It’s not easy looking Dylan Thorpe in the eyes, and not just because he’s basically appointed himself her psychiatrist now. It’s hard because he’s one of the most astonishingly handsome men she’s ever seen. The kind of handsome that seems two-dimensional and unreal even when it’s sitting across from you, like it might slide from view if you swipe up on your phone.
Another woman, a woman without Charlotte’s walls, might have tried to seduce him after their first chat downstairs. Even after it became clear that he’d sought her out as a kind of pet project.
By his own admission, Dylan had sensed she didn’t truly belong in the AA meetings at the Saguaro Wellness Center. That she gravitated to them because there was something about the sharing—all those honest, unguarded expressions of hopes, insecurities, and fears—that quieted her soul, even though she’d never been what anyone would call an alcoholic.
It would take another few weeks before Charlotte admitted she liked the meetings because they made her feel close to her late grandmother, with whom she’d lived for almost a decade after fleeing her father.
They were both survivors, she and her grandmother. The woman almost drank herself to death following the disappearance of her daughter and grandchild. But even before Charlotte’s rescue—Trina’s rescue, if they were going to be technical about it—Luanne found sobriety and became a pillar of the small 12-step community in Altamira, a little town just south of Big Sur and a short drive inland from the Pacific Coast Highway, a place she’d called home for thirty years. After Charlotte went to live with her, Luanne made a habit of bringing her to the open AA meetings in town, the ones that allowed nonalcoholics to just sit and listen. That’s where Charlotte first heard slogans like “First things first,” “Easy does it,” and her personal favorite, “Keep it simple, stupid.” That’s where she had seen that people really could change. That we’re not all doomed by our genetics or our pasts.
The eight years she’d spent with her grandmother, three of them as an almost-normal high school student and the rest as an assistant manager in Luanne’s pet supply store, were the happiest in her entire life. Idyllic compared with what came before and after. The long walks they took together along Altamira’s rocky coast, the open skies that were often filled by great, towering clouds, the steadiness of her grandmother’s grip, and the quiet wisdom of her recovery, even the biting chill of the Pacific winds—all these things made her time on the Bannings’ farm seem like a memory so distant it might one day fade entirely.
Then one afternoon, walking home from the store, Grandma Luanne died of a sudden, massive heart attack, a quick and painless death, but one that tore a hole in Charlotte so deep she could barely speak for weeks afterward. This is what it means to have real family, she’d realized as they lowered the casket into the ground. This is part of loving and being loved, and without it, you cannot have the other parts, the joyful parts.
In her will Luanne left Charlotte her house and the small pet supply store she’d run for thirty years. Six months later, one of the big chains opened in the next valley over, close to the 101 freeway. Sales dropped precipitously. Her grandmother’s AA friends chipped in what they could, but it was obvious that even selling her grandmother’s house would not be enough to keep the store afloat.
When her father refused to help, Charlotte snapped.
Desperate, she decided it was time to demand at least a respectable portion of the money she’d earned for him over the years—something she could use to start a new life. And it was time to demand it with a lawyer.
She won, but with her victory came the sad realization that there was a lot less money saved than her father had led everyone to believe. Still, she got enough to pay for a legal name change and her house outside Scarlet.
In short, combined with the sale of her grandmother’s house, she managed to get just enough money out of him to become Charlotte Rowe.
In the three months since they started these chats, she’s shared all this with Dylan. She doesn’t harbor any delusions about him, about what their sessions mean to him. She’s just something rough and real for him to cut his teeth on after years of listening to big-city, high-paying clients whine about their perfect lives. And she’s fine with that. It keeps her safe, installs the kind of boundaries and structure her life has always lacked.
But still, there are moments, moments when the heroes in the Nora Roberts novels she reads before bed start to look like Dylan in her mind, or when her hands start to wander under the sheet as she wonders what things would be like if she wasn’t quite her and he wasn’t quite him and her past was someone else’s.
When she reminds herself that she’s just a hard-luck case, then Dylan’s good looks don’t inspire childish romantic fantasies in her. Instead his twinkling blue eyes, determined jaw, and short, jet-black hair, which he always keeps combed to one side like some TV dad from the 1950s, are just additional reminders that he’s passing through, while she plans to hide out here for as long as she can.
And it was all going so well, she thinks. Until the Blake decided to have a Halloween film festival.
“OK then. Well, is it safe to say you assumed that by moving to a town as small as Scarlet, you’d never have to look at that poster again?”
“Something like that, yeah. And technically, I don’t live here.”
“Your grocery store is here,” he answers. “And your PO box.”
“And you.”
“Exactly. So it’s got to feel as if they’re getting ready to play that movie just down the street from where you live, even though it’s a forty-five-minute drive.”
“Movies. Plural.”
“Exactly. Go deeper, Charley.”
It gives her a warm feeling the way he says even the shortened version of her new name. Charlotte is what her grandmother wanted to name her when she was born, and Rowe is the last name of a Canadian author who wrote a vampire novel her grandmother had loved.
“What does that mean, Dr. Thorpe?”
“It means you call me Dr. Thorpe when I ask you to do something you don’t want to do.”
“What are you asking me to do, Dylan?”
“Spell out how you feel, without judgment. So that we can walk you back to a healthier perspective together, one step at a time. “
“OK . . . I feel like the movies are a sign someone knows I’m here.”
“Even though you changed your name. Even though you live behind the kind of security system that’s usually used to protect bars of gold.”
“And the guns. Don’t forget about the guns.”
“The point, Charlotte, is that when I asked you to describe what you were seeing out the window, you used the word invasion.”
“Did I?”
“You did, yes. Is that an accurate description of what you feel when you look at that marquee?”
“Yes,” she answers.
“So it’s safe to say that what you’re feeling now is akin to what you felt when Jason Briffel made threats against you in the past?”
Like ice water in her face, hearing the guy’s name again.
“Do we have to use his real name?” she asks.
“What would you like us to call him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we can come up with some term for him, some nickname.”
“How about we just call him your stalker?”
“Maybe something more . . . I don’t know . . . benign.”
“I’d caution you against downplaying it. Dismissing the seriousness of the letters he sent to you and Abigail Banning won’t make you stronger.”
“I’m not dismissing it. I just don’t want to say his name, OK?”
There’s a flash of something in his eyes, an emotion she can’t quite read. Is he offended? Did she bruise his Harvard-educated ego?