It was around four-thirty when Cole looked up from his desk to see Ram hovering in the doorway yet again.
“Don’t you have a job?”
“No. I thought I’d quit to spend my days writing poetry on the beach.” He dropped into the chair in front of the desk. “It’s called a personal day, you half-wit. One of those benefits of selling out to The Man. You should try taking one sometime.”
“I did. The day after the primary.”
“When you still landed in court.”
“Just one case. A quickie. Barely enough to count.”
“Uh-huh. And how much downtime have you had since then?”
Brockport. He’d had a day of nothing but Jenna when they went to Brockport.
“Not much,” he confessed. “But it’s only a couple more days.”
“That’s true. The election is just a few days away.” Ram leaned back and propped his feet on the desk. “I bet you’re planning to take a day off after that.”
“Yeah, I am. Is there a point to this?” He eyed Ram’s sneaker-clad feet. “You know, this desk belonged to my grandfather.”
“Sturdy piece. They don’t build ’em like that anymore. Let’s say you win, Cole. After you take a day to breathe, you’ll be pretty busy again, right? I mean, it’s not that long until January, especially with the holidays in there.”
“I am well aware of that. Are you here just to shoot the breeze, or is there something you’re trying to say? Because I’m kind of busy right—”
Ram’s feet hit the polished wooden floorboards with far more of a thud than Cole would have expected sneakers to provide. “You’re busy. I know. That’s a permanent state with you.”
“No, it’s—”
“Oh, please. You want to remind me why you came back here, buddy? Wasn’t it something about slowing down and having time to appreciate life?”
“This is a rhetorical question, right?”
“You’re damned right it is. You moved back to get a grip on life. You said, and I’m quoting, that you wanted ‘a job and a life.’ That you wanted time to be with your family. That you wanted to know what it was like to get more than five hours’ sleep a night for more than two nights in a row.” He paused, no doubt for dramatic effect. “That you didn’t want to lose another relationship because you didn’t have time to do it right.”
Prickles of recognition made it impossible to deny the statements. “Right. And I did.”
“Did you?”
“I— Yeah, I did. Until the election, I mean.”
Ram crossed his arms and gave Cole the adult equivalent of a middle school stink eye.
“What?”
“How the hell can you go out there, campaigning about honesty, when you’re so full of it?”
Cole couldn’t name more than two or three times over the decades when he feared for his friendship with Ram. But he was pretty sure the number was close to increasing.
“In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve had a pretty lousy twenty-four hours. I would really appreciate it if you would get to the point so I can finish this will and get down to headquarters.”
“You’re not going to headquarters.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“You called in sick. Everyone knows you won’t be there.”
“I called in sick before that crap came out in the paper. I’m not going to hide away now. And what the hell does this have to do with me being busy?”
“If you go anywhere near that office tonight, Allison, Tim, Aubrey, and I are all quitting.”
What the . . .
Ram leaned forward, his finger tapping the aged desk as he spoke. “Look, Cole. You’re right. You’ve been through the wringer over the past day. Usually I would be the first to say, back in the saddle, yeehaw, ride ’em cowboy. But you need to step back for a minute.”
Cole thought about protesting, but one scowl from Ram had him reconsidering.
“Here’s the thing, Cole. It wasn’t the job that made you keep that crazy schedule back when you were in the city, and it’s not the election doing it now. It’s you. And before you get all high and mighty, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. It is what it is and you are who you are. Some people thrive on having a lot going on, and buddy, no matter what you said about wanting to slow down, the simple fact is that if you really wanted that to happen, you would have done it already.”
Shit. None of this really sounded surprising. More like . . . like something he had known for a long time but had hoped that if he didn’t admit it, it might not be true.
“What are you saying, Ram? That I should drop out of the race and adopt a houseful of cats?”
“Remember when I called you a half-wit?”
“Yeah.”
“I was giving you too much credit.” Ram hunched over, elbows on knees, and focused on Cole more intently than Cole would have thought possible.
“You didn’t lose Meredith because you didn’t spend time with her, Cole. That was a symptom. The real problem was that you talked yourself into thinking you felt something you didn’t.”
