Читать книгу The Secret Between Them - Cathryn Parry - Страница 11

CHAPTER TWO

JOE MANSELL’S WAKE was in Wallis Point’s sole funeral parlor, a refurbished Victorian mansion that, one hundred years ago, had been built by Wallis Point’s wealthiest citizen.

Kyle stood in the back, away from as much of the action as possible, feeling suffocated in his suit and tie. He’d wanted to cut out early, but as the only family member, he couldn’t. The funeral director had tagged him the moment he’d walked in the door and pulled him aside, giving Kyle the day’s agenda.

Evidently, Kyle had duties. Joe had planned the whole thing, and Kyle was to stay for the prayer service to speak his part.

He was in hell.

Kyle shifted onto his good leg. Maybe he had a bad attitude where Joe was concerned, but Kyle still hadn’t forgotten years of his stepfather’s verbal abuse. Joe had been like a drill sergeant. The fact that Joe had been a Vietnam veteran might have explained it, but didn’t excuse it, in Kyle’s opinion. Still, after Kyle had attended boot camp himself he’d understood Joe a little more.

Joe had always needed that sense of order and discipline. A world where the rules were clear and the consequences for breaking them were set out.

But Kyle had always thought Joe had taken it too far. He’d been rude and angry most days, and Kyle didn’t want to be angry, not like him.

He shifted his weight to his other side.

A lot of people had shown up for the service, and Kyle was taken aback by the show of love and support for the cranky old man. Then again, Joe had behaved like a good guy to mostly everybody else. He’d liked to sit in his office in the front of the rink and listen to anybody who came to him with a problem. Jessa Hughes, for one.

“He wanted to be cremated,” Kyle heard one of the mourners say. “Didn’t want people seeing him in a casket.”

Joe’s ashes were in a gold urn on a central table covered with a maroon cloth. A photo of Joe, a candid, taken at the rink about thirty years ago judging by the haircut and his youth, sat beside it. It was a good shot, and it captured what a good guy Joe could be. A lump formed in Kyle’s throat.

The funeral director, Henry, brought over Reverend Ellsworth to introduce them both.

“Joe chose two scripture readings and a song,” the reverend informed Kyle. “He asked if you would please read the Twenty-third Psalm. Are you comfortable with that?”

Kyle stiffened. He hadn’t been to church since his mom had made him when he was young. After she’d died, he’d sort of been against it. Joe had, too. Kyle was lost, and he wasn’t ever going to be found.

“Reverend Ellsworth will be giving the eulogy,” Henry said.

“Fine,” Kyle replied. “I’ll do the psalm reading.” Psalms were short, after all.

“Then we’ll be ending the service with a song that Joe chose. Are you familiar with the Byrd’s Turn! Turn! Turn! Lyrics taken almost verbatim from the Book of Ecclesiastes.”

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven, Kyle thought.

He hadn’t known that Joe had embraced religion again. Kyle just wanted to get through this day. Honestly, he’d been through too many military funerals these past years, and each of those had been a special kind of suck, but this one...it reminded him of being a kid at his mom’s funeral. Twelve years old. Standing beside Joe. Joe had arranged that one, too. Kyle had been too devastated to be of much use. He’d thought his life had ended. In a sense, it had.

Henry led him to stand before Joe’s gold urn. Henry was a tall, polite man who was good at his funeral director job. His demeanor was calm and peaceful, so composed at dealing with bereavement. Comfortable with death.

Kyle gritted his teeth.

People that Kyle had forgotten approached him to offer their condolences. Mostly these were people from his old rink world. Guys who’d run the Zamboni, the snack bar. Lots of skaters and hockey players. They all shook Kyle’s hand.

There were a bunch of mourners Kyle didn’t recognize, too, but they looked like figure-skating people. Joe’s rink had two ice surfaces. Technically, the place was called the Wallis Point Twin Rinks. One rink had been mostly used by the local figure skating club. Periodically they hosted competitions and then they would take over both rinks. And when there were hockey tournaments they took both rinks, too. That was Kyle’s world back then. He’d wanted nothing more than to be an NHL player, but once he’d joined the Marines, it had pretty much been out of the question to pursue anything like that.

