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He switched gears, his tone calmer, more consoling. “Why don’t I see if Bubby can come over tomorrow? She can be persuasive—and as stubborn as they come if she needs to be. Maybe if the two of you gang up on your mother, she’ll listen.”
“An intervention of two?” Ally said facetiously.
“Pretty much. I’d make it an intervention of three but I’m the keynote speaker at a conference tomorrow that I can’t miss. But if you and Bubby together can’t get through to your mother tomorrow, I promise I’ll add whatever influence I have to convince her to have those tests done.”
Ally had been staring at the floor but she glanced at him then, finding a kind smile on his face.
He got up and came to stand in front of her, reaching a big hand to her arm and squeezing it comfortingly. “I know this is rough.”
Did he also know how warm his hand was? How strong? How good it felt and that something elemental in her sparked?
“Let’s just take it a day at a time for now,” he added, his deep voice drawing her from her thoughts. “Tomorrow we’ll bring in reinforcements with Bubby, and then we’ll go from there.”
Ally nodded.
“Get some rest,” he advised.
Ally nodded again, shocked by how sorry she was when he let go of her arm.
She got to her feet. “I’ll walk you out and peek in on my mother to make sure she’s still asleep.”
Jake led the way for the trip back through the house, opening the front door when he reached it.
But he didn’t immediately go out. Instead, he turned to look at her. “I’ll check in again tomorrow night.”
Ally nodded, gazing up into those smoldering eyes and suffering another wave of that strange mix of emotions that volleyed back and forth between hating this guy and being confused by the feelings he stirred in her.
“I’ll be here,” she answered.
“That’s important,” he said before he reached for her arm again and did another of those reassuring squeezes.
Only this time he rubbed his thumb against her arm, too, and somehow that made it seem less comforting and more…intimate.
But then he said good-night and left, and Ally wasn’t sure if she had only imagined that.
Chapter Three
“I’ll have to take this.”
David Hanson excused himself from the dinner table to take a phone call. When he did, Nina Hanson’s children—Zach and Izzy—asked if they could be excused as well. That left only Jake, Bubby and Nina—who was Bubby’s granddaughter and Jake’s friend since they’d met as teenagers—sitting in the Hansons’ dining room.
It was Friday evening. Jake had a standing invitation to the traditional Shabbat celebration that Nina held each week. As part of the religious observance, Nina, Bubby and the kids lit candles, said kiddush, and afterward they all enjoyed a meal together. And even though Jake wasn’t Jewish, he liked to be there whenever he could because it was a warm family time that gave him a sense of belonging that was almost as good as having a family of his own.
“Poor David,” Nina said with a loving look in the direction her husband had just gone to take his phone call. “He’s probably going to have to go to Kyoto next week while Tom Holloway goes to San Francisco. There’s trouble with both the Taka hotels.”
Jake knew that Nina’s husband’s family business—Hanson Media—had merged with a Japanese-owned company called Taka Corporation a few years ago and that as a result, their business interests had expanded. They were now in the process of developing a chain of upscale hotels, with the first two in San Francisco and Japan.
“What’s going on?” Jake asked.
“There are accounting irregularities in Kyoto,” Nina said. “And the promises the interior designer made that he would get back on schedule by this month have fallen through. That puts the soft opening of the Taka San Francisco in jeopardy.”
“Does Drake Thatcher have anything to do with it all?” Jake asked. Nina had told him just last month that the tycoon had planted a woman named Shelly Winston within David’s organization to spy and sabotage things from inside. It hadn’t been successful because Shelly Winston and Tom Holloway—the new head of corporate finance of the hotel division—had fallen in love and ended up together, but it seemed to follow that any other unexpected occurrences might track back to Thatcher, too.
“They don’t know. Anything is possible at this point,” Nina answered. “All I know is that things are a mess.”
“Speaking of messes,” Bubby interjected. “I visited with Estelle and Ally this afternoon, Jacob.”
Nina didn’t seem to mind her grandmother’s abrupt change of subject, because she began to stack all the dirty dishes she could reach from where she was sitting. And since Jake had been anxious to ask Bubby what had come of her trip to Estelle’s house today, he welcomed finally being able to get into it.
“I didn’t want to bring the subject up with David and the kids around—I knew it wasn’t anything they’d be interested in—but I was going to ask you about it as soon as I had the chance. How was Estelle today?”