Everything Ram was saying sounded true. But for the life of him, Cole still didn’t see how any of it fit together.
“You said something about you and Jenna never having a chance, that you should have known better than to try to squeeze something permanent into something temporary. But Cole, you’re missing the point. Everything is temporary. Nobody gets forever, buddy. And even though you screwed things up with Jenna by trying to buy more time with her, the fact is, you’re an efficient guy. You’ve already built something lasting with her, and don’t insult us both by trying to deny it.”
God, how he wanted to believe Ram. And yet—
“It’s not something lasting if one person calls it quits.”
Ram sighed. “Cole, you hurt her. But here’s the thing. Relationships don’t live or die by time. It’s all about the effort. And the fights and the making up and the screwups and the times when it all works. You guys have that.”
“This was more than just forgetting a birthday or something, Ram. I don’t think there’s anything I could have done that would have hurt her more.”
“Remember Mrs. Cowburn?”
Cole blinked. Roller coasters didn’t have as many twists as this conversation.
“Yeah, I remember her. Grade six. Why?”
“Remember when she made us write that essay defending Benedict Arnold?”
Decades of distance didn’t keep Cole’s stomach from cramping in memory.
“I lost three nights sleep over that one.”
“I remember. You were one sorry sight, especially when you fell asleep in her class and snored so loud that they could hear you in the next room.”
Did Ram have to look so delighted over the memory?
“The point is, once she woke you up and got the whole sad story out of you, she told you to stop making things so—”
“So complicated,” Cole finished. “And that all I needed to do was figure out what she really wanted, and make sure I did that.”
“Right. Because once you had that part down, the rest would fall into place.”
“This is a little more important than a middle school exercise on point of view, Ram.”
“And there you go, making things more complicated again. Think, knucklehead.” Ram rapped on the desk. “What does Jenna really need from you?”
Cole remembered the argument.
Remembered her saying she had believed in him.
Remembered her loathing for her father.
And knew, with the same certainty that told him he loved her, that all Jenna wanted was the exact thing he had been promising everyone else all along.
The truth.
***
Jenna expected to spend the night staring at the ceiling. And there was an hour or so during which she tossed and turned and heard her mother’s words over and over.
Which would have been okay if she hadn’t kept hearing her father saying the same thing.
When she did fall asleep, though, it was blessedly peaceful. No scary dreams. No waking. Just deep, restoring sleep, that left her opening her eyes calmer and remarkably more settled.
Kyrie had told her to take the morning off. Jenna hadn’t bothered with even a token protest, assuming she would be wiped out. So instead of setting up coffee, she sat up, peeled back the covers, and looked at her leg.
Everything she had said to Cole that first time was true. There were no repulsive scars. But as she traced the fading lines, she knew that not every scar was the kind that could be seen. And that maybe her parents—both of them—might have been onto something.
Maybe it was time to stop setting her focus elsewhere. Maybe it was time to claim her life as it was, here and now.
Though how she was supposed to build her life in the town where Cole’s name blazed out at her from lawn signs up and down every street was beyond her.
“No.” She couldn’t let that stop her. Couldn’t let her actions be dictated by her relationship to another man. Not anymore. She had to do what she had to do.
Step one was to stop being an idiot about using the skills and relationships she’d developed when she was with Kendall.
Back when they were together, she had always made a point of befriending his secretaries and assistant. Not to get dirt on him, as he once accused her, but because it had seemed like the right thing to do. They were the most important people in his world. He spent more time with them than with her. So it had seemed only logical to get a feel for them, their quirks and personalities, so when Kendall talked about them—or complained about their incompetency, which turned out to be the case most often—she would have an idea of who and what she was dealing with.
Yeah, she could write a book. Trophy Wife 101, by Jenna Elias Stirling Carpenter.
Her efforts had ended up being a huge help during the divorce, when Kendall’s assistant, Rico. had seen fit to slip her a few warnings about upcoming shenanigans. She hoped his loyalties still rested on her side as she hit the number she had never removed from her phone.
“Hello?”
