Chapter 3
“P
erfect timing,” Maggie says, sliding bacon and eggs out of a frying pan and onto a plate where two slices of buttered toast await. “I heard movement and thought you’d be hungry.”
“Looks delicious. Thank you.” I take a stool at the island as she places breakfast in front of me, along with a knife and fork. “But by ‘movement,’ do you mean some shrieking and raised voices?”
My aunt’s brows shoot up, and her eyes grow to approximately the size of the yolks on my plate. “Raised voices?” She couldn’t try to look more innocent if she put a halo over her head. “No. Why?” There’s a hint of pink in her cheeks as she turns away and opens the fridge. “Ketchup?”
An Oscar winner she is not.
The aroma rising from my plate is mouthwatering. I pick up a slice of toast and pierce the top of a perfectly fried egg with the corner. Warm, molten yellow leaks out.
“How come you didn’t tell me you’d given Hannah a job?”
Maggie puts the ketchup bottle in front of me. “Oh.” She turns her back, opens an upper cabinet, and produces two grinders. “Salt and pepper?” she asks, placing them next to the ketchup. “Maybe for the eggs.”
I swallow my mouthful of toast. “Did you think I might not notice?”
“Notice what, darling?”
“Hannah. Walking around your house.”
Her face lights up. “Oh! Did you bump into her?”
“Did I ever.” I grind some pepper onto the eggs. “I imagine that’s what you heard.”
At my sideways glance she turns on the tap and runs her—seemingly perfectly clean—hands under the water. “Like I said, thought I heard movement.” She concentrates on her hands as she dries them on a tea towel that bears the slogan Bay Leaf In Yourself surrounded by images of herbs. “I was going to tell you about that today. Thought I’d let you settle in first.”
“A little warning might have been nice.” If anyone else had pulled a trick like that, I’d have been furious. But how can anyone ever be mad with Aunt Mags?
Not only is she the most delightful woman on the planet, she and Uncle Jim took me and my brother in after our parents were killed in a car crash. I was eleven. Walker was ten. They already had their own three boys and sure as hell didn’t need us stretching their thin resources any thinner. Jim’s salary as a Boston city bus driver wasn’t made for a family of five, never mind seven.
I pick up the knife and fork and attack the bacon. God, this is good. Travel always makes me feel like I haven’t eaten for a decade. “Go on then. Fill me in. What’s the story?”
A huge—and this time natural—smile spreads across her face. “Well…” She grabs two mugs from a shelf and fills them from the full coffeepot. “I was in Find Your Roots, the plant store in the village, like I have been a hundred times, and she walked out from the back. Just like that!”
She opens the fridge and pulls out a carton. Her expression suggests she’s pleased, like the cat that got several canaries. “Didn’t recognize her at first and wondered why this woman was standing stock-still and staring at me.” She slops cream into both mugs, gives them a stir, and returns the carton to the fridge. “Then she said, ‘Mrs. Dashwood?’”
Maggie takes a seat on the other side of the island and slides a mug toward me. “And I still didn’t get it until she said, ‘It’s Hannah.’”
She clutches her hands to her chest. “Couldn’t believe it.”
I smear some egg on my toast. “What on earth was she doing in Blythewell?”
“Well, this is the weird coincidence. She’d been living just a few miles away, in Fullerton, for years.”
“What?” The Hannah I knew would never live in the countryside, or a village, or anywhere more than two minutes from a vintage record store. “Why? What the hell brought her here?”
Maggie cups her hands around her mug, leans toward me, and lowers her voice. “She was living with”—her eyes dart over my shoulder to the door, presumably to check Hannah’s not about to walk in—“a man.” She exaggeratedly whispers those two words, just in case.
“Horrible business.” Maggie’s pained expression makes me wonder what the hell that story is. “Anyway, she’s saving up for a fresh start. She could only have been making peanuts helping out Jude at the store, and you boys are constantly saying we should get some help here. So”—she shrugs as if to say this was all my idea—“I got us help.”
I mop up the rest of the egg yolk and bacon fat with the last slice of toast. “You just gave someone you hadn’t seen for closer to two decades than one, a job? In your house?”
“I took her for coffee first.”
“Oh, well, then that makes everything okay and perfectly normal.”
