Page 8

A Year and a Half Since He’d Said Her Name

“Addie.”

Addie.

“Addie.”

Her name was the only sound he could make, but he wasn’t entirely sure he was making any sound at all. His brain was a symphonic

dissonance of those two syllables, over and over, as he watched the taillights reach the end of the driveway. And then his

brain finally kicked into gear enough to activate his feet into movement and his voice above a hoarse whisper.

“Addie!”

“Wesley Hobbes, what in tarnation do you think you’re doing?”

Any other time, the sternness of Jo Stoddard’s voice behind him would have caused him to snap to attention like a little boy

playing soldier. But first things first.

“Jo, what is Addie doing here?”

He hadn’t said her name aloud since Wray died, and he hadn’t said it to anyone outside of Wray in more than a decade before that.

Now his brain and his tongue and his vocal cords all seemed fixated on it.

Once upon a time, Addie Atwater had been his first language.

He’d been fluent in every dialect of her.

And yet tonight he’d made contact with her eyes in a mirror and seemingly lost the ability to communicate.

At least he couldn’t communicate well. He certainly couldn’t communicate with her.

He watched her turn onto the county road and fade off into the darkness, and then he asked the question again. “What is Addie

doing here, Jo?”

“She lives here. I think the better question at this moment is what are you doing here?”

Wes turned to face her and was surprised to realize how far down the driveway he had wandered—watching Addie go, wanting to

chase after her, unable to process that desire. He glanced over his shoulder one time to make sure she wasn’t coming back

and then sighed and began walking toward Jo. “A little warning wouldn’t have hurt.”

“About Addie?”

“ Of course about Addie.”

“Yeah, well.” She shrugged and wrapped her bulky knee-length sweater tightly around her. “You could stand to listen to yourself.

A little warning about you might not have been a bad idea either.”

“What do you mean? You told me I should come home.”

Jo laughed. “No. I most certainly did not.”

“Yes, you did. Last week. You said I should try talking to Sebastian and—”

“No, no, no. No, sir. You’re not putting this on me. First of all, I’m not even sure that half of what I say on the Face-to-Face

Time gets transmitted—”

“But you did , Jo. You said that if anyone would give me a fair shake, it would be Sebastian Sudworth.”

“And you took that to mean you should show up here unannounced like the Ghost of Christmas Past?” She planted her fists on

her hips as her lips tightened into a wrinkly cluster that resembled a peach pit.

He arrived back at his abandoned bags and stood in front of her. She was shorter than she’d been. Of course he was probably a little bit taller than he had been, but she was definitely smaller. Whereas they’d once stood eye to eye, and then eye to mouth after his last big growth

spurt junior year, they were now a little more eye to chin. That didn’t change the fact that she was still the most imposing

figure he’d ever known.

Not that her being the most imposing figure he’d ever known made him any less likely to tease her.

“Actually...” He cleared his throat and took one more step toward her. “I’m pretty sure the Ghost of Christmas Past was

announced. That was sort of the point of Jacob Marley, right?” One corner of his mouth rose, and the other joined in when

he spotted her peach-pit lips twitching. He opened his arms and leaned down and pulled her into his embrace. “I’ve missed

you.”

“Fine, fine.” She wouldn’t go so far as to return his hug, but she patted her hands on his back twice before pulling away.

“Let’s continue this argument someplace warmer.”

He picked up his backpack and hoisted one strap over his shoulder before extending the handle from his suitcase and proceeding

to roll it over the bumpy gravel. Jo didn’t wait for him, so after she’d hurried inside, he found himself standing alone on

the porch, looking up at the redbrick walls of the house he had once known so well. There was no way to track all the hours

he had spent there with his group of friends when it had belonged to Laila’s grandparents. The attic had been their clubhouse

where they hung out, watched movies, played games, studied, you name it, from the time they were in elementary school.

Over the course of the past year, he’d made amends with Jo.

And making amends with Jo had led to his teaching her to use FaceTime (which he could never, for whatever reason, quite convince her wasn’t called Face-to-Face Time) so they could talk.

Face-to-face. (Okay, so she wasn’t quite as out in left field as, say, his stepmother when she referred to Lady Gaga as Zsa Zsa Gabor.) Maybe that had filled him with a false sense of security about coming back.

