Chapter 13
The morning after she’d been detained by the police, Halley woke up feeling as
though she had been beaten up. Every inch of her body ached, though they hadn’t laid a
hand on her or been rough with her. She looked like what she was. A respectable,
expensively dressed woman, middle-aged by technical standards, no matter how young
she looked. And even the police had guessed that the matter would be cleared up
quickly. If the president hadn’t been attacked and almost killed, no one would have
cared about the absence of Halley’s passport. But in light of a terrorist attack, they
couldn’t overlook a single detail of protocol. They had been careful about how they
handled her, suspecting that she could be the wife of someone important, and that all
hell would break loose when her husband found out she had gotten locked up by the
French police. Those things could easily get out of hand and had before, so they handled
her with kid gloves, but she didn’t feel like it the next day. They had still detained her
and briefly put her in a cell.
Her little black dinner dress was badly wrinkled when she woke up still wearing it.
She took it off and took a bath, and felt slightly better. She was starting to recognize the
danger signs that had plagued her over the years at times of great stress. It had only
happened a few times when the twins were young, and it had all come back in a rush
when Robert died. She had spent six months with a therapist, every day when she
needed to. His assessment was that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder, and when they went over the major traumas in her childhood, it didn’t surprise
Halley or the therapist. Halley always knew what it was and where it came from. She
knew she was one of the lucky survivors, but the scars of her trauma were deep.
After Robert died, she had had nightmares for months, dreaming that her mother was
coming after her, to kill her. Halley was drowning in the dreams, and Robert couldn’t
save her. And then she would find Robert dead on the beach or in a forest, and her
mother would appear and come after her, and would kill her too. The dreams were easy
to decipher, and harder to get rid of.
“You’ve lost your savior and protector, and you’re afraid your mother will come
back and you’ll be helpless again, and this time she’ll kill you. Robert dying is the loss
of your happiness, you think forever, and in your dream, you’re a helpless child again,”
Dr. Thacker had explained. Halley had had several acute anxiety attacks before she
asked her doctor for the name of a therapist. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life
having panic attacks and nightmares. She’d been happy for a long time, and even
without Robert, she wanted to get back there. It had taken longer than she wanted, but a
year after Robert died, she felt like herself again. She missed him, but she wasn’t
plagued by the ghosts of the past. The therapist had helped her finally put them to rest
and bury them. Now they were back, having risen from the grave again. She wanted to
deal with them quickly this time before they made themselves at home.
She hadn’t particularly liked Dr. Thacker but he specialized in trauma, and was
good at what he did. He had carefully led Halley through a minefield of pain, to all the
most agonizing memories in her life that she had buried for decades. She’d had therapy
before, but the recent time was the most effective. She wanted the ghosts out of her life
forever now, even though she hadn’t forgiven them and knew that she probably never
would. The therapist didn’t ask her to. He said that Halley didn’t need to forgive them,
but she had to be willing to leave them, forever this time, and give up the dream of
winning their approval or their love. Therein lay the key.
They had gone through all her most painful experiences, and the worst forms of
abuse, the beatings, the injuries, the stitches, the broken bones, and worse, the broken
heart of a child that her mother didn’t love, and the realization of it. Halley had had to
almost physically wrench herself away from the idea that her mother would emerge
from the grave and finally love her.
