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“Let’s get Amanda down here,” Mac interrupted. “I don’t want to do this behind her back.”
Rachel nodded, surprised, and Mac called his daughter to the kitchen. The girl stomped down the stairs as though she led a death march.
“What?” She scowled from the bottom step.
“We are going back into weekly counseling.” The way Mac treated his daughter like an adult impressed Rachel. She didn’t see a lot of that in her job. “You start on Thursday.”
“No way!” Amanda bristled and turned red-faced. “No way, Dad. I am not going to talk to her.”
“Amanda.” His tone was reasonable and sure. “We don’t have any choice.”
Rachel took a step forward. “I know you’ve heard all of this before, but I really am not the enemy.”
“Screw you.”
“Amanda!” Mac started toward his daughter, but Rachel held out a hand to stop him.
“Go ahead and be mad, Amanda. But you still are going to have to talk to me.” She locked eyes with the furious girl.
“I don’t have to talk to anyone!” Her lovely young face was twisted into a sneer that was too old and ugly.
“No, you’re right. You don’t have to talk to anyone. But it would be better for you, and for your dad, if you did talk to me and you told me the truth.”
“We don’t need you,” she cried. “Tell her, Dad!”
“Amanda, baby.” Mac’s voice cracked. “We need her. We have to talk to her.”
Rachel walked to the stairs and climbed the first one so she was nearly nose to nose with Amanda. “Right now I am your best shot at staying with your dad.”
Amanda’s lips curled and she sniffed hard as her eyes flooded with tears. She backed out of the way, sitting down on the bottom step of the second set of stairs. She hugged her legs to her chest. Rachel walked by her toward the door, knowing these two needed time alone.
“I don’t need anyone,” the girl whispered, her words like ice.
“We’ll see,” Rachel replied softly, knowing the pain of being twelve and believing that Amanda truly felt that way. Rachel walked out the door down the path and across the gravel to where she’d parked.
She climbed into her car, started it and began driving down the mountain. She focused as hard as possible, with every beat of her heart and with every breath she pulled in, on the observations she had made, the rational conclusions she could draw from that first meeting.
But it didn’t work.
As soon as she was out of sight of the house, she pulled over. The reality of what she’d done, of being in the same room as Mac, of risking her career for a friendship that clearly meant nothing to him, fell in on her. She pressed shaking hands to her face and took deep breaths, feeling the black edges of the world pressing in on her.
Oh, my God, she thought. What am I doing?
CHAPTER THREE
“DAD?” AMANDA STOOD, THE tears glittering on her round little-girl cheeks breaking his heart.
“I’m sorry, Amanda.” He held his hands out to his sides. He had failed her so much and so often. “What am I supposed to do?”
The answer burned in her eyes, it radiated off her trembling shoulders. He could see it on her face, in the wild clenching of her hands. I am supposed to take care of her. I am supposed to love her and care for her and make sure no one takes her away from me.
Basic dad things, and he was failing.
She finally turned and ran back to her bedroom. The sound of her footsteps pounded up the stairs, then her door slammed and Mac collapsed into one of the dining room chairs like a sail that had lost all of its wind.
Rachel Filmore. He stared up at the wood-beam-and-stucco ceiling and wanted to howl. Talk about nightmares colliding. The dissolution of his family mixed with the devastating return of Rachel Filmore. Perfect.
He had truly thought the parts of his body that could feel the painful combination of lust and hurt and anger had been burned out of him thirteen years ago. But those numb parts had flared to painful life when Rachel had pushed those sunglasses off her eyes.
God. He rubbed a hand over his face. Rachel.
She still appeared fragile, as though a strong wind would push her over. But he knew better. Her feet were planted wide and firmly on the earth. She was as immovable as one of the trees in his orchard. Her chin was still out, ready to take on the world. Her green eyes held that wrenching combination of hope and cynicism that he’d remembered. One corner of her mouth still curved up, like the suspicious and sarcastic kid she had been, but her whole smile was like the sun coming up on a new day.
She was gorgeous and still had the power to make his heart stop and his hands sweat.
He groaned and shut his eyes. As if his life needed this.
Thirteen years spent erasing her from his memory, trying to forget what it was like to love her and for one night believe that he was loved in return. All of those feelings had come rushing back as she stood on his stairs, in the house he had built, and said she was here to help.