Where was Jessa—Jessica? Or her mother? Kyle had forgotten to ask about her when he’d seen Jessica yesterday.

“Hey, Kyle. It’s good to see you,” one of Joe’s former employees said to him. Johnny David was his name. “What have you been up to?”

“Marines,” Kyle said.

“Wow. You still active duty?”

Kyle shook his head. “I work for the DoD now. Department of Defense.”

“I heard you live in Florida.”

“No. Maryland.”

“You still play hockey?”

His pulse sped up. He was especially cognizant of his leg. “Yes.”

He did play hockey, in a wounded veterans league.

But that rink was an hour’s drive from his job. To run a league here, at his own ice rink, would be heaven. And he was quickly realizing that he’d never fit in here, except on the ice. And now, only on the ice with other guys who knew what it was like. What he was going through.

Johnny David prepared to ask Kyle another question, but Kyle was saved by the touch of a hand on his shoulder.

“Kyle?” A slender woman smiled at him, a pretty blonde he vaguely recognized. “I’m Natalie Kimball. We spoke on the phone.”

Natalie seemed nothing like any lawyer he’d ever pictured—she was sweet-faced, thin and slight, soft-spoken. He shook her outstretched hand and nodded at her, saying nothing.

With her other hand, she curled her hair back over her ear. Natalie wore a hearing aid.

He felt himself relaxing.

“This is my husband, Bruce Cole.”

Bruce reached over and shook Kyle’s hand, too. Bruce was older than Kyle; his face wasn’t familiar, though Kyle remembered the name—he’d been blamed for the tragedy of his best friend’s automobile death.

Kyle noticed the heavy gold ring Bruce wore. “You went to the Naval Academy?” he asked without thinking.

Bruce nodded. “I’m inactive. I work in IT now, at the Portsmouth Navy Yard.”

Kyle guessed that Bruce hadn’t seen combat. Still, Bruce was military. He understood. Kyle nodded back at him.

Get through this, Kyle thought. Just get through this. If it weren’t for the will, he probably would’ve skipped town already.

“I, ah, don’t see Jessica Hughes here,” Kyle commented to Natalie.

Natalie glanced over the crowd. “You’re right. Maybe she stopped by earlier.”

Kyle had been here since before the doors had opened. Jessica hadn’t come earlier. “Maybe she’s not feeling well.”

Natalie tilted her head at him. “Do you know something I don’t?”

“I saw her last night, I thought maybe she was pregnant.”

“Really?” Natalie looked surprised. “Did you say that to her?”

Oh, hell. Had he screwed up? “She had a ring on her finger. A guy was with her. She was wearing a baggy top and...”

“Trust me, she’s not pregnant,” said an authoritative-sounding blonde who popped her head into their three-person circle.

“That’s my sister Maureen,” Bruce said, nodding to the blonde. Kyle remembered Maureen Cole. They’d been in a lot of the same classes in high school.

“Jessica’s not married or engaged, either,” Maureen said to Kyle. “I know, because I leased a beach house to her boyfriend, and I ask about these things. If you’re interested.”

“No,” he said flatly. “I’m not interested.”

They all looked at each other. Great.

But Natalie smiled at him. “Don’t worry, Kyle. Things will be fine on Monday.”

He shook his head. He’d just made their appointed meeting at her law office that much more awkward.

“Where are you staying?” Natalie asked him, taking him aside.

“The Grand Beachfront Hotel.”

“Would you like me to give you a ride on Monday?”

“That’s okay, I have my truck.”

“You drove up from Maryland?” Natalie asked.

He stared at her. “I wanted to be ready in case there’s anything I need to move to or from the rink to take it over quicker.”

Natalie’s eyes widened. “Have you given notice on your job down in Maryland?”

“I’m hoping to do that on Monday, ma’am.”

Natalie gazed at him for a long time. Then she smiled. “That’s really good to know, Marine.”