“Sabine was incapable of it,” Dr. Thacker had said matter-of-factly. He wasn’t
gentle with Halley, but he wasn’t cruel either. He reminded her again that she was no
longer five years old, or three, or six, and that her mother, the most dangerous person in
her life, hadn’t killed her, probably because she didn’t dare, not wanting to face the
consequences, but would have liked to. That had always been a hard idea for Halley to
stomach, but she knew it was the truth. Being hated by her mother was one of the hardest
hurdles she had to clear. Her mother had been so excessively narcissistic that there was
no way for her to love a child. Halley represented the ultimate narcissistic injury to her
mother, even more so because she was beautiful as a little girl, and her mother saw her
only as competition, not as her own flesh and blood. Her mother had been the evil queen
in Sleeping Beauty, the villain of every story Halley had ever read, and of many of her
own books. Sabine had a textbook pathology, and there was no way Halley could
conquer or escape it. It was just bad luck that she was her mother. That was an accident
of nature, or of Fate, but the deck had been stacked against Halley from the beginning
and she knew it. And her father was weak, immoral, and almost as narcissistic as her
mother. He simply ignored Halley most of the time and hoped she’d disappear, which
she had obligingly done in closets and under stairs. Until he perceived her as sexual,
and then would have loaned her to his friends for their amusement, if she had let him,
which amazingly she hadn’t. And he had decided to try her out for himself one drunken
afternoon, with no thought of what it would have done to her, except that she hadn’t
allowed him to do that either. He was her enemy from then on, just as her mother had
been. They were people she could never trust for an instant.
The only remarkable part of the story, in the therapist’s eyes, was that Halley had the
courage and the wisdom at a tender age to protect herself from the ultimate blow, from
her father, which might have been the final one that pushed her over the edge. She might
not have recovered if he had raped her or seduced her. Her own powerful survival
instincts had saved her by not letting him do it. Instead, she had fought with all the wiles
available to a child her age to escape both her father and his friends, who had touched
her and tried to abuse her, but she had fled and never let them rape her. They had never
touched her soul. Dr. Thacker pointed out that some grown women wouldn’t have been
as brave or as resourceful. But somehow, Halley had instinctively known that if she let
them, she would never have been whole again or able to lead a normal life.
“Your preventing them is probably why you were able to love Robert so fully, and
have a healthy sex life with him.” It had been one of the most fulfilling parts of their
relationship, which might not have been the case otherwise. It was the only part of her
psyche and her body that her parents hadn’t succeeded in battering. It was hard to
understand people like them, and what motivated them. Many sociopaths actually did
succeed in killing their children, and Halley had no idea why they hadn’t. They had
come close at times, especially her mother, while her father’s crimes against her were
more subtle. She blamed her mother more, because the injuries she inflicted were so
obvious, and involved tissue damage. Those inflicted by her father were frightening in a
different way. But she had been old enough to outsmart him and his friends and protect
herself, like a child in a war zone fleeing the enemy. From her mother’s abuse at the age
Halley was, there had been no hope of escape, and there had been no one to protect her
or save her. Only Robert, many years too late. She simply had to endure the abuse. Then
Robert left too, and could no longer protect her from the ghosts that returned after his
death, once she was helpless and alone again.
Halley could feel the ghosts hovering now, ready to reenter her life and try to crush
her again, or kill her this time. Tomás Maduro had opened the door to them when he
threatened her and brought the memories back again. The man who had stolen her bag
had let them in. The trauma of the sense of violation she had, and the helplessness, had
awakened her childhood abuse and trauma again. Not wanting to let the ghosts settle in,
she looked for her therapist’s number in the New York directory, and found him. She
hadn’t spoken to him in two years. Her life had been peaceful since then.
Halley had been reading the morning paper, and saw that two more of the French
president’s would-be assassins had been found, and killed in a deadly gun battle with
the police. The remaining two suspects were on the run, still at large. Halley found
herself crying as she read the story and didn’t know why. She was crying for the
president, the dead men, their mothers, and all the children in the world who had
suffered as she had and she didn’t know. And in the end, she was crying for herself, and
the child she had been who had been so mercilessly beaten and abused, so frightened
every moment of her life for six years, and then neglected and abused in other ways for
another eight years until her father died, and after that, she was alone.
She was crying for all the loveless years, until her twins were old enough to love
her, and later Robert. Locke had been in her life too briefly and inconsistently to give
her comfort. She had lived for twenty-four years without a gentle touch or a kind word.
