“She’s gone, boy,” Lucas said when the dog walked back to him, stopping every few steps to peer over his shoulder. “I knew she was leaving, but you didn’t.”
She’d told him to look on the kitchen window ledge, but he couldn’t bear to go back in the house right away. She’d likely left him a note, and he didn’t feel like reading her elegant good-bye, written in her decisive, angular hand. She’d say she had enjoyed his company, appreciated the time they’d spent together, thanks for the memories.
Best to just get it over with and keep moving. He walked back into the kitchen and looked at the ledge. A single rosebud, small and tightly furled, lay in the sunlight streaming through the window. When he picked it up something gold slid off the stem to clatter into the sink. He reached down and picked up his grandmother’s ring, lost for decades.
Found.
Sunlight glinted off the small diamond. He opened the note:
Lucas—
I found this while you were walking Duke this morning. I went out to the rosebush to cut the first bloom for you, and when I loosened the dirt worked into the foundation, there was the ring, glinting in the dirt. The gold is a little scratched, but a jeweler can polish that out and check the prongs to make sure the diamond is secure.
You and Duke just turned the corner onto this block, so I don’t have much longer here with you. I’m fairly sure we’re both going to be grown-ups about saying good-bye. After all, this was a contract position for me, a short-term lease for you. You helped me find the strength I needed to go back to my life stronger, more confident, better able to hold my ground against other people’s expectations. I’m glad to have found something of yours in return.
Alana
She thought he’d helped her find something? That strength was there all along. All he did was give her sex and sleepless nights chasing Tanya all over the county. He’d given her a troubled boy and a fixer-upper rental house.
She’d found something much more valuable.
He looked at the ring, then at the bloom, and for a moment longing swelled inside him, pushing at the edges of his skin. He wanted to get in his truck and follow her, chase her down on the interstate and pull her over, and beg her not to leave. He wanted to tell her how she made the house feel like a home again, with her books and her simple homemade meals, how Duke ignored the other tenants, how he checked to see if a light was on every time he pulled into his driveway.
His fist curled tight around the ring. The pain of the sharp edge of the petals cutting into his palm brought him back to reality. He had nothing to offer a Wentworth. He had two houses in a small town in South Dakota. At thirty-two, he’d reached the pinnacle of his career in law enforcement. He had an aging dog, and a police vehicle he drove because it was so old and battered he wouldn’t send another officer on patrol out in it. He had a failed marriage, a failed effort at mentoring, and a family that was falling apart in slow motion.
He had a heart that had been broken so many times, the pieces weren’t even worth offering to someone else. Especially not to Alana. Who would soon be in India, and then in London.
There was one thing he could give her, something that would make her happy, because it wouldn’t just be for her.
? ? ?
THE NEXT DAY, Lucas locked Duke in the screened porch and headed down County Road 46.
The trailer’s front door was wide open when he pulled off the road and onto the dirt tracks leading to the front door. The little kids were playing in the turtle sandbox. Cody sat on the steps, a sketch pad balanced on his knees. Lucas almost didn’t recognize him without the hoodie, but the way his shoulders hunched under the T-shirt when he saw Lucas’s truck tipped him off.
The little kids perched on the edge of the sandbox turned to stare when Lucas got out of the truck.
“What do you want?” Cody said. “I finished my community-service hours. Mrs. Battle signed my form on Friday. We’re done.”
Okay, they’d skip the pleasantries. “Is your mother home?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She just got up.”
Mrs. Burton appeared in the doorway. She wore a pair of sweatpants and a tank top, and her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail. “What did you do?” she hissed at Cody.
“Nothing!”
“He hasn’t done anything,” Lucas said. That I’m aware of and I want to keep it that way. “I’d like a minute of his time, ma’am.”
Mrs. Burton gave Cody a little shove down the stairs. The boy crossed the lawn at a lope, resentment clinging to him like the faded jeans and T-shirt.
“What?”
“You’re going to paint the mural in the library,” Lucas said.
“You can’t make me do something I don’t want to do,” Cody said.
“No, but I can help you do something you do want to do,” Lucas replied.
“I don’t want to do it.”
“You wanted to hurt Alana. You wanted to withhold the only thing you had to give her. But she’s gone, and the only person you’re going to hurt if you don’t do this is yourself.”