but not quite.
“Leave, and I’ll match whatever she’s paying you.”
“It’s not about the money, Mr. Blade. It’s about my professional reputation. I take pride in my work.”
“And what is your work, exactly? You’re a Christmas elf? You decorate the apartments of unsuspecting Scrooge-like individuals, thus intensifying their loathing of this time of year?” His sarcasm seemed to slide right off her.
“I’m part of Urban Genie. We’re an events and concierge company.”
“Decorating my apartment is an event?”
“Your grandmother is one of our clients and this request came through her. We can do pretty much anything that’s requested of us.”
He bit back the obvious comment. He told himself that he didn’t want to make cheap jokes at her expense, but the truth was he was trying hard not to think of her that way. “Anything, it seems, except leave when you’re asked to.”
“I’d leave if requested to do so by my client. You’re not my client.”
“Give me the name of your boss, and I’ll call and explain that I no longer need your services.”
“I am the boss. I run the business with two of my friends.”
“How do you know my grandmother?”
“I met Mitzy earlier in the year when she requested a birthday cake. She was one of our first clients. We got talking, and since then she’s used us a few times. When the weather is cold I walk her little dog, and sometimes we just talk.”
No one but his grandfather had ever called his grandmother Mitzy. To everyone else she was Mary, or Gran. Clearly this girl was more to his grandmother than the face of an efficient concierge service. “What do you talk about?”
“Everything. She’s an interesting woman.”
“She pays you to chat? You charge an old lady for company?”
“No. I chat because I like her.” She was patient. “She reminds me of my grandmother. She’s a little lonely, I think.”
Even though there was no accusation in her eyes or in her voice, he felt another stab of guilt.
“She calls you?”
“Occasionally. More often she uses our Urban Genie app.”
“You’re confusing her with someone else. My grandmother doesn’t own a cell phone. She has always refused to have one.” He thought of the number of arguments they’d had on that topic. He didn’t understand how she was allowed to worry about him, but he wasn’t allowed to worry about her.
“She didn’t refuse me. And she regularly uses our app.”
“She hates technology.”
“She hates the idea of it, but she was fine once we’d given her basic training. She’s very smart.”
“You trained her?” How did he not know this? He thought back to the last time he’d seen his grandmother. The summer had been busy with an international book tour. He’d spent less than two days at home in July and August. Since then he’d been busy trying to find a way to start his book.
They were excuses and he knew it.
He could have found the time. He could have made the time.
The truth was he found it hard to be with his grandmother. Her intentions were good, but whenever she tried to soothe his pain she simply made it worse. No one could heal the wound that festered inside him, not his grandmother, and not this woman with eyes the color of a summer sky and hair the color of buttermilk.
He held out his hand. “Do you have the app on your phone? Show me.” He took her phone from her and opened the app. “Your wish is our command?” He raised an eyebrow. “My wish is that you leave and tell no one you saw me. How do we make that happen?”
She snatched the phone from him. “We don’t. Here’s the deal, Mr. Blade. I don’t know why you’re not in Vermont, and I don’t need to know. That’s not my business. My business is doing the job your grandmother paid me to do. I will decorate your apartment, fill your freezer and then I will leave.”
He would have been impressed if he hadn’t been so exasperated.
Finally, after months of struggling, he was ready to write and he couldn’t because this woman refused to leave him alone.
“I could have you removed.”
“You could. But then I’d call your grandmother and tell her where you are. I’m sensing you don’t want me to do that, so I’m sure we can reach a compromise we can both live with.”
“You’re blackmailing me?” After a decade spent exploring the darker side of human nature nothing ever surprised him, but this did.
Her eyes were kind, her mouth lush and perfectly curved. On the outside she was gentle and sweet. Inside she was solid steel. The contrast might have intrigued him, but right now all it did was aggravate.
He was about to find a way of forcibly ejecting her when he noticed the volume of snow falling past the windows of his apartment.
The sight chilled him.
He walked to the window in silence and stared at the world outside, transformed and remodeled by layer upon layer of snow. The thick curtain of flakes veiled his view of Central Park.
Memories rose in dark, menacing clouds, their presence blackening everything. He was yanked back in time to a night exactly like this one.
The same deceptively harmless swirl of snow had proved as deadly a killer as any he’d written into his stories. The unexpected twist had made it all the more brutal.
Time was supposed to heal, but he knew he hadn’t healed. He didn’t know how to heal. His emotions were as raw and real as they’d been three years earlier. All he could do was cling on and survive. Get up, get dressed, get through another day. He wouldn’t have thought there was anything that could make it harder, but one thing did and that was the pressure he felt from other people to “move on.” The knowledge that he’d been unable to meet their expectations when it came to recovery added to his sense of failure.
He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, blocking out the images and the memory of the last time he’d seen Sallyanne alive. He wanted to be able to go back and think about the good times, but so far that hadn’t happened. Like a misbehaving computer, his mind had crashed and frozen on that one single moment he would have chosen to forget.
“I love snow, don’t you? It’s like being wrapped in a great big hug.” Her soft, dreamy voice cut through the nightmare playing out in his head and he opened his eyes, knowing that whatever his grandmother might have shared with this woman over cake and tea, she hadn’t shared all the details of his wife’s death.
Her innocent, optimistic comment grated on him, like sandpaper rubbed over raw skin.
“I