It killed some people and might have killed her. But by some miracle, it hadn’t. She
didn’t know why it hadn’t killed her body or her soul. She didn’t think she was stronger
than anyone else, or braver, or more clever. Some part of her simply refused to be
broken, like some people in concentration camps. Some died and others didn’t. There
had been studies comparing the survivors of severe child abuse to the survivors of
concentration camps, and there were notable similarities, and comparable aftereffects,
some of which Halley had experienced in her youth, and recognized the signs of now. It
was familiar to her.
She had never let her children know the horror of it. It was too ugly for them to
know.
Dr. Julian Thacker was a small wizened older man, in his sixties when Halley met
him. At first she thought him cold, but Halley realized he wasn’t one day when she saw
that he had tears running down his face as she told of a particularly horrific episode
with her mother that had required fourteen stitches in her arm. For Halley it was the
shedding of memories that had lain dormant for years, the way it was for the
concentration camp survivors coming back from the camps and chronicling what the
Germans had done. It was digging the bullets and shrapnel out of her soul, after a war,
and not letting it fester. The brutally painful sessions had freed her in the end, more than
ever, but she also knew that she was the survivor of a special kind of war, and some
days, due to weather, or something someone did or said, the scars would ache for a
moment, and then settle down again.
When she finished the year of therapy, they were scars, no longer wounds. The
wounds had healed. And an important part of healing was not seeing herself as ugly
because of them, but as a beautiful person who had been injured, as if a mine explosion,
or an erupting volcano, or an avalanche had buried her through no fault of her own. Fate
had caused her to be born in an enemy camp. It wasn’t something that she had caused or
deserved. All her life until then she had tried to figure out what she’d done to provoke
it. She hadn’t. She had done nothing to provoke it, nor to deserve it, and once she fully
understood that, for the most part she was healed of the aftereffects. And no one who
truly loved her would ever find her ugly because of it, no matter how many stitches she
had had or how many wounds had been inflicted on her. She had never tested out that
theory, and had never told her daughters what she had experienced. She didn’t want
them to know. She thought they were too young and it was too gruesome to tell. She had
told Robert all of it, and he had only loved her more. And she had mentioned it casually
to Bart. She didn’t know yet if she would tell him or not. She didn’t know if he would
stay in her life long enough to really love her. It was too soon to say.
Julian Thacker was a traditional psychiatrist who had a few unorthodox theories of
his own, but his style of confrontational therapy had worked for Halley. She had faced
all the painful events in her life squarely to rid her of the post-traumatic stress
symptoms.
She waited until it was eight A.M. in New York, which was his call hour. He didn’t
seem surprised to hear from Halley, as though they’d spoken the day before, when it had
been two years. Halley knew she could say anything to him. Nothing shocked him. He
had helped her to be proud of being a survivor, not ashamed.
“Where are you?” Dr. Thacker asked.
“I’m in Paris,” Halley said, and there was obviously more to say, or she wouldn’t
be calling.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes, sort of. I came alone, but I met someone here.”
“Is there another man in your life at the moment?”
“No. I haven’t dated anyone since Robert. I’m just starting now. The nightmares are
back,” Halley said with a sigh.
“Do you think it’s because of the new man? Are they the same nightmares as
before?” Dr. Thacker went straight to the heart of the matter. He always did. And she
was scrupulously honest with him, and in her life. The honesty was an important part of
the healing.
“It’s not him,” Halley said quickly. “And the nightmares are similar. My mother tries
to kill me, and succeeds in the end.”
“And your father?”
“I think he’s gone.”
“Did something happen to revive the trauma?”
“Something stupid,” Halley said. “My purse was stolen the day after I got here. It’s
an expensive bag I loved, but so what? It’s just a bag. It got stolen with everything in it,
money, passport, keys, credit cards, personal stuff. The thief has been calling me
wanting to sell me the bag for an extortionate amount, trying to blackmail me, and he
says he’s going to kill me. He keeps saying he controls me, and he will kill me if I don’t
do what he says. I feel helpless again.”