That was one of the risks of modern technology, he supposed.

It was the same phenomenon that made him feel like he and Jennifer Garner really were friends just because he spent so much time watching her pretend cooking show on Instagram.

He knew where she kept her measuring cups, so why couldn’t he expect her to recognize him if they bumped into each other on the street?

But now he was dealing with the reality of being back. Jo Stoddard in her seventies. The Olivets’ house having been converted

to an inn.

Addie.

“I know for a fact you weren’t raised in a barn.”

He shook himself out of his stupor and smiled as he walked in through the open door—making sure to be a good boy and shut

it behind him.

***

“Who’s going first?” Jo asked him as they settled in front of the fire in the front room of the Inn Between.

Wes took the cup of coffee she offered and nodded his thanks before taking a sip. “First? For what?”

“Well, I figure you need to tell me why you’re here, and I need to tell you why you should leave.”

He chuckled and took another scorching sip before setting the cup on the coffee table in front of him. “Good to see you too.”

“Come on, now. You know that has nothing to do with it. I’m not the problem here.”

He may not have understood the full scope of the problem as Jo saw it, but he still had no doubt she was correct in that assertion.

“The truth is, I didn’t put a lot of thought into it.”

Jo blew gently on her steaming mug of herbal tea and cocked a brow over raised eyes. “It’s good to see some things never change.”

That was fair. In Jo’s eyes he probably did appear to be the same flighty, somewhat wild, somewhat dim-witted boy who seemed incapable of treating anything with the seriousness it deserved, be it his homework or his SATs, a mountain bike wreck while he stupidly wasn’t wearing a helmet, or his mother’s death.

What no one had ever understood, though—not even Addie, he was pretty sure—was that he carried it all with him.

All the time. What they saw him dismissing on the outside was usually gnawing and churning and slowly destroying him on the inside.

“Why do I continually feel the need to remind you that the good people of Connecticut have elected me to office five times

now? I think it’s safe to say I’ve come pretty far.”

“Well, that may be, but ‘the good people of Connecticut’ never had to train a schnauzer to lick your face in the mornings

when your alarm clock went off so you wouldn’t be late.”

Wes leaned forward and grabbed his coffee again. “What? You think I show up on the floor for legislative sessions of my own

volition?” A gulp of the hot, rich liquid burned on the way down, and he savored it. “You don’t give ‘the good people of Connecticut’

enough credit.”

No one could have been more surprised by his evolution into a three-term representative, two-term senator, and popular presidential

candidate than Wes himself. It was just that for ten or fifteen years, he’d forgotten to feel surprised. Or, perhaps more

accurately, for ten or fifteen years, he’d realized it was easier not to feel anything.

“Why is Addie here, Jo?”

She took a sip of tea and then rested the cup on her knee. She traced the rim with her finger—round and round and round—before

finally saying, “Tell me why you’re here, and then I’ll tell you why she’s here.”

“You know why I’m here.”

“No, I don’t. Not really. I know why you want to talk to Sebastian, but I’ve told you he’s only here part-time. And for the

record, part-time is not right now.” She looked up from her cup with compassion in her eyes. “You had to have known it was

a crapshoot, but you came anyway. Rather than have ‘your people’ reach out to him and try to set something up—which I can’t imagine would have been too difficult, given that he covers the

news and you currently are the news—you decided to show up here for the first time since you—”

“Thanks, Jo, but I know what I did. You can spare me the recap.”

“See, I don’t think you do know. Not really.”

Until his first tentative phone call to Jo, nearly a year ago, he’d been completely cut off from news of Adelaide Springs.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He’d always received tidbits here and there, but they were filtered at best, run through

the meat grinder of personal pain at worst.

Way back in 2005, when Wray Gardner knocked on his dorm room door at Yale, he’d almost wrung himself dry of homesickness.

Her arrival marked a transition in his history: from trying not to miss Adelaide Springs to convincing himself that leaving

was the best thing he ever could have done. Wray stayed loosely in touch with her sister, Andrea, through the years, but if

she ever gleaned news from the home front, she sure didn’t share it with him. Of course he never asked. Oh, occasionally over

dinner she would let him know that so-and-so had died or this business or other had closed down, but they never dwelled on