He groaned and winced. Help? Rachel? He couldn’t get his head around it. He’d never thought he would see her again, sure that she had moved as far away from New Springs as possible. And all this time she had been just forty minutes away? He smiled at his own nonsense, as though had he known, he would have done something about it. Nope. He just couldn’t believe that she’d actually stuck around this area.
She’d said she would never come back.
Funny how things work out. Freaking hilarious.
What was funny was how the women he loved were always such mysteries. His wife he’d been able to read like a book, but his mother, Rachel, his daughter—all enigmas.
Things were going on in his daughter’s head that he couldn’t begin to fathom. Since Margaret had died, he’d tried very hard to make Amanda’s home a safe and warm place, despite the absence of her mother. He raced around at double speed to cover up that gaping hole in their home. And until Amanda ran away, he’d seriously thought he was doing a pretty good job.
But now this ghost who looked like his daughter, but wasn’t the girl he knew, wandered through his house and he didn’t know how to help her.
Initially, when they’d been court-ordered into counseling, Mac had been relieved. Finally someone for them to talk to, a guide through this new horrific landscape they traveled, would surely help.
But they’d gotten Frank. Amanda wouldn’t talk to him. She’d become more angry and withdrawn from Mac, with his in-laws, who adored her. Frank hadn’t seemed to care or understand that Amanda was retreating from her family, and Mac had grown frustrated. And when Frank had told Mac that Amanda would be taken away from him, all hell had erupted.
Mac looked over at the counter where the broken plate lay in pieces in the sink.
Way to show your rational side there, Mac thought. A surefire way to keep your family together.
Like a fool, he’d thought they were in the clear. He hadn’t heard from Frank in three weeks after he’d dropped the “removing Amanda bomb” on them. Mac had figured they were just another family who had slipped through the cracks. Only in their case it was a blessing.
I think it’s a blessing. I can help you. Rachel’s words lingered in his head.
Honestly, he doubted it. It wasn’t so much that his faith in the system was nonexistent. It was his faith in Rachel that was lacking. Graduation night he’d let himself believe that she was staying—that they were going to be together. But the next day she’d left without telling him, and then he made that stupid trip to her apartment, when he’d stood out in the rain begging her to come back. Although that was pretty mortifying, it was not what was so disheartening.
Rachel had run away from her family. She’d lied and run away from them. When things had gotten tight, she’d left without so much as a word. She’d abandoned her brother, who never forgiven her. Mac couldn’t blame Jesse. He’d never forgiven her, either.
How could he trust someone capable of that behavior?
How could he trust the woman who’d showed up on his doorstep with promises to help, but who’d acted just as cold and formal as Frank, who’d betrayed him?
How could he trust the woman to whom he’d given everything he had of value? And she’d left it all behind like clothes she’d outgrown.
Mac took a deep breath and pushed himself out of the chair. Right now he had to convince his daughter that they needed to give counseling one more try.
Mac climbed the stairs, feeling a hundred years old, and knocked on his daughter’s door.
“Go away,” she yelled.
“Amanda?”
“Dad.” She ripped the door open and then took three flying steps back to her bed where she curled onto her side away from him.
Her nickname, Eddy, was embroidered on the back of her shirt, the fragile knobs of her spine pressed against the cotton. Suddenly, Mac was nearly on his knees with the desperate desire to rewind time seven years. Amanda would be starting kindergarten, her life an open book to him. There were no secrets, no locked doors, no terrifying three days of her disappearance. No criminal investigations. No Rachel Filmore.
“Amanda.” Two months had passed since the harrowing nights she’d been gone, and he wasn’t any closer to finding out why she ran. “Maybe if you talked to me about why you ran—”
“Dad, I’ve told you,” she mumbled.
“I know it was Christie’s idea, but why did you go?” He watched her thin shoulders shrug. He expected that calculated shrug, considering it had been her standard answer for two months.
Why did you run away?
Why are you so sad?
Why won’t you eat?
Why won’t you talk to me?
Frank had told Mac that he needed to push his daughter for answers, that he couldn’t let her silence get the best of him. But staring at the delicate curve of her spine, he wondered how he could push her. She had already suffered so much.