“The same—sometimes the old Estelle, sometimes…” Bubby raised both palms toward the ceiling, shrugging her shoulders at the same time to convey her own lack of understanding of what was happening with her friend. “She’s a handful, that Estelle,” Bubby concluded. “She went to the bathroom, never came back. We found her packing her bag. She said her husband called and wanted her to go on a business trip with him—the man’s been dead forever!”
“And what did her daughter think of that?” Jake saw Nina’s eyebrows rise and he knew his victorious tone of voice had been the cause, so he explained himself. “I had a hard time convincing the daughter that there’s a problem.”
“Poor Ally, she can tell her mother’s not right in the head now,” Bubby said sympathetically. “This is a lot for that girl to take in, Jacob. We’ve all been seeing Estelle slip, but her daughter—”
“Would have seen it, too, if she’d had more to do with her.”
“Oy, such a big deal with this one!” Bubby said to her granddaughter.
Nina laughed. “You know how he is—he can’t believe anybody who has a family can take it for granted. But he does seem awfully invested in this particular family, doesn’t he?” she responded to Bubby as if Jake wasn’t there. “Do you think it has anything to do with how pretty you said Estelle’s daughter is?”
“Pretty?” Bubby exclaimed. “Pretty doesn’t do her justice. And me? I saw Jacob at the hospital—before he knew who Ally was, when she just came in the door and was at the reception counter? His eyes were glued to her. He didn’t even hear Ruth Cohen ask him if he wanted a cup of coffee out of the machine. It was like in the movies when everything else fades away and he only knew there was her.”
Jake shook his head at the absurdity of that. Yes, Ally Rogers had caught his attention, but it didn’t mean anything. “The key word in all of that is before—before I knew she was the daughter who neglected Estelle.”
“What neglect? When Estelle needed Ally for the gallbladder, Ally came. Estelle hasn’t needed her for anything else until now, and where is she now? Here again, that’s where. So what neglect? Those foster homes, those group places you had to grow up in, Jacob, they made you daydream of what real families are. But it’s not so realistic. Families—there’s some good, there’s some not so good—families are families. What they’re not is fairy tales.”
“If you’re even a little pale one day, Bubby, isn’t Nina going to notice it? And why? Because she sees you. She knows you. She knows what’s going on with you. Would I have to call her and order her to go to your apartment? Would I have to tell her to help you? No, I wouldn’t.”
“Not everyone is like my Nina. But that doesn’t mean Ally is a bad girl. And Estelle is a hard nut to crack—you know that. How many weeks have you been trying to get her to have a checkup? Where has it gotten you? You called Ally, she came—where’s the crime?”
“The crime is if she turns around and goes back to California without taking care of her mother.”
Again Bubby looked at Nina. “He wants this one to be so perfect.”
“He does seem to want her to live up to something, doesn’t he?”
“He wants her to be as good as she looks.”
“I just want her to do what she needs to do. For Estelle,” Jake insisted.
“Well, she did—how does that make you think of her?” Bubby challenged.
“What did she do?”
“Between the both of us we got Estelle to say she would have your tests.” The victory was all Bubby’s now.
“You got Estelle to agree?”
“We did. She won’t see her own physician, though. She likes you—that’s what Ally used to make her say she would.”
“I’ll get right on it, then,” Jake said.
“And say some sorries to that girl, Jacob,” Bubby ordered. “You’re too hard on her.”
“I have not been too hard on her,” he defended himself. “I’ve been as hard as I needed to be to open her eyes. Why? Did she complain to you?”
“No, but I can tell from her attitude. Enough, already! She’s scared enough. This is bad, don’t make it worse.”
Bubby stood, picked up the pile of dirty dishes that Nina had stacked and headed for the kitchen.
But while the elderly woman may have seen the subject of Ally Rogers as closed, Jake had one more question.
“Do you know what Estelle blames Ally for?”
Bubby stopped short to look at him. “Blame? What’s to blame?”
“I don’t know. Last night Ally said Estelle blames her for something, but she wouldn’t say what.”
“I don’t know about that. I just know this—tonight is the night to celebrate the end of the week, to reflect, and then to usher in the start of a new week. A new week brings a new chance to do right. Start the new week by being nicer to that girl, Jacob. You’ll get further.” Then Bubby smiled slyly at him. “And who knows? Maybe you could end up with that family of your own after all.”
