Lily remembered Edward telling her the promises you made to other people weren’t as important as the ones you made to yourself. What mattered, he had said, was what you did out of the sight of others. She kept his glance. “If—when AJ is found, if he needs a criminal attorney, then, yes, I want you to represent him. He’ll want that, too.”
“And Paul? What will Paul want?”
Now it was Lily’s turn to stare out the window. Her gaze drifted to the highway beyond the café parking lot, where a stream of traffic flowed, constant, monotonous, indifferent. When Paul had contacted Edward Dana after AJ’s first arrest for murder, it had been at the recommendation of a friend who was a business associate. Edward had gotten the friend’s son cleared of a felony assault charge. He’d said Edward was a bulldog in the courtroom, that if he couldn’t get AJ off, no attorney could.
Paul had discouraged Lily’s participation in the legal discussion concerning AJ’s defense. He’d said it was men’s business. But Lily had attended the initial consultation anyway, arriving at Edward’s office unannounced, ahead of Paul and AJ, determined to inform Edward of her intention to be included. AJ is my son, too—that phrase had repeated in her mind. I have a right to be here, she had planned to say. But when Edward appeared in the reception area, the moment became uniquely charged. Lily lost her power of speech. A few minutes, or an eternity passed—she was never sure which—and when Paul arrived and found her already there, standing with Edward, he’d stopped, his glance switching between them as if he were trying to sort out what he’d walked into.
“You may not believe me,” Lily said now, bringing her gaze back to Edward, “but before this happened, I was only waiting for AJ’s wedding to be over.”
“To do what? Nothing has changed, has it? You’re still married.”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” Her answers came in quick succession. She realized with a jolt that she didn’t know which of them was the correct one.
The waitress came and set mugs of coffee in front of them. “Cream?”
Lily nodded, taking the small silver pitcher from her, upending the contents into her cup, knowing it wouldn’t make the bitter brew more palatable.
“What does AJ’s wedding being over have to do with anything?” Edward spoke as soon as the waitress was out of earshot. “I haven’t heard from you in three years. I have tried, tried my damnedest to—” He broke off, turned his mug in a circle, contemplating it.
Forget you.
She knew he had tried his damnedest to forget her. He didn’t need to say it for her to know his meaning. She had tried to do the same with her memories of him.
“Six years ago”—Lily went back to the beginning—“when AJ was charged with murder, when I thought he would go to prison, I prayed. I don’t know if there is such a thing as God, and if there is, whether he hears, but I begged him for AJ’s life. I said to this god I’m not even sure of that if he would please keep AJ safe, I would be a better person, a better wife and mother.
“And he was saved.” She raised her glance to Edward’s. “Because of you, your legal expertise, my prayer was answered. But I was never a good mother. Even before that happened, there were times—I was always afraid AJ would come to harm because of me—my—my lapses of attention. When AJ was two, we . . . Paul hired a nanny. She took over AJ’s care.”
“Why? Did something happen?”
“I—it was—” Lily broke off. She couldn’t talk about it, the first time she had bargained with her uncertain god for AJ’s life. She was already mortified.
“You were so young when he was born. Only twenty, right?”
She’d been twenty-one, but her youth was no excuse. She thought of the dozens of times she and Edward had met in the past. With few exceptions, their conversation had been inconsequential. They shared a love of books. They liked being outdoors. Where Lily loved riding a horse at full gallop, Edward loved skimming a sailboat over the water. He had a second home on Lake Buchanan, and a boat he’d named the Summer Wind after the Sinatra song.
He would teach her to sail.
She would teach him to ride.
In some fairy-tale place.
“You know I have a son I haven’t seen since he was twelve,” Edward said. “Charlie’s thirty-three now, and I don’t know where he lives.”
“Because of the gambling.”
“Yes.”
“Once you told me you were thinking of hiring a private investigator to locate him.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t seem to find the guts to make that happen. I’d have to face him, then. I’d have to explain why making a bet was more important than being his dad.”
Edward kept Lily’s gaze, and his love for his son and his pain at the loss of him was naked in his eyes. They were no longer dealing in fairy tales, she thought, but in the harsher edges of reality, the places in their lives where they felt they had failed. “AJ and I aren’t close. He doesn’t know me—the dreams I had, the life I planned.”
“Before Jesse, you mean.”
Edward knew the story. How Jesse had happened upon her on the highway outside Wyatt one summer day after she’d graduated high school, struggling to change a flat tire. He’d stopped and offered to do it for her. She’d been enthralled with his twentysomething bad-boy good looks, his hard, lithe body, the way he sat on his motorcycle, long hair curling over the collar of his leather jacket. He’d ridden a Harley like the one in the movie Easy Rider. Jesse could have passed for Peter Fonda.
He’d followed her home to the xL, somehow conned her dad into giving him a job. Jesse had wanted the job, but he had wanted Lily, too, the boss’s daughter. The power she’d had over him—over both Jesse and her dad—had thrilled her. She’d driven them both crazy for different reasons. She’d been glad in a perverse way when her dad caught her and Jesse smoking pot behind the barn, when he caught them half-naked up in the loft, making out.
It wasn’t long, maybe a week or ten days after she’d brought Jesse to the xL, that her dad booted him off the property, and when Jesse went, she’d gone with him. She thought she was such hot shit. She’d loved it when he’d showed her off to his biker buddies, holding her out to them as if she were a trophy, a notch on his belt. During the month she rode with him, if any other men had so much as sniffed around her, Jesse had challenged them. He’d beaten them down if they’d wanted to carry it that far. But he’d turned that temper on her, too, in the weeks they’d spent together, using his fists on her, punching her low, where no one would see the damage. During sex, he’d put his lips to her ear and call her cunt and whore. Her stomach heaved, remembering.
“AJ doesn’t know about Jesse, or that I was arrested,” Lily said now. “Paul forbade my talking about it. I thought it didn’t matter, that it was best to pretend it never happened.”
The waitress came, and left when both Lily and Edward declined refills.
“You think it was a mistake, not telling AJ.” Edward wasn’t asking.