Chapter Six
The Harrington Cabin
Cal sat in his car looking at the Harrington cabin. It was tiny—even for only two women. Rough-hewn. Old. Cal had no doubt some long-dead ancestor of Glenda’s long-dead husband had chopped down the trees and built it themselves. All pioneer spirit and know-how.
He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to do this.
But he’d been an asshole last night, and the problem with coming home and staying was he didn’t get to run away from being an asshole. It just sat on his gut like an uncomfortable weight because, soon enough, he’d have to see Jill again.
And Glenda.
It wasn’t fair to blame Glenda for his behavior last night. He was in charge of his damn self. But her eerie light-green eyes had followed him around, and it had made him more and more and more tense as dinner went on.
Glenda Harrington left an itch between his shoulder blades. Glenda represented something he could not seem to fully understand. Glenda might always be a fucking ghost that haunted him, no matter how long she lived.
“Not right to take it out on her damn granddaughter,” he muttered to himself, still sitting in his truck.
Jill thought it was about the book. He really didn’t give a shit about the book.
Maybe it made him a little uncomfortable, but he’d been uncomfortable his whole damn life.
He believed Jill when she said she wasn’t writing some kind of creepy fictionalized biography. She was just using his condition.
Not his life.
It wasn’t the book. It was her damn grandmother. And whatever secrets still sat hidden in his own mind. And if there wasn’t still anything hidden in his traumatic amnesia … then it was almost worse, because it meant this feeling might dog him for the rest of his life.
Cal inhaled. Exhaled. Breathing exercises his therapist had given him. Because feelings weren’t facts. They weren’t something to be pushed aside and ignored either.
Apparently, he had to feel them, and in feeling them, he didn’t like how he’d treated Jill last night.
So he got out of his truck. It was late morning, the sun was climbing and though the snow up here was higher and more frozen than down in town, there was still a give to it as he walked across the yard and up to the front door. Spring. Warmth. Rebirth. Renewal.
He didn’t think he had those things in him, but somehow, he found himself walking toward them again and again.
On a heavy sigh, he knocked on the door. When he had to wait for a while, he started seriously considering leaving. He could text his apology. He had Jill’s number. Her email. A formal email apology would be fi—
The door swung open to Glenda.
Fuck.
“Hey, Glenda.” He smiled.
He knew Glenda didn’t buy it. She’d been around since he was a baby.
She’d helped his mother survive his evil abuser of a father.
Glenda had always been there. And while Cal felt a certain kind of affinity for her, knowing there might be things he didn’t remember between the two of them left him increasingly uncomfortable.
“I just needed to talk to Jill for a few minutes.”
Glenda stepped away from the doorframe, let him into their cozy little living room. The cabin they lived in was nearly a tiny house. Just the minuscule living room that led into the kitchen. Then a little hall with two tiny bedrooms and an even tinier bathroom.
But the two women seemed to make it work.
“Shower,” Glenda rasped.
Cal had to fight off a shudder. He hated when she spoke, and he shouldn’t, considering it had been a big reason his father was now behind bars. Glenda had found her voice and damned Benjamin Bennet with it.
But when she formed words, it scraped against his skin like sandpaper. Like a nightmare was lurking, right there in every word.
He was fucking done with nightmares.
Jill was in the shower. Okay. He’d wait and say his sorry in a few minutes.
He didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about Jill or the fact she was an attractive woman. But sometimes little traitorous thoughts from the man he used to be wriggled in there.
Right now, the thought of her in the shower felt a little bit traitorous, because he could almost imagine it. Because it had been a long time since he’d so much as looked at a woman twice.
Probably half your problem.
He might have even tried to conjure an image, just to see if that part of his brain still worked, if Glenda wasn’t standing right there, like she could read his mind.
“Grandma, I—” Jill appeared and came to an abrupt stop in the space between the kitchen and the living room.
She was in a flimsy robe, and her hair was twisted up in a towel.
She had thick socks on her feet. She kind of looked ridiculous, but there was something about the ridiculous mixed with the sight of her long legs that made Cal smile in spite of himself.
Her tawny cheeks took on a reddish hue. Like she was embarrassed.