“Ah, so your mother’s back,” the therapist said, and Halley was startled. She hadn’t
made the association. “Do you believe him, that he’ll kill you?”
Halley thought for a minute. “Yes. I guess I do. I know I don’t deserve it, but I think
he might try.”
“You’re not five anymore, Halley. Have you told the police?”
“Yes, they’ve been terrific. They know who he is. They’re trying to find him, and the
bag. And the man I met here has been wonderful too.”
“So you’re not fighting the forces of evil alone this time. You couldn’t stop Robert’s
death. But the police can stop the thief.”
“He keeps calling me and threatening me,” Halley said in a frightened voice. The
fear made her feel weak and defenseless, as much as the threats.
“My guess is that they’ll protect you, and ultimately they’ll catch him. Your mother
can’t come back. She’s been dead for forty-two years. Dead people don’t come back.
She’s not a ghost. She was a very sick, disturbed woman who died, who didn’t love
you, and it was never your fault.” It felt good to be reminded of it. “The thief is
powerless. You don’t have to give him any power. He’s not your mother.”
“He makes me feel the way she used to. Helpless.”
“There is nothing helpless about you. You’re a strong woman. That’s your old PTSD
talking. It’s a flare-up, like a broken arm or a knee that aches before it rains. It’s raining
in your world right now. I doubt that the police will let him hurt you. And you can
protect yourself. Are you being careful?”
“I am.”
“Remember, he’s not a ghost and he’s not Sabine. The threat he poses is real, but
there are people in your world to protect you now.” Suddenly Halley wondered if she
had made the association because her mother was French. She mentioned it to the doctor
who thought it was an interesting detail.
“It’s possible. I think it’s a flare-up. I’m not dismissing it. Abuse will always
remind you of her, like a familiar song, and stealing your bag is a major violation, or it
feels that way, even to people who’ve never been abused. What he did is very personal
and shocking for anyone, not just you.”
“I feel stupid being so upset about it,” Halley admitted.
“A), it would upset anyone, b), the bag is incredibly valuable, which is also
upsetting, it’s a real loss, and c), the thief has been stalking you and threatening to kill
you. I don’t think ‘stupid’ applies here, not even remotely.” Halley smiled at what Dr.
Thacker said and felt better. “Feel free to call me whenever you need to, Halley,” he
said, more warmly than usual. It had been a good session. “And we can get together if
you like when you get back. I hope you’ll feel better by then. Try to enjoy your stay in
the meantime. Try not to obsess about the threats. And realize that he’s real and not a
ghost from your past.”
They signed off then, and Halley sat thinking about what the doctor had said. It
always helped to talk to him, to clear things in her head. She was still mulling it over
when Major Leopold called her, to apologize again for her being detained the night
before, and tell her that he and the agent from the FBI were meeting later that afternoon
and he’d like her to join them. She agreed immediately and called Bart to tell him about
it.
“Do you want to come?” she asked him.
“I’d like to very much,” he said. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all, I’d like you to.”
“How do you feel today?”
“Kind of beaten up,” she said. “I just called my old shrink in New York. I feel better
now. He’s good at helping me clear out the cobwebs and the fog in my head sometimes.
I get confused about what’s real, and what’s the echo of the past. He gave me
permission to be officially upset about this.” She smiled. “I thought maybe I was
overreacting.” She didn’t tell Bart about the nightmares, or the associations they had for
her. She had always kept that to herself, except with Robert. Bart was too new in her
life to share such heavy stuff with. The bag theft was heavy enough, and the stalker. And
he’d been great about that. She didn’t want to overload him with her past. He already
knew enough.
The meeting was set for that afternoon.
“I’m meeting Ryan at his gym. My club in New York has a reciprocal arrangement
with a club here. I’ll meet you at the police office,” Bart said, and after they hung up,
she got up from the kitchen table and went upstairs to dress, thinking about him. She felt
lucky to have met him. He was a real person and a kind man, and she already respected
him.