Bubby disappeared into the kitchen and Jake turned his focus to his old friend, thinking Nina would be on his side and understand that there was nothing personal going on between himself and Ally Rogers.
But Nina seemed to agree with her grandmother, because she was barely hiding a knowing smile of her own.
The knock on Ally’s apartment door at nine on Friday night startled her.
Her initial, panicked thought was that her mother had gotten out of the house without the alarm going off.
But then it occurred to her that if Estelle got out of the house, the last place she was likely to come was here.
She peeked out the curtain over the window that allowed her a view of the outside landing. And then the late visit made sense—Jake Fox again. He had said he would check in with her today.
Better late than never. Not that she cared.
“I wondered who would know to come back here,” she said in greeting when she opened the door.
“The house was all dark so I figured Estelle had gone to bed early again. I took the chance that you’d still be up and came around,” he explained amiably.
In fact, nothing about Jake’s demeanor said he was on the offensive tonight. He actually seemed relaxed—more even than when he’d perched on the arm of her sofa the night before.
Ally couldn’t help being suspicious of it, though. Even as she found herself unwillingly attracted to it.
“Come in,” she invited.
“Thanks.”
She couldn’t help sneaking a glance at him over her shoulder as she closed the door behind him. He looked great. Whatever had occupied him earlier in the evening must have begun immediately after work because he was dressed much the way he had been on Thursday—casual cocoa-colored twill slacks and a pale yellow dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The only thing missing was a tie. Plus, there was the slight shadow of beard darkening his face, but it only added an appealingly masculine scruffiness that Ally didn’t want to like as much as she did.
“I talked to Bubby,” he announced as soon as Ally turned to face him.
“She brought lunch over and stayed most of the afternoon—it was really nice of her,” Ally informed him.
“And she said you two finally got your mother to agree to let me order tests.”
“It took some work but, yes, we did. Mother won’t have a full physical, but she said she’d let you do what you want. I’ve reminded her about a million times since then that that was what she’d said she would do so she wouldn’t forget.”
“How did that go?”
“She got annoyed and irritated with me, but as of when she went to bed, she was still saying she’d go through with it.”
“Great! I made some calls, pulled some strings, and even though tomorrow is Saturday, I’ve arranged for her to have a brain scan and blood work at the hospital. The labs will tell us if anything systemic is going on, the brain scan will let us know if she’s suffered a stroke—”
“A stroke? That’s the first you’ve said anything about that.” Why was it that every time she talked to this guy, things seemed to get worse?
He sighed. “You’re right. I’m getting ahead of myself. A stroke is another possibility, yes,” he said. “She could have had one in the part of her brain that affects memory, and we could be seeing the damage from that. Or there could be a small aneurysm that’s bleeding into that portion of her brain—”
Worse and worse…
“That’s why we need the scan, to rule out these other things. If there’s no evidence of a stroke or an aneurysm, and nothing systemic to explain what’s going on with her, then we move to the second stage and I’ll do cognitive tests for Alzheimer’s.”
Just when Ally thought she might be getting a grip on what she could be dealing with, he added to the list of scary possibilities and made her feel overwhelmed again.
There was a tiny two-chair kitchen set against the wall near the door. Ally pulled out one of the chairs and sat down, not caring any longer if it was rude to sit when she hadn’t asked him to.
Jake didn’t wait to be invited to join her. He just did, pulling the other chair from the opposite side of the drop-leaf table to the front of it so he was closer to her when he sat down. Close enough for her to catch a whiff of an outdoorsy cologne.
“I know, I’m the bearer of bad news,” he said as if he’d read her mind. “It’s not a role I like.”
Had that contributed to his harshness of before?
She expected him to talk more about the tests and what they could reveal and how bad it could all be, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “You and I haven’t had a wonderful start, and I think I owe you an apology.”
Ally stared at him, trying to figure out if she’d missed something.
“Bubby says I’ve been too hard on you,” he added.
“I didn’t say anything like that to her,” Ally defended herself.
“I know. She said she could just tell. But she’s right, I have been a little rough on you. Partly because I hate what’s happening with Estelle, hate not being able to put my head in the sand about it, and partly because I sometimes have unreasonably high expectations of family members—that part comes from my own history—”
“A history of your own family meeting or not meeting your expectations?”
He hesitated for a moment. “I don’t have any family.”
“Oh.”
