Bed of Lies (29 page)

"Sure didn't look like that," Peter snapped.

"Until today. Or the last five or six days. It's never been like that between us, but things change, Peter. All the time. Sometimes they even change for the better."

He glared at her.

Fine.

"I came for you, and because I was angry at myself and ashamed for leaving you here all those years."

"I was fine," he claimed.

She ignored that and went right on. "I should have found a way to help you. To stay in touch with you."

"Why?" He snarled. "I didn't miss you."

"Well, I missed you."

Peter tried hard to hide it, but his face took on that hurt look once again. Julie figured she'd pushed it as far as she could today. She let him return to the sanctuary of his room. Thankfully, the music didn't come back on when she turned the electricity on. She ended up outside again, raking the leaves, needing to work hard and stay busy. She really didn't like being in the house.

She supposed she should ask Zach about the foreclosure process. She'd probably have to face her mother to find out about the criminal charges and if there was any money to keep them from losing the house.

She needed to ask Zach why he was here and how long he could stay. Try to figure out what had him so uneasy, and then... Lord, she had no idea what would happen then. Her head was still spinning from all that he'd said and the look he'd had in his eyes when he'd told her he wanted her, he needed her.

They were going to have some kind of relationship, it seemed, and she knew what she wanted from it.

Everything.

She wanted everything she was so sure she'd never have. With Zach.

* * *

Okay, so he hadn't said much of anything he really needed to say to Julie. He'd gotten distracted by how good it had been to see her, to touch her. But he would tell her. He'd pick his time and force it out. For the moment, he settled for facing his older sister instead.

Emma, the pro.

The shrink.

He closed his car door and stared up at her house, wondering why his sister had to go and do that with her life. It was proving damned inconvenient to him. Not that he would ever deny her one bit of happiness. But surely he could at least be mildly irritated with her at the moment.

He got out of his car, slammed the door shut and leaned against the right fender, stalling for a moment.

The house looked great. He was happy to think of his sister living here now and so joyous in the life she'd made for herself. In an odd little twist that still had people talking, Emma had taken one look at Sam's long-lost brother and not only figured out who Rye was but had somehow fallen in love with him and finally convinced him to marry her. What did it really matter if she was the adopted daughter of the brother Rye hadn't seen in thirty years? And quite a bit younger than him? Most everyone had learned to overlook those little details.

Zach didn't think either his sister nor her husband had regretted their decision for a single day. Sixteen years of marriage and three children later—with a fourth on the way—it was obvious that they belonged together.

Standing outside their house, with children's toys littering the lawn and the driveway, the sound of laughter drifting over from the backyard, Zach found himself wondering how they'd known they'd end up like this, still so obviously in love after all these years.

And he wondered what Emma had taken with her from those chaos-filled years with their other mother. Emma had to have scars. She had been almost twelve when they escaped for good.

Zach heard a shout. His nephew, Jamie, the four-year-old, came barreling around the corner, howling with laughter as he ran down the sidewalk. He was halfway there when he spotted Zach, then ran to him, stubby legs pumping wildly as he plowed through the flowers that edged the driveway.

He launched himself into Zach's arms, yelling something that sounded like, "Unka Dack."

"Close enough, short stuff." Zach grabbed him and wiped a bit of dirt from the boy's cheek. "Where's your mom?"

"Back dair." He pointed to the backyard.

"And probably looking for you," Zach said, heading that way. "I might as well haul you back to her."

The kid chattered the whole way, a string of gibberish about his new red truck, the cookies he'd had for a snack and his best friend, whose name might be Jeremy or Jimmy or even Jennifer. Zach couldn't tell. He just kept smiling and nodding and let the kid talk, happy that his sister had so many good things in her life. Hoping she could help him.

They ran into his niece Tricia, who was seven, heading toward the front yard as they were heading for the back.

"Looking for this?" Zach asked, pointing to the little boy.

"Uncle Zach!"

She threw herself into his arms just as he rounded the back corner of the house and spotted Emma. She was sitting on the ground under a giant oak tree, planting purple and yellow pansies. Her twelve-year-old, Dana, was lying in a hammock on the other side of the yard, talking on the phone. Soon he found himself mobbed by females, the girls first and then Emma.

She grabbed him and didn't let go for a long time, then talked the girls into taking their brother inside and attempting to get him down for his a nap. Emma took Zach by the hand and dragged him back to her tree, where a whole flat of bedding plants waited to be transplanted into the soil.

"You're putting 'em all in today?" he asked, as he sat down on the ground beside her.

"Yes, why?"

"Jamie might have taken out a few by the mailbox when he spotted me."

Emma shook her head. "He moves so fast he doesn't take time to even look where he's going. Last week, he ran into a tree and scraped the whole side of his face. He said he was chasing a butterfly and it turned faster than he could."

"Sounds reasonable." Zach glanced across the yard, like he needed to inventory the kids' toys and the landscaping, anything rather than look his sister in the eye. "How are you feeling?"

"Still a little queasy, and I swear, I sleep all the time, but I just can't seem to get enough rest."

"Cut back at work?"

She nodded and went back to work on her plants. "I've gone from three days a week to two. Thank goodness we just took on a new partner a few months ago. Otherwise, I don't know how I'd be able to make that work."

"Just kids, or grown-ups, too?" Zach asked, checking the distance between plants and clearing a small rock, then another, from the spot where she'd want the next purple flower to go.

