Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
It was three days after Yoko’s panic attack at the grocery store that Liam returned from Los Angeles.
Lily waited for him at the airport. She threw her freezing-cold arms around him and planted a kiss on him when she saw him.
He shivered in her arms and smiled down at her.
“I’m beginning to regret returning to winter already,” he said.
She thought she would burst into tears, but he kissed her again, temporarily putting her fears to rest.
In the front seat of her car as they drove from the airport, Liam asked a number of questions about his mother’s health and explained that he’d had to pull many strings to get out of promoting the television show in Los Angeles.
“But it won’t screen till summer, right?” Lily said, squeezing the steering wheel so hard that her fingers turned white. “You have time to promote it. Later on?” Why did it feel like Liam was blaming her for tugging him out of LA a tiny bit early?
“Sure, but they want all the promotional material to be done now so that it’s done and over with,” Liam explained, his tone pedantic.
“That makes sense,” Lily breathed, although she thought, It’s not like he’s the star of the show. They don’t need his promotional material that much. She regretted thinking it immediately. She wanted only butterflies for his return home. This was when the rest of their lives were slated to start.
“Where are we going?” Liam asked, realizing that they weren’t taking the road toward his parents’ mansion.
“We have to make a pit stop,” Lily said.
Liam groaned. “Don’t tell me your family planned some kind of classic Sutton party.”
Lily reached over to squeeze his thigh in answer, and he groaned into a big, Liam smile.
When they pulled into the Sutton House, her grandparents’ place, which they now shared with Kade, the Suttons flooded out onto the parking lot to hug Liam and call him their “favorite movie star.” As he always did around big groups, Liam lit up, performing for everyone, kissing Lily’s aunts on the cheek and picking Rebecca and Esme up and whirling them around.
The younger kids were overjoyed to have him there.
They saw him as their favorite playmate.
Inside, Lily and Liam found Yoko on the sofa, waiting for her son.
After a few days of rest, she looked brighter than she had that day she collapsed at the grocery store.
Lily studied Liam’s face as he rushed to his mother and sat beside her, speaking in a quiet and focused Japanese.
Lily watched her future mother-in-law come alive in a way she hadn’t seen since Liam left.
Yoko bowed her head, then allowed her American sensibilities to take over as she hugged her son hello.
She spoke rapid, beautiful Japanese. Lily could only guess what they said to one another.
Maybe Liam was telling his mother he wasn’t happy with Lily.
Maybe Yoko was telling her son that Kendall wasn’t happy with her.
But suddenly, the rest of the Suttons filtered back inside, passing around platters of appetizers and filling the newcomers’ drinks. Lily accepted a glass of red wine and smiled happily when Liam suggested she sit on the other side of him.
When Grandma Esme handed Yoko a glass of sparkling water, Yoko looked up at her and said, “I want to thank you for your help the other day.”
Grandma Esme knelt in front of Yoko. “We have to be there for each other on this island, especially during these harsh winters. I hope you’ll let me know if you need anything else. I know your husband travels a lot for work.”
Grandpa Victor stepped into the room holding a glass of something and smiling at the scene. “Greetings, Yoko and Liam,” he said, bending to clink his glass to theirs. “It’s wonderful to have the engaged couple back together on our island again. All is right with the world.”
Liam threw his arm around Lily’s shoulders. “I hope you’re ready to make a speech at our wedding, Vic?”
Victor threw his head back with laughter. “I don’t think any of my daughters are keen to hear that.”
“I don’t think it’s possible to stop Victor Sutton from making a speech at an important family function,” Aunt Bethany said, swatting her father happily as she passed.
“A man after my own heart!” Liam said.
Yoko spoke in a tiny voice that forced everyone to bend closer to hear her. “His father is the same way,” she explained. “Always the life of every party. He was so different from anyone I’d ever met. And now, look! Our son is exactly the same.”
A strange greenish hue passed over Liam’s face, one that made Lily question if he knew all about his father’s affair. “Yes, but you never taught Dad the old Japanese, did you?” he said.
“Did he ever want to learn?” Grandpa Victor asked Yoko.
“He tried a few times,” Yoko said, glancing down. “But it’s a complicated language.”
