“I’ll call Shane. He’s got a truck and can bring it over.”
“I don’t want to trouble him,” Cady said.
“It’s no trouble,” Conn said. “And it’s safer.”
They paid for the tree. Patty bought a round of hot chocolates, and they trooped back to Cady’s Audi. “Do I have any Goo-Gone?” Cady asked when they were inside, the heat blasting.
“I don’t think so,” Patty said. “You can borrow mine. Em and I are wet but clean.”
“It’s so weird not knowing what’s in my own house,” Cady said. She had her hot chocolate in one hand and her phone in the other. “Speaking of which, who has keys to my house?”
“I’ve got the one in the kitchen,” her mother said. “I loaned that one to the realtor to get the house set up for you. Oh, and Chris borrowed them last week.”
“Why?” Cady said.
“He took some of your stuff over to the house before the concert. I wasn’t able to go with him, because I had to work.”
“Okay, thanks. Hey, Em, when do you want me to tweet those pictures?”
“Let me mess with them first, then send you the ones I want out there. Thank you, Cady!” Bag swinging wildly, she dashed up the front steps, opened the door, and disappeared into the house. Patty followed her, then returned with a bottle of Goo Gone.
“Thanks, Mom. I’ll get the tree set up. We can decorate next weekend.”
“Sounds good, honey. Thanks again, Conn.”
“No problem.”
The roads were dry, the snow lying in sculpted drifts along the shoulder on the way back to Cady’s house.
“He could have had a copy made,” Conn said, jumping back a few hours to the reality, not the fairy tale of winter wonderlands and Christmas trees.
“He’s not here, remember?” Cady said. She’d tucked her phone into her pocket and closed her eyes.
“He could have given the copy to someone else.”
“So he’s got an accomplice in his new gaslighting business? This is so crazy I won’t even consider it. A random psycho from the internet spending his Christmas breaking into my house in Lancaster is more likely than Chris trying to scare me into dropping a record I’m having second thoughts about.”
“How much money are we talking about? Hundreds of thousands?”
“Yeah. Maybe more, if the record drop goes like the label hopes it does.” She opened her eyes and looked at him. He read so many emotions in there, the satisfaction of a day with family, physical tiredness from slogging through the snow with Emily, and a deeper worry about her future underneath it all. “I know, I know. People shot over a sandwich.”
“Or take in kids because they get money from the state. Or steal their neighbor’s eight-hundred-dollar TV, or an iPhone. What seems to us to be a lot of work isn’t to someone who stands to reap the rewards. What makes more sense to you? A person close to you who knows which buttons to push to throw you off your game and stands to benefit from your success, or a random stranger tracking you down and breaking into your house?”
She thought about that for a beat, then shifted her weight in the seat and refused to look at him.
“I’m here to protect you against a stalker. In my opinion, you don’t have one. You have a manager who sees his meal ticket getting cold feet just as his investment’s about to pay off.”
“Chris comes across like a jerk, but he isn’t one.”
“So ask him. Flat out ask him if he’s been breaking into your house.”
“No way,” Cady said, hard and fast. “I trust him, and I’m going to keep working with him. If I tell him I think he’s behind this, I damage a professional relationship that’s worked very well for me.”
“Until now.”
“Creative differences,” she said. “It happens. You work it out.”
“Like you work things out with Emily?”
“I was too hard on her. Half of the teenage girls in America fantasize about dating Harry Linton, and she actually knows someone who has. It’s just … she’s a typical teenage girl sometimes and then this super-savvy, super-driven designer in the making the rest of the time.”
Conn consciously relaxed his hands. The road conditions didn’t warrant fists clenched around the steering wheel. “I want to track down Harry Linton and beat him to a pulp.”
Cady smiled. “Because he cheated on me?”
“Because he expected you to pay him back for favors with sex.”
Her smile disappeared, and her expression clouded over. “Oh. That.”
It took him a moment to decipher her tone. “You’re ashamed. Why are you ashamed?”
“Because I did pay him back with sex. But it didn’t seem like it at the time, you know? It wasn’t until later that it felt cheap. And ugly. I really didn’t like myself afterward, or how long it took me to figure out that’s what was going on.”