Chapter 15 #2
I stepped inside and then stopped, amazed. The whole restaurant was decorated with balloons and streamers, signs with my name, and more that wished me a happy birthday. There was no one else here eating, because it had been turned into a private celebration. For me.
“Happy birthday!” Cadence told me. She bustled past me to get out of the cold. “Surprise!”
“Did you do this? For me?” I asked.
“All three of us did. Vivi? Are you ok?” she wondered.
I had started to cry, for absolutely no reason. “This is amazing,” I told them. “I never had…I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I told Nolan.
“Is this your first party?” he asked and I nodded as I hid my face against his chest. “Happy birthday. Welcome to the beginning of a long line of parties we’re going to throw.”
It got even more amazing. We had cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes, and then Nolan brought out a cake that he had made and decorated. “I’m a beginner,” he cautioned, but I thought that it was beautiful. He had tried to write “Vivienne” and it had almost fit! It was delicious and I had two slices.
They also had presents. “We just had Christmas!” I protested, but still. Beau and Cadence got me the most beautiful, softest sweater that he said was cashmere and was the perfect color for me, and she gave me something else, too. It was a flat, rectangular package that I opened slowly, to savor it.
“It’s Nolan!” I exclaimed, staring at the picture in the frame. “You painted him?”
“He was worse than babies at staying still,” she said. She had gotten two more commissions from guys on the football team, so she knew what she was talking about. “Do you like it?”
“I love it,” I answered and gently touched the glass. “Thank you! It’s exactly him.”
“Actually, Cadence did me a lot of favors. I have something for you at home,” he told me. “I’ll give it to you later.”
I didn’t need anything else, probably not ever.
“This was the best party and the best cake, and these were the best presents,” I said.
“Thank you!” I didn’t want it to end but everybody had work the next day, me included because I was employed for real now.
I would get a paycheck every two weeks with money taken out for taxes, and there was a lunchroom with a few notes taped up about washing dishes and cleaning out the fridge. It was great.
We walked together into the empty lot and Cadence hugged me again.
“Happy birthday,” she repeated. “I’m glad you like the painting.
He was very embarrassed that I wanted to do it, but I said that it would mean so much because he was important to you.
” She glanced over at where he stood with Beau.
“I guess I am starting to think more like an artist in how I notice detail. Once I started to study his face, I realized how different it is.”
“What do you mean?” I thought that Nolan was as handsome as ever, if not more so.
“I tried to capture the changes and I hope I succeeded. It was obvious when I went back to our high school yearbook,” she said.
“He has a class picture and he also showed up in a few other shots in the background. He looked the same in every one, and he looked the same when I saw him in the years since,” she said. “Like he was—”
“Cadence? Are you ready?” Beau called, and she nodded.
“He seemed separate even if he was with a group and he was…remote,” she told me. “Maybe that’s not the right word, because maybe he was just sad. He doesn’t seem that way anymore and it’s the same thing I noticed about you. The first time we met, I thought you were very pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“But you were the same way. Sad,” she explained. “You guys really helped each other.”
“I mean, he helped himself a lot. I’m glad if I did something for him too, because he sure did for me.”
“I think it was mutual,” she said. “I think you’re good for each other, no matter how you want to have your relationship. It works for you.”
It did. It was hard to think that I wanted more, because what did that say about me? I was greedy enough to want all of him, and not just his body for sex…although, I’d been thinking about that a lot.
“Thank you,” I said when we got into his car. “Thank you for doing this for me.” He had already given me a homemade breakfast muffin with a candle to blow out and that had been more than enough. Then he’d done a whole party? “I was totally surprised.”
“I could tell,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone look so shocked as when you walked into the restaurant.” He smiled. “Do you want to stop and get your car at Cadence’s house or do you want to get it tomorrow so we can ride together?”
“Tomorrow is good.” I looked behind us on the road. Whoever had been following me might not know this vehicle—
“There’s no one back there,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“What?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“You never said anything to me about it but I could tell that you were nervous,” he answered. “Every time you got into the car, you repeatedly checked your mirrors.”