“It’s not like she’s a stranger, Tom. She spent enough time at our place when you were dating. And she was obviously going through a rough patch. We have more resources than we know what to do with these days, and I wanted to help. But it’s not like I could just give her an envelope of cash, so I gave her a job. She’s too independent to want to be treated like a charity case.”
Independent. That’s Hannah to the end.
And generous is what Maggie is to the end. “I bet you’re paying her double the going rate.”
“One and three-quarters.” She peeps at me over her mug. “And we also have more space than we know what to do with, so it only made sense that she moved into the guest suite. Lordy, it’s so good to have young energy around the place again. You know, I didn’t realize just how much I miss?—”
“Moved in?” I stop with toast halfway to my mouth, my blood stilling in my veins. “She’s living here?”
“It’s a win-win. For everyone.” Maggie beams. “A total delight.”
She’s fucking living here.
I pinch the bridge of my nose and screw up my eyes. I came here to get some desperately needed away-from-it-all rest, for Christ’s sake. And judging by the encounter outside my bedroom, Hannah being here will make this anything but a restful atmosphere.
“I’m so worried about you.” Maggie stretches across the island and squeezes my arm. “These last few months have taken their toll, haven’t they? I’ve never seen you this exhausted.” She grabs my chin between her thumb and forefinger. “Didn’t even catch a glimpse of the famous Tom smile last night.”
Ever observant Aunt Mags.
I shake my head. “Guess ending a marriage is exhausting even if it’s all your own idea. And even if the divorce is a quickie.” And my God, has this been draining. Knowing it was the right thing to do didn’t make walking away from the relationship any less upsetting. The sense of failure is unavoidable. So apparently are the bad feelings—on Louisa’s part anyway. And the lawyers suck the life out of you…dear God, the fucking lawyers.
“And the holiday season at work is always stressful.” I leave out the part about this year being made worse by one of my executives somehow setting a Christmas tree on fire at our annual party. That would have been bad enough by itself, but one of our young singers who sports a spiky hairdo was standing right next to it—turns out, the hairdo was held in place with enormous amounts of highly flammable hair spray. Thank God someone threw their beer over her before more than just her hair was burned. But then there were more lawyers…
“And there was no spring in your step even when you were here for the wedding.” Maggie tips her head and looks at me like I’m a puppy with a broken leg. “Even Max commented on it. And it’s not like him to notice things like that. Particularly when he is the center of attention.”
“Isn’t he always the center of attention?” I bite off the eggy, bacony part of the toast and put the crust back on the plate.
“Oooh, careful. You almost gave me a smile.” She snags the crust. “The best part,” she says and pops it into her mouth.
Max and Polly’s wedding was amazing. And it was great to be with the family. But two transatlantic flights in four days amid all the other stress and fatigue was too much. It knocked me a couple rungs even further down the ladder.
I can’t remember the last time I slept properly—when I sleep at all, that is. I’m not one to preen in mirrors, but even I’ve noticed my skin’s sallow and blotchy, and the bags under my eyes would definitely not qualify as carry-ons.
So here I came, to the peace and quiet of small-town New Hampshire, the loving embrace of my aunt and uncle, and the comforting atmosphere of this beautiful family home. The perfect place to rest for two or three months, recuperate, spend time with the folks, get my shit together, and then head back to London refreshed and ready to take on the world again.
What I did not come here to do was live under the same roof as my high school girlfriend who clearly bears a grudge as big as my divorce settlement.
“So this arrangement with Hannah is just till she moves to California?” I pick up my coffee.
“Oh…” Maggie wafts her hand about again. “I don’t know about that. I’m not sure it’s definite. Or even a real thing. She probably doesn’t know what she wants.”
“If she doesn’t know what she wants, then she’s a very different Hannah from the one I knew.”
Maggie leaps off her stool like it suddenly caught fire and stares behind me. “Hannah! I was just telling Tom how we bumped into each other in Jude’s store.”
I stare hard at the creamy liquid in my mug to stop my head from turning to look over my shoulder.
She might be out of my line of sight, but it’s impossible not to sense her presence. Hannah always had an aura that set her apart from everyone else in the room, and right now I can almost feel it brush down my side as she walks by, even though she’s several feet away.
Even if she wasn’t softly singing to herself, I’d still have known she was there. At least one part of her hasn’t changed—always singing.
“Such a fluke,” she says with a smile to Maggie, not only completely ignoring the fact I’m here, but also angling her body slightly away from me.