He sounded surprised, but in a good way, like someone who had just found a winning lottery ticket on the street.
“Rico. Hi. Can you—”
“Give me a minute, sweets. I need to get those figures.” There came the sound of movement, a door closing, and then a long, drawn-out whistle.
“Jenna Elias, how are you, you sweet thing?”
“Much better now that I’ve heard your voice.” No lie there. Cutting Kendall from her life had turned out to be distressingly easy, but losing Rico and the others—oh, that had been the killer. “I hate to be horrible cliché, but I need a favor.”
“Does it have anything to do with that hatchet job that was done on you in yesterday’s paper?”
“Holy— You know about that?”
“Oh, you sweet innocent. Kendall keeps tabs on all his exes. I think he can’t quite believe that anyone could ever go on living without him.”
Oh, it felt good to laugh. “You are such a bad employee.”
“On the contrary, my darling girl. I am a most excellent, hard-working and resourceful assistant. But that doesn’t mean I can’t use those talents for good on occasion. Especially when I spent all yesterday hearing some evil overlord snickering over people getting what’s coming to them.”
Nice to know Kendall hadn’t changed. It made it all the easier to ask for what she needed now.
“I need Kendall’s office to have an ad crashed into the newspaper.”
This time the whistle was far more subdued.
“Tomorrow’s paper?”
“Yes.”
“Big ad?”
“As big as possible.”
“It’s going to be tricky. And expensive.”
“I know. That’s why the request has to come from someone tricky and loaded.”
“In that case, you’ve come to precisely the right friend.”
Jenna’s shoulders seemed to sink about ten inches. “You are the most amazing doll ever.”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart. I know that very well.”
Of that, she had no doubt.
“You’ll be able to do this quietly, right? I don’t want you getting in trouble.”
“Jenna my love, don’t you worry about a thing. I can hide this so deep that even Liam Neeson couldn’t find it.”
“Music to my ears, Rico.”
“And you know how I love to sing. So tell me, sweetness.” His voice dropped. “What are we doing, and to whom?”
***
Cole woke to the sound of bells.
For one hazy moment he thought he was back in his undergrad dorm at the University of Rochester, where he had often been yanked into wakefulness by the playing of the carillon at the center of campus. Drove him crazy. How was a person supposed to catch a nap with stupid damned chimes clanging all the time?
Except he was pretty sure these weren’t bells.
He rolled over, cracked one eyelid, and squinted at the clock. 6:43. What the . . .
The sound came again. His phone. Doing some kind of happy dance with the damned text message alert.
He liked it a whole lot better when he woke up beside Jenna. She wasn’t nearly as loud. A lot more cuddly, too.
God, he hoped he could make things right between them again. Nothing worked without her. Even the things that used to feel perfect, like waking up in this bed. It was too big now. Too lonely. And she’d never even been here.
“You picked a hell of a time to fall in love, dipstick.”
The phone beeped again. He was going to have to deal with that.
He fumbled around the night stand, grabbed the instrument of torture, and pulled it to him.
Huh.
Eight texts. All of them from Ram, Allison, and other members of the team. That was good. It meant that nothing had happened with his folks. Or with Jenna.
He closed his eyes again as the knowledge twisted deep in his chest. If something happened to Jenna, he wouldn’t know. She could be in a hospital bed this very second, hanging on to life by the skinniest thread, and he wouldn’t know.
The phone beeped again. He could swear it had switched over to a tone like that of a schoolyard bully—nyah, nyah.
“Fine. Fine.” He opened the first message, from Ram.
Have you seen this morning’s paper?
Well, no. He hadn’t. A quick jump to the newspaper’s website showed him just that day’s headlines. Maybe he was cynical, but he didn’t think his phone would be overflowing over a lead story about a bear that had been spotted on the edge of town.
Back to the messages. Tim, his mother . . . yes. Allison.
You had to go for the gutsy one, didn’t you, Loverboy? Page 2.
Oh shit. Jenna had done something.
