your dad.”
Those three words were a shot to the gut. She was one of the few people outside of his brothers and sister and mother who knew what growing up in his house had been like. She’d compared him to the slob who’d made his family a bunch of victims. “You throw him in my face the first time you get mad at me?”
“Your father hurt you because he drank, Owen. He drank like you do. You told me yourself, he couldn’t stop.”
“Maybe he had his reasons.” He closed his eyes for the briefest second. “I’m not my father.”
“You don’t want to be. I believe that.” She came to him, taking his face between her hands with patience and sadness that was more painful than accusations.
She was saying goodbye. He knew it even as her touch eased the pain in his head.
“I just wanted to see you tonight.” He tried to put his arms around her, but she slipped beyond his reach. Over her shoulder, he spied the silver tray that held vodka and scotch and whiskey so expensive a guy from Bliss, Tennessee, had never tasted its like before she’d first offered it.
His mouth watered. He wanted it. He couldn’t help it. The thirst was a furnace inside him, a fire that had to burn. Fires burned.
Drinkers drank.
“You’ve seen me.” She walked away from him, her mouth tight, her eyes wounded. Pale blond hair fell over her face. “Now you can go back to the center,” she said. “I’ll drive you. Let me change.”
“I’m not going back. I tried because I care about you, and you wanted it, but I don’t want it.”
“What if I can’t be with you if you drink?”
He moved in front of her, jostling a small parquet table he’d given her as a thank-you for his first show at her family’s gallery. “What are you talking about?” He tried again to decipher her expression. “Why are you looking at me as if I’ve cheated on you?”
“Because that’s how I feel. Every time you show me you prefer vodka to me, you cheat on me.”
“You showed me the best clubs in Manhattan. You’ve matched me drink for drink and laugh for laugh. We’ve had a good time. Maybe it was just fun at first, but you matter more than...”
“You are vital to me, Owen, so I’m begging you...” He’d never heard this tone before, so earnest, so broken. Where was the woman who’d survived a childhood kidnapping to step bravely out in the world as a successful gallery owner? “I am literally begging you to promise you can stop drinking. That you will stop drinking.”
“I can’t.” Every last moment in that place had been like marching through a desert, his mind always fixed on a glass of the only relief for the thirst that owned him. It was painful to acknowledge, but he’d needed that drink more than he’d wanted Lilah.
“I came back because I missed you.” He could barely look at her as he said the words. “Why can’t that be enough? Maybe it’s time we stopped doing this long-distance relationship. I could move here.”
At least then he could lose the title of town drunk, transferred from his father’s head to his.
“No.” She turned her face away, and strands of her hair stuck to the tears on her cheeks, making this whole mess worse. “I need you to commit to being sober.”
He was sober now. The vodka he’d sipped all the way from rehab on a bus that had smelled like unwashed humans had long since vanished from his system.
He licked his lips. What he’d give for another fifth.
“I will not lie to you,” he said.
“I don’t want you to lie. I want you to be the decent man I believe in, not a man who terrorizes his family and wastes his life.”
He laughed as if that were funny, but he headed for her door. “You don’t believe I’m decent.” He didn’t believe it. “I’ve made my choice. When you get bored with being reformed, give me a call.”
SOMETHING PRODDED Lilah Bantry’s face. Something small and pointy and insistent. She woke, felt the smooth weave of the couch beneath her and peered through the tangle of her hair. Her son’s tiny index finger poked gently at her arm this time as he leaned over her.
“Mommy?”
“Ben.” She gathered him close. “Morning, buddy.” She’d doubted her ability to be a good mother until she’d seen his red, scrunched-up face in the delivery room four years ago and realized she would do everything she could for this little guy. “Hey, buddy.”
“Are you awake?”
“I fell asleep waiting for the ball to drop.” She hugged him tight and relished the grip of his little arms around her. “Happy New Year, baby. Are you hungry?”
He nodded. “Blueberry pancakes?”
“Perfect, from the blueberries we picked last summer.”
“I can stir.” He tugged at the quilt.
She stood, pushing it off her legs until it fell to the floor. Her son grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the kitchen. Solemn and intent, he pushed the stool he usually sat on while she did the prep work for their meals, until it bumped into the granite island.
“Flour, Mommy.”
First, she took the blueberries out of the freezer. Then she carried the baking powder, sugar, milk and an egg to the island. She ran the blueberries under water to thaw them slightly and then mixed up the batter. When she added the blueberries, and the batter turned purple, Ben clapped his hands. She’d never been a big fan of purple food, but her boy was.
“Blueberry pancakes. Yummmm.”
She’d broken their griddle at Thanksgiving, and she hadn’t found time to replace it yet, so she heated a frying pan and poured small pools of batter, just the size Ben liked best.
“I can eat more than three.”
“I’ll make you more.” She grinned at him over her shoulder. His dad was allergic to blueberries. She hadn’t remembered that the first time she’d given them to Ben, and she’d followed her son around for an hour before she realized he was going to survive her mistake. “Want to make a snowman on the green in town after we eat?”
“Why do they call it green, Mommy? It’s white, and when the snow melts, it’s brown.”
“Excellent work on your colors, buddy, and I don’t have a clue. I’ll have to look that up for you.”
“You said you know everything.”
She probably had. She did that sometimes. “I will know after I look it up.”
Their doorbell rang. She glanced at the frying pan. Her pancakes were puffing
