Chapter 19
amy
Amy glanced up from the stove as she heard Mac’s key in the front door. ‘I was expecting you ages ago,’ she said, giving the puttanesca sauce a final stir. ‘Donny said you left the office at four.’
‘I had a couple offsite meetings,’ Mac said.
‘Dinner’s been ready to go for half an hour.’
He already had his boot on the first tread of the stairs. ‘I need a shower first. I’ve been crawling around boats all day. Give me ten minutes.’
Amy rested her spatula in the pottery spoon rest her nephew had made her for Mother’s Day when he was twelve, and turned up the heat on the pot of water she’d allowed to go off the boil.
‘Didn’t look like he needed a shower to me,’ Helen said.
It was Wednesday, which wasn’t Helen’s appointed day to join them for dinner.
But Mac had the irritating habit of casually inviting Helen over if he bumped into her taking out the trash from her apartment or pottering with her geraniums – What?
She’s your mother! – and Helen made sure he bumped into her often.
‘Don’t start,’ Amy said.
‘I’m just saying.’
‘You’re never just saying, Mom.’
Helen’s lips pleated in disapproval, but she subsided.
Mac came downstairs just as she tossed the pasta into the boiling water. His dark curls were still wet from the shower and clung tightly to his head, making him look oddly boyish. Amy felt a tug of desire. Even after more than two decades together, he still had the power to melt her with a glance.
‘Where’s Nicky?’ he asked, dipping his finger in the puttanesca sauce.
She whipped the pan out of reach, but she was smiling. ‘Hands off, you. Skulking upstairs in his room.’
‘No, he’s not. His bedroom’s empty.’
‘He knows it’s time for dinner,’ Amy said. ‘Where’s he gone this time of night? I didn’t even see him leave the house.’
‘He’s probably over at Maggie’s,’ Mac said.
Amy felt a flare of guilt. It’d been two days since Maggie had told her about the deepfake porn after the incident with the moose, and she still hadn’t had a chance to talk to Kate about it.
She and Maggie’s mother had both been run off their feet getting everything organised for prom, and it wasn’t something Amy could just mention in between ordering paper plates and sorting out parking.
She needed to find some proper time to sit down with Kate and work out the best way forward.
‘He’s not with Maggie,’ Helen said. ‘Nicky’s with his grandfather.’
‘Colt?’ Amy said uneasily.
‘Unless he’s up at the graveyard with his other grandfather,’ Helen said tartly. ‘I hope you’ve got a salad for me, Jean. You know I can’t eat pasta with my diabetes.’
‘Why’s he with Colt?’
‘I have no idea,’ her mother said. ‘I saw him sitting in the front seat of Colt’s truck at the petrol station on my way home from bridge earlier.’
‘Doing what?’
‘They appeared to be talking.’
‘What about?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Does it matter?’ Mac interrupted. ‘I’m sure he’ll be back soon, Amy. I’ll text and ask Dad if he wants to come up and join us for dinner.’
‘I haven’t made enough for five,’ Amy said.
‘It’s pasta,’ Mac said. ‘It’ll stretch.’
A sticky knot of nausea clumped in the pit of Amy’s gut. She was forty-five years old, but where Colt Smith was concerned, she was still the same terrified, panic-stricken child she’d been that summer night more than thirty years ago.
She’d been pet-sitting Colt and Jane Smith’s black Labrador, Grendel, taking him for walks and playing with him for the week Jane had been visiting her mother in New York with the then-teenage Mac.
Colt had been too busy with work to look after the dog, Jane had explained, and Grendel needed company, someone young to play with while Mac was gone.
She hadn’t even seen Colt until the last day of his wife’s trip.
In her night terrors, Amy could still remember the weight of his hand on her shoulder, pushing her back on the sofa.
The choking scent of his cologne as he pressed wet lips against her neck.
And then the way he suddenly leaped off her when Jane had come home early, blocking his wife’s view of her and smoothing his face into an expression of genial welcome.
Amy had been thirteen years old.
She hadn’t had the words for what had happened to her. She was ashamed, without even knowing why. She’d tried to tell her mother when she’d got home, but Helen had dismissed her story as the spiteful fantasies of a jealous little girl.
For thirty-two years, Amy had done everything she could never to be alone with Mac’s father again.
She’d guarded Rose and Maggie against him, making sure he never had the chance to do to them what he’d tried to do to her.
She’d debated telling Iris and Kate, but if her own mother hadn’t believed her, why would they?
She’d never told Mac. The rational, sensible part of her knew he wouldn’t blame her, but the part of her that was still a humiliated, petrified child couldn’t get out the words.
So she kept her secret, filled with rage and shame, because it was his secret, not hers. Mac had always known she didn’t like his father, but assumed it was simply a personality clash; not unreasonably, given the man’s unpopularity around town.
But she’d refused to ever step foot in Colt’s home again, and Mac had never pressed it.
He and Colt had never been close, and after his mother’s death when Mac was in his mid-twenties, the only times he and Colt ever really saw each other was when Helen invited the man to family gatherings, which she did far too often.
It was bad enough that Amy had to stomach Colt Smith in her home, but she didn’t want the man anywhere near her boy, and especially not alone.
Nicky had always been a sensitive child.
There was a darkness in Colt her son had intuited without Amy ever having to say a word.
As a baby, he’d refused to go to his grandfather; in his teens, he’d recoiled from his misogynistic comments about women, and on one occasion, he’d come home from a rare trip out with the older man in tears – it later transpired Colt had taken the fourteen-year-old to a topless bar.
Ever since then, Nicky had gone out of his way to avoid him.
So Amy couldn’t imagine what her son was doing having a heart-to-heart with Colt, of all people.
She picked up her spoon and turned back to the stove, trying to ignore her uneasy, swirling sensations of paranoia, edginess and growing dread.