—
Bart was already at Major Leopold’s office when she arrived. The major was
looking very official, and there was a tall, thin, serious-looking, youngish man in a dark
gray suit. He looked American, with short dark hair, and he introduced himself as
Special Agent Bernard Dexter, of the FBI. They chatted for a few minutes and then the
major got down to business, with everyone present.
“First, I want to mention your guardian. He’s a bit of an unpleasant character, but I
don’t think you have anything to fear from him. He served time in prison for six months
ten years ago, for bank fraud, bad checks, but he’s had no problems with the law since.
It’s not a high recommendation for him, and I don’t know if his employers are aware of
it or if they care. Only slightly more interesting is that he is a member of the Communist
Party, and apparently takes it very seriously. He goes to party meetings regularly, and
he’s been to Russia, but I don’t think he’s a spy or anything dangerous. He apparently
has a passionate hatred for the rich, but his employers are extremely wealthy, so he
probably dislikes them as much as he does you. He has no girlfriend, and he sounds like
a bitter, unhappy person, from what people say about him. One of my operatives
checked him out. He sounds disagreeable but harmless. I don’t think he’s a real concern,
just an annoyance.” It was a relief to hear it.
“The same is not true of Tomás Maduro, the man who stole your bag. He’s a
professional thief who caught our attention several years ago. But now we’ve been told
that he belongs to a very active militant anarchist cell. We’re waiting for more
information on him from Interpol. He had trouble with the law in Colombia, but most of
the time he has stayed below the radar, and he has several aliases. His main source of
income is from the high-end goods he steals and resells. I think he got too lucky this
time, and is finding that your very expensive one-of-a-kind bag is not so easy to sell. If
he sells it in a reputable place, he needs a bill of purchase. If he sells it through the
underground, he won’t get anywhere near what it’s worth. They can’t pay him that kind
of money, because they can’t sell it for what it’s worth. Possibly in Asia to some avid
collector. At the moment, you are his best potential customer, and we think he’s going to
try to sell it back to you, just as he said to you, if you are attached enough to the bag to
want it back for a high price. As you know, from what Hermès told us, it could be worth
as much as a hundred thousand euros today. At a high-end auction, it might bring double
that, if two collectors battle for it. I think he’ll try to sell it to you for somewhere
between fifty and a hundred thousand. That’s big money for him.
“He has a wife and three teenage kids in Colombia, and a mistress here with two
young children of his. We know he lives in the suburbs outside Paris in the ‘ninetythree’ district.
We haven’t narrowed it down yet, but we’re very close. We think you’ll
hear from him again soon. He doesn’t want you leaving when you get your new passport
and slipping through his fingers. He’s never been violent before that we know of. He’s
been very typical of that kind of thief. Steal, sell through his usual resources, steal
again. He’s said to live well, and he’s well dressed. He has a visa for France, which
we could revoke and send him back to Colombia when we catch him, or we could keep
him here. He may cooperate with us, which would be simpler. His brother is a drug
dealer who goes between here and Colombia, and a very dangerous man. He served
time in prison in Venezuela and Argentina. Our man has been involved in anarchist
demonstrations and riots, we’ve learned. Mostly for what he can steal when they break
into and loot the high-end luxury stores. He’s a real pro, and he only steals important
brands.
“I think we need to wait for him now, until he contacts you again, and see what he
says. I think he’ll suggest a meeting and a price.”
“And then what?” Halley asked.
“It depends what he says, and how badly you want your bag back. Of course, we
would go to any rendezvous and intercept him. And if we get information on him before
that, we’ll arrest him, and hopefully he’ll still have the bag, unless someone offers him a
lot of money first. But I think he’ll assume you’re his best client, thinking it has
sentimental or personal value for you. For now, we wait and see what he does.”
