don’t want to hear that negative attitude,” her mother warned. “You’ll have to give up this whim of running a bookstore, of course. Far too much exposure. The same goes with library work. I can’t fathom why you ever wanted to do anything so dusty and fusty in the first place, but never mind. Let it go, and move on, honey!”
“But I’m not fit for anything else,” Liv protested. “All my training and education is in literature and library science.”
“You can do what I’ve been trying to persuade you to do since you were in college,” her mother announced triumphantly. “You can go into the advertising department of ECE! Any location you like, darling. Seattle, Olympia, San Francisco, Portland, Spokane. Location is virtual these days. You could work from home, with this new video conferencing technology. You’re so creative and imaginative, Livvy. You were wasted as a librarian, or a shopkeeper, for God’s sake. In fact, this whole thing might just end up being a blessing in disguise.”
Hah. Liv gritted her teeth. “I wouldn’t be any good at—”
“Nonsense. You’d be brilliant. And the best thing about it is that anywhere you worked, you’d be guarded by ECE corporate security! Imagine what a load off our minds, honey! Knowing that every day, you’re as safe as if you’re locked in a bank vault!”
Liv winced. “I’d go bonkers if I worked for ECE.”
“Stop doubting yourself, Livvy! We’ve always believed in you!”
Believed in who? Whoever this person was that Amelia Endicott so ardently believed in was light years away from the daughter she actually had. But there was no point in trying to make her understand.
“We’ll find a high security condo, wherever you decide to settle,” her mother went on. “You’ll have to give up all that hiking and running, but you can work out indoors. There’s always grocery delivery…”
Her mother’s babble faded into a faraway hum in Liv’s ears, as if she were alone beneath a glass bell. She thought of her mother’s collection of antique dolls in the parlor of her Seattle town house. Each stood alone, stiffly poised, a perfect ceramic smile on each painted face.
Pretty. Content with their lot. Happy to please. Compliant.
It was so painful, disappointing her mother for the umpteenth time. Forever rowing against such a powerful current wore her out, but this current was pulling her towards a deadly waterfall.
She thought of the life in store for her. No more wandering on hiking trails, staring at the mountains. No more walking on fog-bound beaches, watching the surf wash away the tracks of the seagulls. No more cuddling at night in her armchair in the ramshackle house in the pines, reading fantasy and sci-fi and romance novels. No more morning jogs, watching the sunrise. No more poring over book catalogs as she decided what to stock. No more ripping opening boxes of shiny books, leafing through crisp pages, making notes of what to read later. No more reading to starry-eyed little kids at Story Hour.
Nope. She’d be a lonesome rat in a cage in an antiseptic condo. Running on a treadmill in a basement room. Crammed into hose, heels, and a power suit. Ferried back and forth in a car service to a job that bored her silly. Locked in a bank vault. She shuddered with inner cold.
“…have the courtesy to concentrate on what I’m saying, Livvy! Didn’t you hear me at all?”
“Sorry,” she murmured. “I’m kind of wiped out.”
“Concentrate,” her mother snapped. “Your father and I have decided that you and Blair should announce your engagement.”
That snapped her right to attention. She stared at them wildly. “What engagement? What on earth are you talking about?”
“I hate to rush you, Liv.” Blair’s voice was earnest. “I know you want to wait until you’re sure, and I respect that. But we don’t have to get married right away. It’s just theater.” He grabbed her hand and dropped a gallant kiss on the back of it. “For now,” he added coyly.
“You have to move fast, now that McCloud is showing his hand,” her mother said. “We’ll work out the details later.”
She blinked “What hand? What does Sean have to do with this?”
Blair and her mother exchanged glances. “You mean the possibility hasn’t even crossed your mind?” Her mother’s voice was pitying. “That we’ve identified your stalker? Liv. Honey. Wake up.”
Liv was so startled, she let out a burst of laughter, which turned quickly into a phlegmy coughing fit. “You think that Sean is the stalker?” she gasped out finally. “But that’s totally ridiculous!”
Blair’s face hardened into that pompous, judgmental mask that had always stopped her short whenever she’d been in danger of sliding down the slippery slope into being his fiancée. “There are precedents,” he said stiffly. “His father was severely mentally ill. He’s trained in the use of explosives. He’s worked as a mercenary. His twin committed suicide. He’s unstable. I went to school with him, Liv. I know what he’s capable of. He set off a bomb in the teachers’ bathroom in the sixth grade. He had no concept of civilized behavior. He was constantly fighting, constantly mouthing off. The teachers were desperate.”
“Uh, Blair? Small detail. He was twelve.” She couldn’t keep the irony out of her voice, even though she knew she would pay for it.
Right on cue, her mother let out a distressed huffing sound. “Here we go again. Defending him again, just like old times. You never learn.”
“Reality check, people,” Liv announced, looking around at each of them in turn. “Sean McCloud saved my life today. Yours, too, Blair.”
Her father leaned over, groaning, and clutched his chest. Amelia leaped to his side in an instant, making anxious, solicitous sounds.
Liv had seen the melodrama before, so she turned back to Blair. “I cannot believe that Sean would ever do that to me.”
“Of course not,” Blair said. “You think the best of people. That’s very well and good, in normal life, but this is not normal life. Sean McCloud is strange. His family is strange. What’s happening to you is strange. Don’t you feel how the strangeness matches up, like a puzzle?”
Nope. Sure didn’t. She shook her head. “I don’t get your reasoning, Blair. Why did he stop us from getting into the car?”
“Because he wanted to impress you. He wanted the glory of saving you. He wanted you to be grateful to him. He staged the whole thing to make you feel vulnerable. Don’t you see? It’s so obvious.”
There was no point in telling the truth to Blair when he had that look on his face. Sean McCloud did not have to throw himself in front of a bomb to impress her. All he had to do was crook his finger and smile.
Barely that. He could just be his own charismatic self. Watch the women drop like flies. Herself being the first to hit the pavement.
Whoever T-Rex was, he had an rotting dead spot inside him. In her recent crash course on arsonists, assassins, serial killers and rapists, she’d learned that they were usually loners, failures. Men with no interpersonal skills, no talent at relating with women.
Sean McCloud had