The phone wasn’t going to cut it this time. He grabbed a T-shirt, yanked it over his head, and ran downstairs, hoping to God his paper had landed on the porch this time instead of in the middle of the—
No luck. There it was, by the sidewalk. And there he was, the day before the election, sprinting across the lawn in his old shirt and monkey-print boxers.
Allison would kill him.
Jenna would laugh hysterically and lock him out of the house.
It was still early enough that he received only a couple of beeps from passing cars. Maybe he’d lost nothing more than his dignity.
He could hope, right?
The moment he was in the shadow of the porch he dropped to his grandfather’s rocker and opened up to page two.
And was immediately glad that he was sitting.
The entire bottom half of the page was taken up by one ad—an ad dominated by a photo of Jenna on one side and the words Let’s Talk Corruption on the other. Below the heading was another photo of a very young girl in a very frilly dress, held in the arms of a very young Robert Elias. The caption read, Me and my father, about thirty years ago.
The message was simple.
Cole Dekker knew who I was when he agreed to let me work on his election campaign. He knew then that I am not my father, and that each individual deserves to be judged on his or her own actions. He took a chance that many wouldn’t dare to take, because he believed in me.
My father took bribes. Cole Dekker gave me a chance. My father faked his own death. Cole Dekker has told the truth, even when that wasn’t politically wise. You want to talk corruption? Come talk to me. I know all about it.
Cole didn’t even realize he was still clutching his phone until it rang, sending him into a flailing shock wave that would probably have people calling for paramedics if they saw it.
“Son of a . . .” He checked the display. “Ram? What the hell?”
“Just wanted to be sure you saw the latest.”
“Yeah.” Cole tapped the picture of teeny Jenna. When had her hair stopped being curly? “Yeah, I saw it.”
“The girl has balls.”
“That, she does.”
“Allison thinks it’ll help.”
“Why am I not surprised that you two are already having strategy conversations before seven in the morning?”
“Just wait, Grasshopper. Someday you’ll have kids. Then you’ll understand.”
Cole tapped the picture of tiny Jenna once again.
“I’m going to do something, Ram. Allison probably won’t like it.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I figured I should let you know, in case you need to talk her down or something.”
“Decent of you. You want to give me a clue?”
“Nope.”
A long sigh brought a grin to Cole’s lips. “You’re going to make a sentimental ass of yourself, aren’t you, Dekker?”
“Lips are sealed.”
“Fine. Be that way.” Ram tried to sigh again, but it was cut short by something that sounded suspiciously like a snicker. “Can you at least tell me when to have someone recording Allison?”
“You’re a sadistic bastard, Ram. That’s why I like you.”
“And you’re a hopeless idiot, Dekker. That’s why I hope you get her back. Because you need all the love and help you can get.”
***
The text from Kyrie showed up just as Jenna was leaving her last class of the day.
Sorry to do this, but Lindsay is sick. Can you cover her shift for a couple of hours? Jake said he can come in at six, but if you are free, I could really use you for a while.
Her first instinct was no. She’d spent the day handling comments from people who had seen her ad. Most of them were supportive. Some were a bit sarcastic, but nothing as bad as she had prepared herself to face. The biggest surprise was how many people told her they’d had no idea she was an Elias until they saw the paper.
Maybe she wasn’t quite as notorious as she had thought.
But if she were being honest—which, damn it, she vowed she would do—most of her weariness came from spending the day grabbing her phone every few minutes, checking to see if Cole had sent any message about the ad. She wasted far too much of her day hoping that he would see this as the apology she meant it to be.
Enough. She was in charge of her life now. What Cole did or didn’t do was out of her control. She was calling the shots.
Right now, that meant helping the sister who had covered for her this morning. And waiting tables. And taking a good look at the life she had—right here, right now—so she could figure out the parts she liked most. Because those were going to be the real key to her fresh start.
It was time to make a name for herself.
***
Cole slumped back in his chair and dragged his hand across his gritty eyes once again. Maybe this time he could pluck the exhaustion and worry from them and leave behind nothing but energy and enthusiasm.
Yeah, he didn’t think so.