* * *

JESSICA HAD MEANT to go to the funeral.

She’d dressed in funeral clothes: a black skirt with boots and a long dark coat. But when the street had forked and it had come to a choice between steering her little orange Volkswagen toward the funeral parlor and taking the road that led to Sebastien’s house, she’d chosen Sebastien.

She parked in his driveway, not exactly sure what she was doing. She felt knocked off-kilter about their Valentine’s Day dinner. After she’d turned around to watch the couple behind them getting engaged, it had been as if a switch had shut off in Sebastien. And for the rest of their dinner, he had been disconnected from her. Oh, he’d kept up polite conversation—he was a corporate marketing professional, after all, great with making small talk—but when he’d driven her home, he’d been quiet and pensive. And he’d begged off coming in for coffee. He had a full day on Saturday, he’d said.

So had she. The funeral, for one thing. She owed it to Joe to attend. But...this thing with Sebastien was bugging her. He was her hope for her future. Her dream, her safe place. She hoped that Joe would understand she needed to set things right with Sebastien before she paid her respects to him.

She stared at Sebastien’s black Nissan, parked in his driveway in front of her. She and Sebastien had never had a misunderstanding or a fight before. He was usually so easy and laid-back. He never asked her about her old life as Jessa Hughes and she didn’t ask him about his past, either. She’d thought that had been a great part of their relationship.

Suddenly queasy, she turned her rearview mirror toward herself. She looked terrible, pale and drawn. She pinched color into her cheeks. Found her tube of lip gloss in her purse and smeared it on.

She glanced at Sebastien’s front door. Since his car was in the driveway, he very likely was home. She was sort of hoping he’d see her out here in the cold and come outside and kiss her. Act as though everything was okay, as usual.

But it wasn’t. She was the one who would have to be brave, who had to face whatever it was that had gone wrong. She got out and knocked on his door. She didn’t even have a key.

He answered, dressed, a coffee mug in his hand. “Jess? Don’t you have a funeral to go to?”

She nodded, miserable, standing on the doorstep feeling more alone than ever. “I’d rather talk to you.”

Immediately, he opened the door. “Come in.” Instead of his normally easy smile, he wore a quizzical expression. He was in his bare feet, and she gazed down at them as she walked in.

He took her coat and draped it over a leather couch. She never got over how spectacular his rental house was. On the beach, it had views of the surf. The ceilings were high, and in the kitchen, everything was gleaming modern stainless steel and white marble and real wood. The complete opposite of her dingy little winter rental in a drafty apartment beside a gas station.

Without asking, Sebastien went into the kitchen and came back, pressing a warm mug of coffee into her hands.

“I’m...sorry about last night,” she said. “It’s pretty obvious there’s something wrong between us. It feels like there’s a big distance, and it’s scaring me.”

He sat at right angles to her on the leather loveseat, so close his knees brushed her skirt. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it, too.” He frowned into his coffee. “Honestly, Jess, I wonder if I even know you sometimes. You get so closed up tight that I have no idea what you’re thinking.”

She expelled a breath. She’d been hearing that most of her adult life. She made a small laugh. “I don’t want to be like that with...the man I hope to marry.”

Sebastien froze for a moment.

“You did make hints,” Jessica said gently, setting down the mug. “At Christmas. You asked what kind of engagement rings I preferred.”

Sebastien nodded. She couldn’t read his face exactly, but he took her hand in his.

“I don’t want to be a controlling person,” she continued, “so I didn’t push. I know better than most what it’s like to be pushed. My mother...” She paused.

“It’s pretty obvious this funeral is stirring something up in you. That’s all I wanted to know about last night.”

She removed her hand from his and smoothed her skirt. It was more than Joe’s death and Kyle’s presence that was bothering her. It was as if she’d been propelled into the past, feeling helpless and broken again.

“You never explained this Joe person to me,” Sebastien said. “And there’s a will reading? Are you inheriting something from him?”