“A completely different alphabet,” Rebecca offered.
“It was like our secret language when Liam was growing up,” Yoko said, turning again to look at her son. “Your father hated being boxed out.”
For a moment, all the Suttons were quiet, save for whoever was chopping something in the kitchen. Lily read this silence as proof that everyone now knew about Kendall’s affair and didn’t know what to say or how to speak about him, certainly not in a light way.
“Nobody likes to be boxed out,” Liam said finally, pulling the rest of them over the cavern of silence. “But I swear, these stuffed mushrooms are the best I’ve ever had. Whose idea were these?”
Rebecca confessed they were hers.
“The chef of the family!” Liam said, winking at Lily. “I should have known.”
About fifteen minutes before dinner was set to begin, Lily wandered back to the kitchen to refill her wine.
Liam and his mother had returned to their Japanese conversation on the sofa, and every other Sutton seemed immersed in dialogue, laughing with one another in a way that set the stage for the approaching holiday season. Thanksgiving was around the corner.
Right before she entered the kitchen, Lily stopped short at the mention of Liam’s name. Aunt Valerie was talking about him in a low whisper, as though conscious he could walk in at any time. “Do you really think Liam’s having an affair with his co-star?”
Aunt Bethany responded, “I don’t think so. They have to do all that stuff for promotional material, you know? You can’t believe anything you read anymore.”
“But you saw how chummy they looked in those photographs,” Aunt Valerie breathed back. “If I saw Alex doing something like that? It would break my heart.”
“But Lily seems fine! She must know it’s nothing,” Aunt Bethany said. “I mean, she was out there for a while. Maybe she even met the co-star?”
“I don’t trust that boy,” Aunt Valerie muttered.
“Give him a break,” Aunt Bethany said. “They’re adorable. They’re in love.”
“Plenty of people fall in love,” Aunt Valerie said. “But didn’t you read about his father? Like father, like son.”
“I don’t know,” Aunt Bethany whispered. “That could all be a farce, too?”
Lily didn’t wait around another second to hear more of what her aunts had to say about her love life and the love life of her future in-laws.
She turned on her heel and fled, hurrying back to the sofa.
But there, Yoko sat with Grandpa Victor, nodding along to whatever he told her and sipping her glass of water. Liam was gone.
For some reason, Lily’s first instinct was to think that Liam had left her forever, that he’d gotten up, walked to the door, called a cab, and fled.
But then she reasoned that he wouldn’t do that.
He couldn’t. Trying to remember her rational mind, she walked around her family members and looked from room to room, searching for him.
Finally, she went upstairs and heard his voice down the long hallway.
It came from one of the bedrooms, the one that had belonged to her Aunt Valerie when she was a teenager.
Lily was almost too frightened to eavesdrop.
What if he’d called Bex Shepherd to tell her how in love with her he was?
What if this was confirmation of Lily’s worst fears?
But instead, what she heard was Liam, crying.
“Why did you do it, Dad?” Liam asked. “I don’t understand.”
Lily took a soft step toward the crack in the door. Although she couldn’t see Liam, she could hear that he’d put the phone on speaker. Kendall spoke back.
“It isn’t up to you to understand my life,” Kendall said. “I haven’t asked you to. I don’t want you to.”
“But what about Mom?” Liam demanded, sounding like the teenager he played on television rather than a mid-twenties adult male. “What about what you’re doing to her?”
Lily was touched by how soft and gentle Liam was, how distraught he was over his father’s affair. Did this mean that he saw all cheating as wrong? Did this mean he wouldn’t cheat on her, that he hadn’t?
“Your mother and I have been married a long time,” Kendall said finally. “She understands me better than anyone.”
“She fainted at the grocery store the other day. She’s lonely and lost without you,” Liam shot back. “You don’t know what she needs.”
Kendall let out a long, ominous sigh. It was clear his son was on his last nerve.
“Listen,” he said finally. Lily imagined him rubbing his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“You’re about to get married. Call me in twenty-five years and tell me you understand.
” After that, Kendall hung up, leaving Liam in a sharp silence.
It was only when Liam started crying quietly that Lily dared to creep back to the stairs and disappear. She didn’t want him to know she knew.