“I’ll see what we can dig up on him too,” Bern Dexter said. He looked like he
approved of everything the major and his department were doing, and what they had
found out. They had a wealth of information about Maduro.
The meeting broke up after that, and Bart took Halley home. He was having dinner
with his son and daughter-in-law that night, at a restaurant with their friends. He
enjoyed joining them, and Halley was going to work on her book some more and have a
quiet night at home.
He dropped her off with a quick kiss, promising to call her later and went back to
Ryan’s apartment.
—
Peter was bringing Savannah and Sophia to visit Olivia at her studio that afternoon.
They were spending a week with their father after he got back from St. Bart’s. He’d
been busy with them, and hadn’t seen Olivia since they got back. She couldn’t wait for
him to be free again. He had only suggested the meeting with the girls the night before.
Sophia had had a cold for two days and was out of sorts. Savannah had had sleepovers
with friends, and he hadn’t wanted to overwhelm Olivia with additional kids. The stars
had lined up perfectly for their meeting that day. She was nervous about it, and had
bought pastries and cookies for them, and she was going to serve them pink lemonade.
Peter had briefed Olivia about the girls’ preferences and warned her that Sophia
was allergic to nuts, so Olivia was careful about what she bought. Sophia was four and
Savannah was six. She was missing her front teeth and had red hair, and Sophia had
dark hair and eyes like her father. Olivia watched them get out of his SUV in front of her
house. They were both in booster seats in the back, and were laughing and talking when
they got out. Peter held their hands as they walked through the garden to the kitchen.
Olivia was standing in the doorway, smiling when they walked in. She devoured Peter
with her eyes, she had missed him, and he kissed her chastely, but with a hand on her
bottom, which his daughters didn’t see. She was wearing paint-splattered jeans with a
pink sweater and pink ballet flats, with her blond hair in a braid down her back. He
introduced the girls, and they eyed the cupcakes and cookies and miniature eclairs on a
big plate on the kitchen table, and the two pink balloons she had tied to each chair to
make it look more festive.
“Is it your birthday?” Savannah asked her.
“No, is it yours?” Olivia asked her, and Savannah shook her head solemnly. “Is it
Sophia’s?” Sophia laughed and squealed “Noooo!” “Then we’ll just have to have a
regular old every day party. How about that?” Both girls giggled.
“Why do you have paint on your pants?” Savannah asked her, looking her over
carefully.
“Because I paint paintings. Do you want to see them?” She had nothing else of
interest to show them. She didn’t have dolls or toys or children of her own for them to
play with, or even a dog, which put her in the category of boring. She led them into the
studio, and they stared at the paintings, puzzled.
“There are no people, just shapes,” Sophia said. “That one is a red circle, and that
one’s a blue square,” she identified them.
“And over here there are four orange triangles with a big purple splatter,” Olivia
said, showing where some of the purple paint had landed on her pants. “I got some on
my shoe that day too.” The girls laughed.
“Our mom gets mad if we get paint on our clothes.”
“Mine used to too. Now all my clothes have paint on them, so it doesn’t matter.” She
smiled at Peter, and he melted. She was being so sweet to his girls, and he knew she’d
been nervous about it. She called him a dozen times to ask for advice before they came.
“Can we try?” Sophia asked, eyeing some red paint and a brush with a big smile.
Olivia glanced at Peter and he shrugged.
“Sure, why not?”
“Mom will get mad if we come home all covered with paint,” Savannah warned.
“Okay, then we’ll be careful,” Olivia said, pulling two garbage bags out of a box.
She cut a hole at the top and two holes for their arms, and slipped them over their heads
to cover their pink jeans and sweaters so only their pink sneakers showed. She told
them to take their shoes off, and a minute later they were standing barefoot in front of an
easel, looking like elves in garbage bags. She set two small canvases down on the
easel, side by side, gave them each three colors of paint and some brushes, and told
them to paint whatever they wanted. They squealed with delight, and started painting
right away. Sophia swished the brushes across the canvas, and Savannah was carefully
trying to paint a tree and a dog, and Olivia helped her, standing right behind her. She
glanced over at Peter, who was enjoying the scene and took a video of them.