“I don’t know.” She stood and paced, irritated with herself. “I’m sorry. I’m just...I don’t like to talk about the past or my family.” She glanced at him. “Honestly, you don’t like to talk about yours, either. And I’ve never pushed you about it. I assumed that was part of why we get along so well.”

He smiled gently. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know about them. Later.”

Okay. She couldn’t get out of this conversation. She had to go there and trust that he’d be fine with it.

“So...you know how I used to be a figure skater?” she said. “Well, I trained at the Wallis Point Twin Rinks. Did you know that?”

He grinned at her. “It’s on your Wikipedia page, Jess. Your skating career is pretty much an open book.”

She winced. She hadn’t ever thought about that, though she supposed it made sense. The big thing she’d loved about Sebastien was that he never pressed her about those days, specifically that one incident that strangers still occasionally came up to her and offered sympathy for.

“You were America’s sweetheart,” Sebastien said. “You got injured and had to pull out of your final competition just before the Olympic Games. When you cried on live television, everybody in the country cried along with you.”

Jessica sat down again. “That was a really bad time in my life, Sebastien.”

“I can imagine. It’s why I never asked you about it.” He sipped his coffee and gazed at her over the rim of his mug. “I thought you were over it. You never bring it up, so I assumed...”

She’d honestly thought the pain and guilt had dissolved, too. Until Joe had shown up in her physical therapy office and then had written her into his will. Kyle coming home had been her tipping point.

She closed her eyes, overcome with guilt so sharp it stabbed into her solar plexus. She felt dragged right back to age seventeen. Crushed. Under everyone’s thumb, panicked and alone, and handling the situation all wrong. She’d better pull herself out of that place if she hoped to salvage all that she’d so painstakingly built for herself since then.

Sebastien eyed her. “What’s wrong?”

“I...need to tell you about something that probably isn’t on my Wikipedia page.” She took a deep breath. Her hands were trembling just anticipating telling him.

Sebastien set down his coffee mug. All his attention—love and concern—on her.

That gave her the courage she needed. “People don’t know this...and I actually promised myself to never tell anyone, but...” She had to do this. Had to bring Sebastien back to her again. “I went to a lawyer shortly after my injury, when I was still seventeen, to look into being legally emancipated from my mother.” She wiped her eyes with her thumb. “You have to understand, Sebastien, my mother was my only family. She and I were...well, I was exhausted and I couldn’t please her anymore. For a lot of reasons I had to separate myself from her, and that one drastic step changed my whole life and not necessarily in the best way.”

She stared at her black skirt, hoping her Wikipedia page wasn’t specific enough to clue Sebastien into what was missing. Kyle’s role. Which would only lead to a secret she could never divulge to anyone.

Instead, she reached for the other, lesser thing that bothered her. “I think I’m kind of screwed up because I have to go back into that same law firm again on Monday. I think it’s messing with my head. That’s all,” she finished.

“Why? Why are you getting an inheritance from this rink owner? Is he your secret father or something?”

“No!” She laughed aloud, relieved. “He was a client. Like you were,” she teased. “That’s how I connected with him again after so long. He mentioned a ring he wanted to give me—an inexpensive onyx ring. Maybe he was just sentimental about the old ice rink days, but like you, I’m not.” She shivered. “Anyway, I’m considering not going to the will reading. I don’t want to go back into that law office. I know it’s silly, I know the law firm is run by the daughter and not the father anymore, but still—”

“Do you want me to take off work, go with you to see the lawyer on Monday?” Sebastien asked. “For moral support?”

“You would do that?” she asked, surprised. Sebastien’s job always came first.

“Of course.”

“I...yeah.” She smiled at him, grateful. “Please do come to the lawyer’s office.”

“Great. It’s settled.” He patted the seat beside him. “You want to hang out today?”

“I thought you had to work?”

“It can wait. I’d rather spend the day with you.”

That was a change. She felt so much better. “Thanks for not giving up on me.”

“No worries,” Sebastien said. “You know you can trust me.”

She hoped she could. She really did.

Because if she couldn’t, she didn’t have anyone else.