When We Let Go, Delancey Stewart [early reader books .txt] 📗
- Author: Delancey Stewart
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I’d watched Maddie leave after breakfast, believing with every fiber of my being that my life was shifting course and that finally things were about to start making sense again. The loneliness I’d felt my whole life was receding like the freeze of a too-long winter, and it seemed like the first rays of something new and promising were breaking through the gloom.
As soon as she’d left, I’d picked up where I’d left off in the manuscript I was working on, amazed as the words flew from my fingertips. The sun tracked across the sky as I worked and before I realized it, evening had fallen again. I closed the laptop, feeling the strange shift I always went through as I moved from the world I imagined and wrote to the one I actually inhabited.
Maddie’s brother was arriving today, I remembered. I wondered if he was here, how their reunion had gone. Maddie hadn’t invited me to meet him—it was obviously something of a tense reunion, so I wasn’t surprised—but I still wished I could see her, could offer some support if she needed it.
I had silenced the phone before I’d begun working, and I picked it up from the kitchen counter now, popping a few salted almonds from the bowl into my mouth as I checked messages.
My agent. I swallowed hard and tried to steel myself. Where calls and messages from my agent had once been the harbingers of good things to come, these past few months had gotten increasingly worse in terms of publicity, and his calls tended to be warnings about new rumors and speculation. As the subject of a stalking and kidnapping investigation, I didn’t imagine the tabloid page he’d attached as an image would be anything I’d like.
I tapped on the photo to enlarge it and was confronted with my own face and a headline reading “Horror Writer Suspected of Murder.” The headline was inflammatory and I’d need to talk to Andrew about that—there were no official charges, and if there were, murder was certainly not going to be among them. I’d given the police enough counter-evidence of my own to be fairly sure I wasn’t a real suspect, just the only one they had at the moment.
But it wasn’t the headline or the story full of half-truths and speculation that made my stomach turn sour and my heart solidify inside my chest. It was the photo. I recognized it. It was recent. It’d been taken right here, inside my house—my sanctuary—by someone I’d begun to trust implicitly.
Maddie.
I thought back through our interactions, during which she’d seemed honest, forthright, and trustworthy. There’d been nothing to indicate duplicity or even a capacity for this kind of betrayal. But there was the photo—and she’d told me herself that her financial situation wasn’t good. Of course she needed money. And selling photos of beleaguered celebrities was a sure way to cash in.
I just hadn’t thought it was possible. Not for her.
But as I swiped the photo off the screen and then threw my phone violently at the far wall, I found a familiar certainty I’d been trying to push away. I was supposed to be alone. I was different from everyone else, and they sensed it. I didn’t work the same way, didn’t think the same. The universe had set me up time and again to tell me I was meant to be alone, and I kept falling into the same old trap of believing it wasn’t true, believing there might actually be someone for me.
But there wasn’t, and I was done hoping for any truth other than this one.
I pulled the shades over the windows and stoked the fire. I was done letting people in.
I had an afternoon shift at the diner, and I’d told Cameron to meet me there. I was glad he was coming up, though I was nervous about seeing him. He was angry with me, for some good reasons. But if there was a place that might bring us close again, it was here, under these trees that had known us as kids, near the rocks that had been our castles, and the logs and streams that had been our playground.
I knew Cam would be disappointed to see the half-formed monstrosity standing in the place we used to camp. He’d given me permission to build, and even signed over his legal claim on the property. But he’d done it to be rid of Jack, who had pestered him with lawyers and complications until he did. I wondered how much Jack had paid him to walk away from our childhood. And I wondered if Cam regretted it at all.
When I arrived, the diner held the usual few regulars. Chance and Sam were there, sitting in a booth by the window, and Miranda was shifting her weight nervously behind the counter, stealing glances at Chance.
I wandered over to their table after sticking my bag under the counter and giving Miranda a wave. I felt like I owed them some kind of update. It’d been months since there’d been any progress on the house.
“Hey guys,” I said, bringing the coffee pot over with me. “Staying busy?”
“Hey, Maddie,” Chance said, his blue eyes smiling along to match the sexy mouth. “We’re busy enough. We’ve got a job putting in some double panes up around the bend past the Ridgewood trailhead, and then we’re finishing the Taylor’s shed. They want to turn it into a guesthouse.”
I smiled at that. A guesthouse? It’d be nice to have a house at all. “I’m glad there’s work to do. I don’t have much to report on my own place.”
“You might want us to come wrap it in plastic for the winter, though.” Chance did the talking, but Sam was nodding. “We already put down a waterproof subfloor, so you shouldn’t have water damage there.”
I nodded. I think they’d explained that to me while they’d worked on it. But I hadn’t been listening back then.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll let you know about the plastic. Any idea what that might cost?”
Sam shook his head and Chance fastened his eyes on his coffee cup for a second. “No charge, Maddie.” He looked back up at me.
His words hit me like a fist to the gut, and my chin went up. “Don’t do that. Don’t do that pity thing.”
Chance looked guilty and I saw him catch Sam’s eye. “Nope, it’s not about that. It’s part of the deal we already made. It’s our job to protect the foundation if we don’t finish building before winter.”
“But it’s not your fault you didn’t finish building.” I wasn’t sure if he was telling me the truth or if this was a pity offer.
“No, but the contract is the same.”
Whether it was generosity or pity, I kept finding myself in the position of having to accept help. I couldn’t solve this problem myself, regardless of what my pride said. “Okay. Thanks, guys. Coffee’s on me this afternoon. Pie, too.”
They both smiled, and Sam raised his cup to me in a silent toast.
I delivered them each a big piece of Frank’s famous apple pie and thanked them again.
That was when the bell over the door jangled, signaling the entrance of the brother I hadn’t seen in more than three years. He looked much the same as I remembered. He was lean and tall, with a goatee and short clipped dark hair. His eyes were small, perceptive, and he typically dressed in black. A tattoo snaked up one arm, which had always seemed to work with the ladies. A petite woman stood at his side, looking around with interest. She was frail, thin, and small. And her eyes were slightly sunken under a bob of wispy blond hair. She was pretty in a fragile way. It had to be Jess, the sister-in-law I’d never met.
Cameron caught sight of me, and our eyes met. No expression crossed his face. Instead, he broke the gaze and helped the small woman into a booth near the door, whispering into her ear as he made sure she was comfortable. Then he straightened up and walked toward me with long purposeful strides as she smiled at me across the space and waved a hand.
The first thing I’d felt on seeing my big brother was love. The pure joyful admiration that I’d always felt as a child washed through me. Here was my protector, my guardian, my defender. And the next thing I felt, as he moved toward me, was fear. Fear that maybe nothing would ever go back to the way it was supposed to be.
“Maddie,” he said, coming to a stop before me. No hug. No nothing.
I stood still, wringing my apron between my hands. “Cameron.” I tried a smile. “I’m so happy to see you.”
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