And while she’d been able to give him love, she’d backed out of sex.
Joe grunted. As he found a spot to park in the street just beyond Grandma’s house, he added, “I won’t be able to stay long.” He didn’t crack a smile.
She wasn’t responsible for his divorce. Nor could she get him more time with the daughter she knew he adored. Those hurts had come long after she’d done her little number on him.
“Last week when I called the office, Thea said that you were with your father.” People were going into Grandma’s house. Some Sue recognized. Some she didn’t. Heart pounding, she wasn’t ready to join them.
Joe didn’t comment. She studied him, his close-cropped black hair, his crooked nose and his linebacker body.
“Is he still in town?” She might not get another chance for personal conversation with him for a while. She cared about him.
Besides, Grandma wasn’t in that house at the base of the famous Twin Peaks, wasn’t welcoming her guests.
Joe shrugged.
“How long’s it been since you’d seen him?” During their four years in high school she could only remember a brief visit from Joe’s fisherman father, who’d come down from Alaska for one of the holidays. The checks he was supposed to have sent to his mother, who was raising Joe, were only a little more frequent than his visits.
“A few years.”
“So he knows Kaitlin?” Joe’s ten-year-old daughter.
“They’ve met a time or two.”
“Was he here just to see you?”
“So he says.” The dry tone revealed more than the coldness in Joe’s eyes. “He’s been in town a couple of months.”
“Did he stay with you?”
“No.”
“Why do you think he came?”
“Money?”
“Yours?”
“I’m not aware of anyone else he knows who’d let him sponge off of them.”
“How much did he ask for?”
“None.”
“You gave it to him before he asked so he’d get out of town, right?” It was what this new, emotionally closed Joe Fraser would do. Joe Fraser, commercial real estate broker, loner.
“I’m not giving the man one red cent.”
“And he left without it?”
“No.”
Frowning, Sue tried to decipher that one. Did that mean Adam had found a way to get the money without asking? That someone else had given it to him, after all?
Or that he hadn’t left?
Her mom and dad parked their rental sedan across the street. Jenny stumbled as she got out of the car, and Luke hurried around to help her, steadying her with an arm firmly around her back. His gaze met Sue’s. He whispered something to his wife and they both smiled over. Waved.
Sue waved back and Joe turned to see who was there. She had to go in. They knew she was out here. They’d come looking for her. She swallowed.
“Is your dad still in town?” she asked Joe, instead. Their conversations were generally short-lived, over the phone and strictly about business. Specifically, the books she kept for him.
Joe replied with a brief nod.
“Has he said how long he’s staying?”
“For good. Are you going in there or not?”
A fresh wave of panic washed through her. “You’re coming, aren’t you? Just to meet my folks?”
He hesitated and Sue was afraid he was going to refuse. Then he opened the car door.
“WHO WAS THE HOTTIE?” Belle asked. “Someone new you forgot to tell me about?”
Joe had met Sue’s parents, a polite, uneventful moment considering all of the effort she’d taken in high school to keep them away from each other. And then, making sure they could take Sue home before heading back to their hotel in the city, he’d excused himself.
Sue gave her cousin as much of a grin as she could muster and shook her head. “That was just Joe.”
About sixty people were milling around Grandma’s huge living room, spilling over into the formal dining room and out onto the deck. Her mom and dad were there somewhere. Uncle Sam and Aunt Emily, too.
A lot of the rest Sue didn’t know.
“Joe Fraser?” Belle asked, as they watched people from their vantage point at the foot of the white-banis-tered curving staircase that led to the three bedrooms upstairs: Grandma’s room and, at one point, Jenny’s and Sam’s.
“Yeah.”
“Ah…” Belle sipped the wine she’d poured from a bottle out of Grandpa’s rack on the wall opposite the fireplace. “The Joe,” she added. “I didn’t realize you guys were friends again.”
“We aren’t. We’re friendly, but that’s about it. Joe hasn’t confided in me in years.” She sipped from the glass Belle had poured for her. “If not for the fact that he needed a bookkeeper when I needed a job that would allow me to stay at home with the babies, we probably wouldn’t be in touch at all.”
They’d made their peace. She’d just never again been welcome in the inner circles of Joe’s heart.
“It’s a shame,” Belle said. “He’s gorgeous. Available. And you guys were such good friends.”
“Joe’s changed a lot. And besides, I’ve never been in love with him. Not in that way.”
Belle nodded, and Sue knew she understood. Belle had recently gone against her overbearing father’s wishes and broken up with the man her dad had wanted her to marry. Try as she might, she hadn’t been able to fall in love with the young lawyer.
The sound of a glass shattering on Grandma’s hardwood floor made Sue wince. She moved toward the sound, intending to clean up whatever had spilled before it had a chance to soak in, but saw Aunt Emily had got to the mess in the dining room first.
“I’ve already done some checking and found that on average, it’s taking homes a year or more to sell…”
Sue froze, just around the corner from the voice. Her uncle Sam’s.
“So you’re planning to sell?” She didn’t recognize the other voice. It was male.
“Of course. What would I want with this old thing?”
“Nadine and I wondered if perhaps
