Let Me Love You Again (An Echoes of the Heart Novel Book 2) (11 page)

Chapter Eight

“She’s adorable,” Marsha said to Oliver.

“Hey, Mom.” He pulled her into a hug, both of them looking out the window. He hadn’t realized she was home yet.

Marsha rested her head on his shoulder. “Selena was about that age when she and Belinda first moved next door. That was, what, eight years or so before you came along?”

Oliver grunted.

He blinked the sleepless grit out of his eyes.

After Travis dropped him at the house, Oliver had jogged a quick couple of miles to clear his head, nearly having a heat stroke under the midday sun. He’d showered. Hanging until Dru got home with Teddy, he’d downed what must have been a gallon of water and tried to nap. Epic fail. Then he’d heard Selena’s dilapidated Chevy pull into the driveway next door. He’d dragged his ass off the couch so he could peer through the blinds, and he’d been borderline or not-so-borderline spying on the Rosenthal place ever since. When he’d heard her out back, how was he supposed to have looked away from the sight of her and her daughter on the other side of his parents’ hedge?

“She seems happy.” He glanced again at Selena’s
adorable
little girl, who’d gone back to playing. He hadn’t had the heart not to wave back just now.

“They dote on her.” Marsha leaned against the kitchen counter and crossed her arms. An ominous sign. She had something to get off her chest—resistance was futile. “It’s a side of Belinda most people don’t remember. The way she’d loved so freely and showered so much attention on Selena—back before Ben left them, and Belinda and Selena moved out of their big house across town and into that tiny thing next door. Belinda never completely recovered from it. But Camille’s been good for her grandmother. She’s a special little girl. People fall in love with her on sight.”

“What’s not to love?”

He watched Selena talk on the phone, her daughter nearby on a colorful blanket. Sweet, domestic, a picturesque scene. Selena seemed to finally have what she’d always wanted, whatever had happened with her marriage. A family of her own to care for and be loved by, including reconciling with her mother.

“There’s evidently some kind of delay with her divorce,” Marsha said. “Selena’s helping Belinda make ends meet while she’s here, working a part-time job at the elementary school.”

Selena was divorced. Oliver couldn’t wrap his head around it. He tuned back in to the growing chaos that had rocked the house once Dru returned with Teddy—the kid screaming from being awoken from his car-seat-induced snooze. She and Oliver hadn’t exchanged more than a few words before Travis turned up again. Then the school busses pulled to the curb, one every half hour, spitting out the rest of the kids. The noise factor in the house had quickly escalated to eardrum-bursting decibels, distracting Oliver from imagining Selena with another man, raising their child, living their life.
Leaving
their life to move back here.

Two older kids, a teenage boy and girl, raced through the kitchen. Ignoring Oliver and Belinda, they tramped up the back stairs, bickering.

“You played first yesterday,” said the girl who’d been introduced as Shandra. She wore a jeans skirt and graphic T-shirt and had turned a bright blue bandana into a headband. “It’s my turn.”

“No one’s playing nothin’.” Gabe’s cargoes were wrinkled almost as badly as his short-sleeved, plaid button-down. “Not if we don’t find the controller.”

“In your pit of a room?” Shandra raced past him.

“Stay out of my room! I didn’t take it upstairs last night.”

Marsha watched them go and chuckled.

“Video games.” She shook her head. “They take turns after school. Sounds like Shandra has first dibs today.”

“
If
she can make Gabe produce the controller. And she’s infiltrating enemy territory to hunt for it, so he’ll think twice before he hides something from her again. Smart girl.”

Oliver’s running grudge match with his own siblings over anything and everything had been legend back in the day. Marsha and Joe had mostly let them work things out for themselves, the way Travis and Dru seemed to be this afternoon. And before the full-tilt after-school mayhem could torch the last of Oliver’s rapidly declining sanity, he’d excused himself to the kitchen to make coffee—for Marsha. He’d wanted to have something comforting waiting for her when she got home. Instead, he’d let himself get sidetracked.