"What?" Emma asked.

"The new person—does she just do kids? Or grownups, too?"

"Oh." She dug into the soil with her tiny shovel. "Jane Atwood. She's great. Part of a big practice in Philadelphia for twenty years. She has an aunt here who's getting on in years, and needed someone with her, and Jane was ready to escape the big city. She sees adults and children. Why?"

Zach tried to tip a tiny plant out of its plastic container, roots, dirt and all, not very successfully. "How do these work?"

"Turn it upside down and squeeze it a little. The whole thing should pop out in one piece."

"Oh." He managed, kind of. "She any good?"

"Jane? We wouldn't have brought her into the practice if we hadn't thought so. What are you really asking me, Zach?"

"You know what I'm asking you," he said, taking the tiny hand shovel from her and starting to dig in the dirt by his side, suddenly feeling antsy and ready to grumble. Anything but this. "Is that a shrink thing or something? To never answer a question, just ask another one?"

"I answered a lot of your questions, and you know it," she said, forgetting the plants altogether. "And you might not have noticed, but I've been really good. You've been in town for nearly twenty-four hours. It wasn't easy, but I've been waiting for you to come to me."

"You wouldn't have lasted another fifteen minutes," he said, more than happy to bat words around with her that had nothing to do with what was wrong. "That little boy wouldn't have been asleep for a minute before you were in the car, headed for Mom and Dad's house."

"I would not have," she insisted, then admitted, "Okay, I was going to wait until tonight, once the kids were asleep. I thought this would take more time than I'd have with Jamie napping. Wouldn't want to rush you, once I finally got you talking."

He frowned at her, practically mauling a flower as he tried to place it correctly in the hole he'd dug into the ground. Only problem was, the hole was about three times too big.

"I think I showed admirable restraint to this point. And don't kill my flowers. It's not their fault." She put her hand on his, trying to save the next bloom. "You have to let me help now, Zach."

He laughed then, emotions rising inside him, clogging his throat and making saying anything difficult.

"What?" she asked gently, her hand on his arm now.

"You," he said, dropping the flower and just sitting there with her. "Just saying it that way. That I had to let you help me. Not making me ask. I really wasn't looking forward to asking."

"We've been trying to help for months. You just weren't ready to let us."

"I know." He finally looked at her, saw the worry in her eyes. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

"So... " What were they talking about? Oh, yeah. Him and his little issues. "It didn't bother you when George got out of jail?"

She didn't balk at the abrupt leap in the conversation. She just sat there and looked at him, and finally said, "Of course it did."

"But it didn't do this to you?"

"Do what?"

He took a breath that wasn't at all steady. No way he could make it steady. "Make you feel like... like you were choking? Like you were coming apart at the seams, and all these things about the past you could have sworn you'd put behind you were suddenly right there? Right beneath the surface fighting to get out?"

"No. George didn't do that to me. Mark did, though—that guy I was seeing freshman year in college."

"Oh." Zach remembered. That guy had hit her. Left bruises on her. Broken into their parents' home to get her. Thank goodness Rye had been there to save her.

"That guy made you think of George?" Zach asked.

"Worse than that, he made me think about Mom."

She meant Annie Greene. She called Sam and Rachel by their first names, although she definitely considered them her mother and father, but she'd always referred to Annie Greene as Mom.

"Sorry." Zach suddenly felt guilty for escaping so much more of the past than Emma. "I didn't even think about that, Em. That guy must have brought back so many bad memories for you."

"Not just the memories," she said. "The feelings. They're the important part. I was so angry at Mom for the way we lived, for letting him hit her and hit me and scare us to death. I thought she must have been the weakest woman on earth and the stupidest. But at the same time, she was our mother, and I loved her, too."

That would be difficult—loving and still being so angry.

"I didn't think I'd ever understand her," Emma said. "Then there I was, living her life for just a little while and scared to death, just like she must have been."

"Oh." He saw what she was getting at, kind of. "I thought... You and that guy. It was just the one time that he hurt you, right?"

"No. There was another time. That's what made me come home from college in the first place. And the whole thing from start to finish only lasted a few days, which is nothing like what she lived through, but... Well, let's just say I had a whole new understanding of how scared she must have been."

"I'm sorry," he said, struck by how many times he'd said that lately, and to so many different people. It seemed totally inadequate in comparison with the pain suffered by so many people who were close to him. "I should have known—"

"Why?"

"Because you're my sister. I just didn't... I didn't think."

"I didn't want you to think about it. Or to remember it or have it screw up your life the way it is now."

"You knew?" he asked. "All this time, you knew what my little problem was all about?"

"I knew the memories and the feelings had to be inside you somewhere, and if they were ever going to come out, ending up face-to-face with George Greene seemed to be a likely time for it to happen."

He shook his head, baffled. "I didn't even know I had anything of those feelings left in me. I didn't see how they could possibly be this strong, this awful, when I remember so little about that time."

"But the impressions were so strong, and even things you don't consciously remember from your early years can still have an effect on you. Think about Jamie. He probably won't remember much from his life to this point. But do you honestly believe he could have lived with a violent drunk, scared and neglected, maybe beat up until he was four, and have it not affect him later, even if he had a perfectly wonderful home from now on?"

Zach pictured that laughing, happy, completely secure little boy ever being in a place like the one he and Emma had lived in. "I didn't think about it that way."