They painted for almost an hour and then they went back to the kitchen table and had
the cupcakes and cookies and pink lemonade. They made a bigger mess with the
cupcakes than the paint and had cake all over their faces. When they finished, she
washed their hands at the sink and took the garbage bags off, and they looked as pristine
as when they arrived.
Olivia had them sign their paintings, and she had used acrylic paints so they were
dry by the time the girls left. They took their paintings with them and the cupcakes and
cookies and the balloons.
Olivia helped them into the car and Savannah looked at her with a toothless smile.
“Can we come back and paint with you again?”
“Of course!” Peter had told them that Olivia was their new aunt Valerie’s identical
twin sister, which they found fascinating. They waved as they drove away, and Peter
gave her a longing look and thanked her profusely before he left. They had a date the
following night and were starving for each other. They had talked every night and texted
all day. He took his paternal duties seriously, and had spent a good week with his girls,
but he had missed Olivia fiercely.
He called her when they got home to thank her again.
“That was amazing. You said you weren’t good with kids.”
“As long as they like to paint, that I can do. They’re so sweet, and so polite.”
“They liked you too. They think it’s funny that you and Val are identical, and they
said you’re more fun, and I agree, and I’m definitely more fun than Seth,” he teased. “I
can’t wait till tomorrow,” he whispered. “I love having them here, but I missed you all
week.” He was very circumspect with his girls around. She was the first of his dates
they had ever met. And it had gone perfectly. Olivia couldn’t remember the last time she
was as nervous, but it had definitely been a hit, with the painting and the garbage bags
and the cupcakes.
She smiled as she put things away and loaded the plates in the dishwasher. She
couldn’t see herself with children yet, and not for many years, but doing things with
Peter and his might be fun. It had all gone better than she’d expected.
Valerie called her later to check. “How did it go with Peter’s kids?” she asked her
casually. She’d been wondering all afternoon, but didn’t want to call until after they left.
“Really well. They painted and we had a cupcake party with balloons and
lemonade,” Olivia said proudly.
“Wow, that’s new for you.” Valerie was impressed. “Maybe you don’t hate kids as
much as you think.”
“Yes, I do,” Olivia said with a grin, “but Peter’s are really cute. They invited me for
a sleepover at their mom’s house. I’ll bet she’d be thrilled.” They both laughed.
“So do you have a boyfriend?” Valerie asked her, desperate to know.
“Wait a minute, I haven’t even seen him since the boat. We each have a life, you
know.”
“His is all smoke and mirrors with a lot of girls he doesn’t care about, and you
don’t even see who’s in the room unless it’s on an easel. He’s a good guy, Ollie.”
“Yes, he is.” Olivia sat down at the kitchen table with a sigh, and picked up a little
pink sock someone had forgotten. It looked like Sophia’s. It was tiny, and Olivia held it,
wondering where her life was going. She didn’t want to be a soccer mom when she
grew up, or live in the suburbs, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted kids of her own. But a
guy with two very sweet little girls might actually work. She was willing to check it out,
keep an open mind, see how it felt. And if it didn’t work out, she was going to run like
hell, just as she always did.
—
Savannah and Sophia asked for her when Peter tucked them in that night. They
shared a room at his house, and their paintings were propped up on the dresser.
“Can we go back and visit Olivia again?” Savannah asked him.
“I think that can be arranged,” he said noncommittally.
“I want to do a BIG painting next time,” Sophia said, stretching her arms wide.
“Me too,” Savannah added. “I love her,” she announced to the room at large.
“So do I,” Sophia said with a grin.
Peter was dying to say he loved her too, but he couldn’t. It was too soon to share it
with the kids, and even too soon to know, as Olivia said too. But that ship had already
set sail, and it was picking up speed.