“Maybe I was just learning to be more like Beau and Cadence.”
“No, because I noticed it, too. I saw the same guy behind us a few times, although he was driving different rentals. That probably meant that he was a professional and that someone had hired him, someone with enough funds to keep it up for several weeks. There was only one person who would want to do that.” He tapped the steering wheel.
“I called my mother and we discussed it.”
“Oh.” I looked over at him. “What did she say?”
“Right now, you seem less than surprised,” he pointed out, and I nodded.
“I had a feeling that she was behind it.”
“You knew that she was paying someone to stalk you?” he asked me.
“I mean, it made the most sense,” I said.
“Once I got over the idea that it was supernatural, I also figured that it was a pro. So it couldn’t have been the guys from the hotel parking lot, since they were too dumb to check for my car keys and steal what I had in there.
It wasn’t any of my exes, including Kolter.
He wouldn’t have been able to stay hidden for so long because he got caught at everything. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”
“You’re good at that, though. You knew that someone was tailing you and it was bothering you, but you didn’t tell me. It wasn’t just you, either. She had people watching Kolter as well, and maybe Cadence.”
“I didn’t want you to get mad at her,” I explained. “You came back home after being with them over Thanksgiving and you talked about how she was acting different—better. You thought that your parents might have been falling in love again. Wouldn’t that be great?”
“It’s not happening,” he informed me. “They’re not really going to reset and become totally different.”
“But—”
“Viv, they like their lives. Maybe it’s just that they’re comfortable in their misery, but they’re already back into their former patterns.
My dad is carrying on with his assistant and my mom decided to transform the guest bedroom back into a secondary downstairs home office.
They updated her profile on the law firm website to reflect that she has three spaces to work at her house, since she’s so busy. ”
“Oh.”
“And this, hiring someone to follow you, was my limit,” Nolan stated. “I told her that we would not be visiting until she apologized to you, which might happen when she sprouts wings—no, I don’t really believe that she’s magic.”
I hadn’t totally discounted supernatural stuff but I agreed that his mother was fully human. “I’m sorry that I came between you and your parents.”
“There was nothing for you to come between,” he answered.
“I realized that I was hoping for a transformation but I need to accept things the way they are. My mother loves me in an odd, twisted way that involves her surveilling you to try to protect me. My dad is happy to see me, to some extent, but he’s more interested in seeing the back of me so that he can start drinking again.
At least he restrains himself in my presence. ”
“That’s something. It’s a positive.”
He looked over. “Let’s not talk about this on your birthday. I just didn’t want you to worry about some PI sneaking around and taking notes.”
Good, although once I’d determined that it wasn’t paranormal, that it wasn’t someone who wanted to harm me, and that I was pretty sure his mom was behind it, then I hadn’t been overly concerned.
As he’d said, it was from an odd, twisted love…
or maybe just her need for control. I preferred to think of it as the first thing.
I hugged my picture as we drove and thought about where I would put it—anywhere, since Nolan considered that his house was also mine.
Maybe I would hang it in the library. That had become the room where I studied and worked in to get my high school equivalency.
It might also have been the room I would work for more, like a college degree? He thought I could do it, if I wanted.
It was like there were no boundaries, not any of the bad ones. As he opened the garage door, I leaned over and kissed his cheek and he turned to me, smiling. “What was that for?”
“I’m happy,” I told him. “You said once that you only gave me the minimum, but it’s so much more.”
“You liked the party.”
“I like everything,” I said. “Everything about you.”
“Damn.” He sighed and turned off the car. “When you say things like that, it makes me feel wonderful, but it also makes me feel so guilty.”
“Why?”
“Because I should have done something for you on the day we met. When I saw that dumpster where you were living, I should have said, no, you can’t go back there,” he answered.
“You didn’t even know me.”
“But I liked you right away. I remember waking up the next day with no clear idea of what the hell was going on, but I wanted to find you. I kept bothering you even though—”
“You didn’t bother me!” I interjected. “You paid for meals and you were so nice.”