“If he’s hiding, you mean.”
Lily didn’t respond.
Dru said, “You don’t like the idea of your son and my daughter marrying any better than I do—even before all this happened.”
“No, but like you, it’s not personal. Anyway, Shea is his choice.”
“So you’ll make the best of it.”
“I’ll do what I have to in support of my son.”
“Does he know how you feel?”
“No, and even if he did, my opinion isn’t that important to him.”
Dru looked at Lily, surprised by her admission, touched by it.
“We aren’t close.” Lily pushed her hand over her hair.
“I’m sorry,” Dru said, and she was, and when Lily asked about the wedding, whether there was a way to avoid canceling it, Dru said she didn’t think so.
“It’s going to be awful,” Lily said. “There are more than a hundred people invited between us, aren’t there?”
“It’s nothing in comparison to planning your child’s funeral,” Dru said.
“No.”
“Shea’s bridal attendants will help with sending regrets.”
“I can take care of our guest list and cancel the rehearsal dinner. Or if there’s some other way you’d like me to handle it . . .” Lily glanced at Dru.
“I was thinking we could each contact the guests we’ve invited.”
“And the vendors we’ve hired?”
“Yes. It feels horrible, doesn’t it? Impossible—like stopping a train.”
Lily started to answer, but her phone went off, and she pulled to the road’s edge, slamming on the brake, grabbing her purse.
Dru watched her, heart racing.
“It’s Paul.” Lily looked up from the caller ID.
“I’ll just stretch my legs,” Dru said, getting out of the car. She closed the Jeep’s door quietly and headed across the road, where a section of old cedar fencing supported the thick growth of a morning-glory vine, smothering it in cascades of sky-blue flowers. Still, she heard Lily’s voice, the ring of her anxiety: “But did anyone actually see him?” A beat. “It makes no sense that he would . . .” The wind took away the next bit. Then, “He might not have . . .” Dru lost the rest.
She didn’t turn around, though, until Lily called out, “Dru! We need to go now. I have to get back to Dallas.”
“What happened?” Dru got into the Jeep.
“The police found AJ’s cell phone and his laptop.” Lily made a U-turn. “At the bus station in downtown Dallas, abandoned in the seat of a chair.”
“Did anyone see him?”
“A janitor said he saw AJ coming out of the men’s room at around three in the morning. He remembered him because he was wearing dark glasses, and it struck him as odd, given that it was the middle of the night.”
“So he got on a bus? He’s on the run?” Accusation cut through Dru’s voice, but her mind was on Shea, how terribly she was going to be hurt. She didn’t know Becca had been pregnant. Now this? “Do the police know where he was going?”
“I know how it looks, but no one they interviewed actually saw him get on a bus.” Lily glanced at Dru.
She shifted her glance. She was tired of hearing everyone say that—as if how it looked wasn’t the way it was. As if there could still be an explanation other than the obvious one for AJ’s actions.
Lily called her dad and arranged to meet him back at the house. After that, neither she nor Dru spoke for several miles, but then Lily said, “He’s my son, no matter what.”
Guilty or innocent, it didn’t matter.
Dru understood. She would feel the same if it were Shea. Your children are your children, and you love them regardless. But Dru understood something else as well: Lily wasn’t as certain about AJ as she sounded.
Lily had doubts.
The others weren’t back when they arrived at the house. Lily went inside to pack her things while Dru waited on the porch. A moment later she heard the screen door open, Shea’s voice.
“Mom?”
“Oh, Shea.” Dru took a step toward her daughter but stopped when Shea threw up her hands.
“I’m fine.” Stop. She might as well have shouted it. Her jaw was set, her eyes stubborn. She didn’t believe it, that AJ was on the run. How could she not believe it? But her faith in him would end. Once she knew about the baby.
Dru met Erik’s glance when he joined them on the porch.
“Hey,” he said, and that was all.
He seemed heartsick—a reaction more in keeping with what Dru had expected from Shea on hearing her betrothed, a wanted man, had hopped a bus and skipped town. Erik looked as if he’d begun to accept that his best buddy had done something pretty terrible, monstrous even.
Lily came out, a tote over her shoulder, followed by her dad. She didn’t look at Dru, but Jeb Axel did. His eyes, a shade of blue that had been faded by time and weather, were caught in a net of fine lines, but his gaze was piercing nevertheless. It was unapologetic. Talk around town was that back in the day, all the girls had crushes on him—Lily Axel’s daddy. They had compared him to Clint Eastwood. He was still a looker for an older man—age hadn’t thickened him. If anything, the years had pared away whatever softness he might have once had the way the wind chiseled the soil from the face of a rock. Dru hated it, but Jeb Axel intimidated her.
“Are you ready?” she asked Shea.
“No one saw AJ get on the bus, Mom.” It was a challenge. Shea, thinking she possessed all the facts, was throwing down the gauntlet.
Knowing what was ahead, the terrible hurt that lay in wait, Dru left it there. She wasn’t about to get into it here, not in front of Jeb and Lily, or even Erik, as good a friend as he was to Shea. No one needed to watch while Shea’s world was taken apart.
“He wouldn’t leave like that.” Shea was adamant. “He wouldn’t do that to me. Or to you.” Shea looked at Lily and then at Jeb.
Lily was searching in her purse—for her car keys, Dru guessed, but she paused now, and her eyes widened as if she found Shea’s pronouncement of AJ’s regard for her startling.
Erik said, “I wish I knew what to believe.”
Jeb, who’d been pacing, stopped and, thumping his palm with his fist, said Shea was right. “There’s no goddamn way in hell AJ got on a bus,” he declared.
And then he collapsed.
Dru watched it happen, the inharmonious dance of steps that first had him staggering, then dropping to his knees, then toppling sideways onto the porch floor. Because he was tall, well over six feet, rangy and hard boned, he made a lot of noise going down, but then he lay still, and there was only the sweet sound of a spring breeze through the live oaks and the full-throated call of a tiny wren that perched in that instant on the porch rail.
7