She cleared her throat, clutched a hand at the edges of her robe—which didn’t exactly help him ignore how threadbare the fabric was.
“I, um, I’ll get dressed.” Then she turned in a flurry and disappeared.
Dressed also brought interesting images to mind. Maybe he should be happy that he wasn’t totally dysfunctional. But he happened to glance at Glenda, who was giving him a narrow-eyed stare.
“What?” he demanded.
He refused to believe ghost stories about the traumatized old woman. She certainly couldn’t read his mind.
But it really felt like she could.
She shrugged. “Garden,” she rasped, then walked through the kitchen and out the back door, leaving Cal alone in the living room.
But only for a moment, certainly not long enough to gather his thoughts. Jill reappeared, dressed in jeans and a heavy sweatshirt. Her wet hair was piled on the top of her head in a clip. She looked fresh-faced and pretty.
Something he could recognize, so maybe he wasn’t as messed up as he thought.
“Sorry for just showing up,” he said. “I wanted to apologize for last night.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I do. I was an asshole, and I know that makes it seem like I have issues with your…” He trailed off.
She leaned forward, almost conspiratorially. “You know, if you can’t say it, maybe you shouldn’t be apologizing.”
Using his words from last night against him.
He smiled back in spite of himself. “I don’t have issues with your book. I have issues. Period. Like an entire mountain of issues, and some of them happen to stem from…” He trailed off, looked beyond Jill. Glenda had gone outside, so surely she couldn’t hear. “Your grandmother.”
Jill looked over her shoulder, chewing on her bottom lip. “Yeah, I get that.” Her eyebrows were drawn together, forehead creased in worry. “I … I hired Sam to try to find out what happened.”
He blinked, taken aback. “What?”
She turned back to him. Her eyes were closed as if she were in a kind of pain. “I don’t know why I told you that. I haven’t even told Aly that.” She opened her eyes, shook her head. “I know it’s kind of … wrong, maybe, but I need to know what happened to her, and she won’t tell me.”
He stared at her. Her dark eyes were miserable and lost.
“Jill…”
“Something happened. It had to have. Don’t you think so?” She looked up at him imploringly, a little lost and … hell, he was a sucker for lost. Mostly because he was.
But he shook his head. “Did it ever occur to you that if something did, and she refuses to tell you what it is, you might be better off not knowing?”
“Of course it occurred to me. It’s done nothing but occur to me for three years.
But … Cal, she’s unhappy. She’s trapped in her own mind in a way.
Even with the occasional word spoken since the trial, she’s …
she’s not an active participant in life.
Maybe whatever happened should stay buried, but maybe my grandmother has a chance to heal and she’s too afraid to face it. ”
“So, you’re going to make her?” Was that his own voice sounding so … incredulous? Like he had a right?
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. Sam hasn’t found anything.” She inhaled deeply. “But if you’re worried there’s something you might remember, if you’re somehow connected…”
“I don’t,” he said flatly.
Which was a lie.
She didn’t call him on it. She stared at him like she was going to, but in the end, she didn’t. She turned to a little table next to the couch, picked up a binder.
“I gave it a lot of thought last night, and I want you to read it.” She held the binder out to him. “It’s just the beginning. Just fifty pages, but I think if you see what I’ve done, it won’t feel quite so uncomfortable for you.”
He didn’t take the binder. Just eyed it like it might bite. “I’m not much of a reader.”
“Cal, you’re a lawyer.”
He tried to come up with some other excuse. Tried to think of any reason not to read … this.
But she shoved the binder at him. “Please. Just read it. Believe me, I don’t share my work before it’s done lightly. But I think it’ll put your mind at ease.”
He wanted to tell her he didn’t need her easing his mind, but he supposed that wouldn’t be altogether honest. It was just nothing would ease his mind.
“Fine,” he muttered.
Agreeing was the only way out of this. Just because he said he was going to read it didn’t mean he had to do it.
She looked so relieved when he took it. She even smiled at him.
And yeah, she was pretty. Nice without it being all saccharine.
But she was Glenda Harrington’s granddaughter, and he’d do well to stay far, far away from this particular forgotten nightmare.