He sneaked another glance out the window. Selena and her daughter were gone.

“Honey,” Marsha said, “have you—”

“Can we get this started, Mom?” Travis came in from the living room, still in uniform. He’d been grousing since he’d arrived about the mound of paperwork still waiting for him at the station.

“Sure,” Marsha said. “Let me grab that cup of coffee.”

She scanned the unused stovetop. Her gaze tracked back to Oliver. So did Travis’s.

“Take all the time you need, bro,” Travis said with a WTF stare. “I think Dru’s teaching the older kids how to play craps. The younger ones are finger-painting the walls. And I’m showing Teddy the finer points of Hatha yoga. We’ve got all day.”

He left Oliver and Marsha alone again, in the room where she’d cooked for Oliver, where he’d learned to clean up after himself and others. He’d helped her sort and fold laundry on the counter. He’d tutored the younger kids with math homework. He’d helped bandage skinned knees and elbows when there’d been no one else around to see to someone smaller than he was.

All the family he’d known since he’d lost his birth mother had happened in this kitchen, the living room, upstairs where he’d bunked with Travis in what was likely Gabe and Fin’s room now. And being part of it again as an adult felt . . . so much better than he should be letting it. He chugged from a bottle of water he’d snagged from the refrigerator.

Leaning his hip against the counter, he faced the music.

“What’s on your mind, Mom?”

“You’re sure you’re ready to be point for dealing with six kids who’ve never met you?” Marsha’s smile said she’d guessed he’d been hiding out in the kitchen. “A baby, three in elementary school, and another two in high school who come fully equipped with the attitude that anyone older than nineteen loses ten IQ points just getting out of bed in the morning?”

“If Dru and Travis can handle them, I can. My work’s portable,” he assured his mother, when the reality was that he was in danger of losing Canada to Xan, too. “I’m here for as long as you need me.”

A burst of angry shouting in the other room—sounded like
Fin—set off gales of girl laughter. From Lisa Burns, most likely. She was the one closest to Fin in age, the both of them in upper elementary school.

“And what about the rest?” His mother smoothed a hand down Oliver’s arm.

“The rest?”

“You, Selena, and Brad. And Dru. And Travis, now that I think about it. He’s kept up with the lot of you. He and Brad are close still, the way you and your brother have stayed in touch.”

“Yeah,” Oliver admitted. “We have.”

“There are other people here besides Travis who’d like the chance to know you again.” Another whoop of laughter sounded off from the living room. Kid curses, adult chastisement, more laughter. “Some of us will continue to inflict ourselves on you as long as you’re around. Others, you’re going to have to take the initiative with.”

“I’ve already talked with Brad.”

“And Selena?”

“Mom . . .” Oliver stretched his neck from side to side until it finally cracked.

“Now that you’re home, make the most of it. Don’t let your past deprive the rest of us of the good things we could all still have.”

Deprive the rest of them of what?

“What’s really going on?” he asked.

Marsha didn’t answer right away.

Oliver glanced toward the living room, hoping for someone to misbehave and require her intervention. When that didn’t happen, he braced his hands on his hips and bit the bullet.

“I’m listening,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t involve concocting another way to maneuver Selena and me together. I’d do anything else for you and Joe, I swear I would. I’ll deal with Brad and
Dru and whatever else I have to around here. But Selena and I are off-limits. You didn’t see how hard it was for her both times we were together today. I’m not putting either one of us through that again, not even for you.”

“Both times?”

“This morning when I first got here. She and her little girl—”

“Camille”

“—were out front of Belinda’s. And it was just so . . .”

“What?”

Painful. “I don’t want to hurt her again.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“After all these years, it’s just . . .”

“What?”

“Over.” And
over
was a whole lot easier to process from a distance. Through the kitchen window. Or from Atlanta or another state or even another continent.

