Page 21

But the thought gave me a hollow feeling inside. I loved this town. I was involved in a ton of community organizations. I had friends here. Hank and I were close.

And Michelle was here.

I swallowed that thought down. Except it wouldn’t stay down because I was about to see her.

Where the hell was Remy? I pulled down the visor mirror checking my hair as if I was a teenager heading to a date. Which was absurd because I was the adult here. This was just my daughter going for a job, and I was dropping her off because that’s what dads did.

“Sorry,” Remy said as she climbed into the car. “Couldn’t find all the brushes.”

I snapped the visor shut. “Hairbrushes?”

“God dad, that was a way weak dad joke, even for you.”

I grinned, despite the jumble of shit running around my head. I’d never get tired of being a dad.

It was a short fifteen-minute drive to Amethyst Lake, where I’d just learned Michelle lived. In the summer, Remy could have ridden her bike—there was a direct trail from Opal Lake, which Barkley Falls edged, due north to Amethyst. That part of Jewel Lakes was mostly old farmland, and though the area was hilly, the path wound through the fairly flat parts. But now, in mid-November, it got dark before five. Jewel Lakes was as safe as they came, but there was no way in hell my teenage daughter was trail-riding in the dark. As we pulled off onto Michelle’s road, flurries began splattering against the windshield of my Highlander.

“It’s only October,” I griped.

Beside me, Remy made an exasperated sound. When I glanced over, her face was lit up with the glow of her phone.

“Let me guess, Draco problems?” I asked. Last week, her shaved undercut had apparently been a balm to their teenage friction because all I’d heard was swooning on the phone. But by the beginning of this week, they’d been back to bickering.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked.

“Because I care about you.”

There was a long pause. I could tell she was debating how much to tell me. “Well, we’re on a break. Again.”

Dare I hope this one would be permanent? Draco wasn’t a bad kid, but together they were way too much drama. “Oh yeah?”

“Dad, you don’t know anything about relationships, okay? So don’t try to dictate how mine should go.”

That stung. I bit my tongue—literally, I had to clamp down on my tongue to not say something I might regret. Kids didn’t know how harsh their words could be sometimes. Besides, maybe she was right. But like hell she knew what she was doing, either.

“Does Mom talk to you about any of this stuff?” I asked, my voice tight. I was already dreading the answer.

“Sometimes. But she’s always telling me to have fun while I’m young.”

My stomach churned as the old wound cracked open.

When the girls were in middle school, Jill had gone through something like an early mid-life crisis. She’d only been in her late twenties then, but she’d started worrying she’d missed her best years by staying with me and having kids early. She talked about how I’d left her behind while I went to school and launched my career. How I’d relied on her to look after the girls while I developed professionally. She was right, of course, but we had talked it out to death when it was going on, and she’d always insisted she didn’t want to go to school, that she wanted to stay home.

I’d been blindsided—devastated, really. People were allowed to change their minds, I knew, but when she’d told me she wanted to go back to school in New York City—and not have us go with her—I knew this was more than that. I told her I’d give up my job and move the kids to the city with her, but she insisted we stay. She said we shouldn’t disrupt our lives, and I supposed that ended up being a good idea, at least for the girls who got the continuity of staying in our house and at their schools.

From the outside, I could have said it was Jill’s fear of missing out that had triggered things failing between us. But really, it had to have been fractured from the beginning. She thought I was what she wanted, but it turned out I’d only made her unhappy.

Hearing that Jill was still singing the song of ‘don’t waste your youth like I did’ was like a blow. She’d been talking about me.

“Well, you’ll have your whole life to have fun,” I said, trying not to let Remy see. “Don’t spend it all on Draco.” Was I saying what Jill wished someone had said to her about me?

A few minutes later, we reached Michelle’s road.

“Where the hell is this place?” I asked, and though it had been an out-loud thought Remy answered.

“She said it was on the back of some old farm. Like an outbuilding or something?

If I didn’t know Michelle, and this was some random new client of Remy’s, I might have turned around right then. But I did know Michelle, and there wasn’t a chance in hell I wasn’t at least figuring this out. I couldn’t say I wasn’t a little worried about how remote it was though.