He cleared his throat and put his foot down on one side of a line they rarely crossed. “Is it about Mom?”
There was a long stretch of quiet that Mac filled with wordless prayers that Amanda would talk.
“No, Dad,” she sighed. “Not everything is about Mom.”
“But maybe you saw something, or heard—”
“I didn’t see or hear anything!” she yelled, flipping onto her back. Mac watched the steady stream of tears running from the corner of her eyes into her hair. “I told you I was asleep. I woke up in the hospital, Dad. I already told you I don’t know what happened!”
“Okay, okay.” He took a step closer to the bed, but she immediately flung herself back onto her side.
“Go away, Dad. Just leave me alone.” Her voice was thick with her tears, and he knew that if he left the room she would sob into her pillows, shoving them into her mouth, probably thinking he wouldn’t hear her. He had stood outside her door for countless hours listening to her do that. What am I supposed to do?
He couldn’t believe after all this time it was going to come down to trusting Rachel Filmore. Amanda had to talk to Rachel. It was the only way out of this mess.
I hope someone somewhere is laughing, he thought.
“If you’re not going to talk to me, Amanda, I wish that you would talk to Rachel.”
“I’ll talk to that woman, I’ll do whatever you want,” she whispered, and even though she was probably lying, he felt a small measure of relief. She’d never said she would talk to Frank.
“Everything’s going to be all right.” He wasn’t sure at this point if that was an out-and-out lie, but he felt better saying it.
“Whatever,” she breathed, her voice tense with sarcasm.
“I’ll call and cancel the tutor.” At the moment he couldn’t force anything else on his daughter.
“Okay.” Her breath shuddered, her thin shoulders shook.
“Do you want to go into town with me, get some chicken at Ladd’s?” Fried chicken used to be a safe bet for his daughter, but these days with her uncertain appetite and mood, he could never be sure. Please eat. Please come eat with me.
“I’m not hungry,” she whispered.
“I’ll go get some for later, then,” he said, unwilling to give up the hope that sometime soon she was going to eat.
“Okay,” she said, her voice muffled.
See? He wanted to shout. See how normal we are?
He lingered for a moment, wanting so badly to have her look at him and smile. She gave him nothing but the cold chill of her silence.
Mac turned and caught sight of the glittery ladybug stickers that she had stuck on the plate of her light switch. She had gotten those stickers for her seventh birthday and put them all over the house. That was a million years ago. He had scraped those stickers off his car, the tractor, off the fridge, a couple of windows. He still had one on his alarm clock. He smiled as he touched them on his way out, those faded but still sparkling reminders of the girl she used to be.
A while later Mac parked the truck in front of Moore’s hardware store in the middle of downtown. The Main Street Café, where Rachel’s mom worked and Mac never ate for obvious reasons, stood next door, and the Dairy Dream ice cream parlor was a few doors down.
Maybe he’d get a pint of rocky road for later.
He smiled ruefully. He kept trying to get his daughter to gain some weight, but he was the only one whose pants were getting tighter.
“Hey, Mac!” Nick Weber, his insurance salesman, waved at him from where he sat with his family on one of the benches outside the Dairy Dream. “You got time next week to come down to the office, look over some of those papers?”
“No problem,” Mac shouted back, and Nick raised his vanilla cone in acknowledgement.
Mac was upping his insurance policies on everything. Fire. Life. Car. Everything was fragile in his life. Nothing was resistant to destruction, and if something happened to him or to the farm, he needed to be sure Amanda would be all right.
“Excuse me,” he murmured, squeezing between the few people standing in line at the movie theater.
The Royal had been standing for more than fifty years. He’d seen his first movie there—Bambi. He and Rachel had seen a million movies at the theater, though always through the back door without paying. And before she ran away, he and Amanda had seen their fair share there, too.
The cyclical way things worked in small towns appealed to him. He checked the marquee to see if the feature was something he could take Amanda to, but the Now Showing poster was for an R-rated movie.
Mac had never felt the way that Rachel did about this town. It had never been a trap for him. He’d always figured his life didn’t need much more than what this little town could offer him.
He’d tried to see the potholes and the bougainvillea and the families differently, as something bad, something to escape, the way Rachel had. But somehow it still all seemed right.
The scent of fried chicken led Mac to Ladd’s front door.