As she reaches the sink, my eyes can’t help themselves and flick from my coffee to her jeans-clad ass. She pulls open the dishwasher and bends over to place inside whatever it was she was carrying.
It’s a damn good job I didn’t get that view while I was butt naked. I’d have needed another two hands.
“Let me make you a hot chocolate,” Maggie says to Hannah. “And you can take the weight off your feet.”
“Still a chocolate fiend then?” I ask her rear end. “I always used to tell you you’d?—”
“Eat a rock if it was dipped in chocolate.” She straightens and slams the dishwasher door shut so hard the contents rattle. “Yes, I remember.” She turns to Maggie. “Thanks. But maybe later. I should get back to work.”
“Was that the backing for ‘Get the Hell Out’ you were singing when you came in?” I ask.
She turns to face me with deliberate slowness. I don’t get the smile she gave Maggie. I get a hard stare.
“Accidentally.” She folds her arms across her chest. “I loved Four Thousand Medicines before I realized you’d signed them. When I found out, I tried to quit them. Tried my hardest. But they’re too good.”
Maggie slaps her hands together with a jolly clap. “You two must have so much to catch up on.”
Obviously, that’s a terrible idea. Unless what I want to get caught up on is all the ways Hannah’s plotted to administer my slow and exceptionally painful demise. She’s had seventeen years. It’s probably quite a list. Best I leave.
“I need to finish clearing up a mess in the bedroom. I knocked over a glass and broke it.” I push back the stool. “Mopped up the water but need to go pick up the broken glass. Do you have a box or something I could put the bits in, Mags?”
“Done it,” Hannah chimes. “The glass is already safely wrapped up and in the trash outside. And I finished drying off the nightstand. And the floor. And the rug. You’d done a terrible job.”
Maggie steps toward Hannah and rests a grateful hand on her shoulder. “Such a godsend. Couldn’t be luckier to have her.”
“Well, I need to…” There must be somewhere I need to go and something I need to do that puts me out of range of the daggers shooting from Hannah’s eyes. “Yeah, I need to call the London office. To approve the job posting for my new assistant.”
And that is something I genuinely do need to do. I step toward the door.
“Life without an assistant must be tough.” Sarcasm oozes from Hannah’s voice.
“You’ve lost your assistant?” Maggie asks. “The one you’ve had for years? And liked?”
“Yeah, I promoted her to the tour publicity department just before Christmas. Guess I hadn’t realized she’d become as much a personal assistant as an executive one. She was a big help with all the admin for the divorce.”
I swear Hannah’s eyebrows rise just a touch at the word “divorce” before she realizes and gets them back under control.
“Lord knows you need someone,” Maggie says. “You’re hardly the most organized person in the world at the best of times, never mind when you’re stressed and exhausted.”
“Gee, thanks, Aunt Mags.”
“Oh, you know I love you. But you almost missed your flight here, and you almost accidentally bought Max and Polly six actual flutes instead of a set of champagne flutes.”
Hannah sucks in her lips. which successfully stops her from smiling but the slight jiggle of her shoulders gives away her suppressed laugh.
“Yeah, well, I don’t want someone new poking around in my personal life. This will be purely an executive assistant. HR can recruit and train someone while I’m away and have them ready for when I get back. Can’t wait to be rid of all the stuff I’ve had to deal with the last few weeks—all the phone calls and bloody calendars.”
“I see you’ve got the lingo,” Hannah says.
My eyes meet hers for the first time since the incident on the landing. It takes me a second to speak. “Lingo?”
“Bloody,” she says in a terrible English accent, making air quotes around it.
“I’ve lived there seventeen years. Of course I say bloody. And lift, not elevator. And arse, not ass. And, most important of all, football, not soccer.”
I turn to leave. “Anyway, I have to go call—” And almost smack into a ball of energy in the shape of a tweenish boy barreling into the room.
“The T-shirt I wanted is still in the wash. This isn’t the right one, Mom.” He faces Hannah, tugging at the blue shirt he’s wearing.
Mom?
“Tom,” Maggie says. Her non-Oscar-winning smile is back. “Meet Dylan.” She puts her arm around the boy’s shoulder. “Hannah’s son.”
Son?
And Dylan—that has to be after Bob. Hannah’s first music hero.
So, Hannah is housekeeping for Maggie and Jim. Hates me as much as nature abhors a vacuum. Is living here. And has a kid?
Fucking brilliant.