“Okay.” Marsha gave a firm nod. “If over’s what you want, what you need, that’s fine. Just hear me out before you make up your mind. Then if that’s still your decision, I’ll consider the subject closed until you bring it up again.”

Oliver hung his head, because his mother was being reasonable. How was a man supposed to outmaneuver reasonable?

“Let me have it,” he said.

Marsha’s smile should have taken some of the sting out of his surrender. But there was something in her expression that had the hair rising on the back of his neck.

“Selena turned up a few months ago,” she said. “She and Belinda have shared very little with anyone in town about Selena’s life since she left. Except that she’s divorced and starting over. And that she has a little girl she keeps pretty close tabs on. It’s almost like Selena’s afraid to let anyone get too close.”

“Travis said they weren’t planning on staying.”

“Her divorce is holding her up. But, no. No one sees her putting down roots here again.”

“So she doesn’t want her daughter getting too attached.” Reasonable enough for a kid that young who’d been uprooted from one home already. Selena certainly knew how that felt. “They seem happy together.”

His mind replayed an image from that morning: Selena holding her daughter, smiling at her, sweet, perfect, content. It was like a living cameo burned into his brain. And it was none of his business.

“Did you talk with Camille?” his mother asked.

“Not really. Look, I’m glad Belinda’s helping them. If she and Selena have patched things up, good for them. Good for Selena’s daughter. What does any of this have to do with me?”

Marsha looked uncomfortable. She’d never been big on gossip. This was so out of character for her, it was downright spooky.

“I think there’s more going on next door than meets the eye,” she said. “Your father does, too.”

“Like what?”

His mother linked her hands in front of her. “Selena and Belinda have been telling everyone that Camille’s four, going on five years old. My guess is she’s older. Just tiny for her age. She’s snuck over to the house a few times when she plays out back on the weekends and her grandmother’s watching her. You know Belinda. She can get so caught up in her yard, I swear if a bomb went off she’d never know the difference.”

“You’ve been spending time with Selena’s daughter, when Selena doesn’t want her over here?”

“Camille wanted to play with the kids,” Marsha said. “At first, I didn’t have the heart to turn her away. She’s always scampered back home before they notice she’s gone.” Marsha was wringing
her hands, for God’s sake. What the hell? “We’ve had some lovely chats. She’s just . . . wonderful.”

“I’m sure she is, but you need to stop. Do you want me to talk to Selena for you? Is that what this is all about?”

“I’d already have told her myself if I didn’t think I’d get Camille in trouble, and . . .”

“And
what
?”

“Camille’s already finished kindergarten in New York. She talked to me about her teachers there, when I asked her about her class here. Her mother’s reenrolled her in the program at Chandler. Now that’s not all that unusual for kids who are in between age groups, whose parents or teachers don’t think they’re ready to move up yet. But my guess is Camille’s closer to six than five. Maybe a little older.”

“And . . . ?” Oliver stared at his mother while she waited. And waited. He’d reached his limit.

To keep from storming up the kitchen stairs himself, he turned to deal with Marsha’s beaten-up kettle and the coffee he’d promise to make but had no business drinking once he did. The shiny brass kettle had been dented all to hell and back, covered in tiny pit marks it had collected over years of dedicated service. It sat where it always had, on the stove’s left back burner, forever ready to feed the endless pots of herbal tea Marsha made for young souls in need of soothing. For the older and more sleep-deprived, there was the best damn coffee on the planet, made by pouring boiling kettle water into his mom’s stovetop slow-drip pot.

Walking to the fridge, needing some distance, he found his mother’s favorite blend of ground beans in the door, same as always. Dru had said to make sure he made decaf, since it was already late afternoon.

He headed to the sink with the right container and the kettle.
Maybe he could bash himself over the head with the thing. That would stop everything Marsha had said, and not said, from rattling around in his already aching brain. Then something froze inside him. Bits and pieces of conversation, seemingly disconnected details, finally aligning.