But as he went over the words on the screen once more, reading them out loud, pausing every once in a while to make a note of emphasis or change a phrase, he knew that Mrs. Cowburn would be proud. It was the best speech he had ever written, which was convenient, seeing as it was also the most important one he would ever make. His entire future could well be determined by the few minutes it took him to deliver this talk.
God, he wished he’d had more sleep. This was almost as bad as the days of working at Dewey Cheatum. Though he couldn’t recall ever feeling so weighed down by what he was doing back then. Maybe because that had been his normal. Maybe because nothing had mattered as much as the task that lay before him in—he checked the clock—three hours.
Whoa. Only three hours?
Damn it. Ram had been right.
He reached up and over his head, stretching out the kinks from too many hours in the chair. His stomach twisted in an unholy mix of exhaustion, anxiety, and coffee. And it hadn’t even been good coffee. If nothing else, he had to make things right with Jenna so he could go back to Brews and Blues. He missed that place.
Or maybe he just missed walking in and seeing her smile from behind the counter, knowing that the light behind her grin was for him. Because of him.
Maybe he needed to go through his speech one more time . . .
No. He’d done his best. Poured his heart onto these pages. If this didn’t do the job, then he didn’t deserve to win either the race or the woman.
No, right now he needed to have a shower and clear his head and get to headquarters so he could brief his team about what was going to happen tonight. They’d been blindsided enough lately. They didn’t need to have it happen again thanks to him.
There was just one last thing he needed to do.
He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out the business card he’d tossed inside in anger. He picked up the phone and, with a deep breath, punched in the number on the card.
“Hello, Mr. Elias.”
***
Jenna spent the late afternoon with the after-work crowd, pouring coffee, running credit cards, and answering questions with all the frankness she could muster. If she couldn’t stop people from talking and wondering, she could at least give them something worthy of the discussion. She knew that.
What she hadn’t expected was the sense of freedom it gave her. If things couldn’t get any worse—and, given the last couple of days, she was pretty sure that was the case—then that meant they could only get better. She could only get better.
And if the whole world knew who she was, then that meant she had the same shot no matter where she lived. Which meant she could go anywhere she wanted.
Or, perhaps, nowhere at all.
She set her tray on the table a bit too quickly. Coffee slopped over the side of the mugs and onto the shiny surface. Some splashed on her arm. She yanked it back so fast that her elbow connected with someone standing behind her.
“Ow!” She grabbed at the hot spots and spun around as fast as she dared, toward the ooof still sounding behind her. As soon as she saw who she’d elbowed, she knew she’d been hasty.
Things had indeed just gotten worse.
“You know,” Rob said, rubbing at his chest where she must have nabbed him, “all you have to do is ask and I’ll move. There’s no need to pull out the elbows of mass destruction.”
It was so much like something Margie would say that for a second, her usual Rob-induced wall of anger broke open enough to let a tiny bubble of appreciation slip through.
“Go up front please,” she said to Rob, and turned her attention—such as it was—back to the customers. To her surprise and gratitude, Rob did as asked.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked when she was close enough to speak without being overheard.
“No.”
She nodded. “Next time I’ll try harder.”
“Wouldn’t expect anything less.” Rob glanced around the room. “I need to get you out of here. How soon can you leave?”
“Excuse me? You aren’t even supposed to come into this shop, and you have the nerve to stand there and tell me that—”
“That I have been given strict orders to make sure you are at the fire station in the next half hour.”
The fire station? But—that was on Cole’s schedule. His last big public address before the election.
“I can’t go there.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
Oh, hell. Things were really messed up when Rob started making sense.
Jenna looked out the window in search of new customers. She scanned the room, hoping someone had spilled a giant latte all over the floor. Maybe someone could be having a medical emergency. A birth would be good. Anything that meant she could block out Rob’s voice and all the waves of hope it set sloshing around inside her.
Because she couldn’t risk hope. Hope was the bitch that lived to torture, making everything sound possible and doable only to dance out of reach at the very last second, laughing and pointing an upraised finger at Jenna as it fled. She couldn’t go through that again.
“I can’t go there,” she said again, this time in a voice thickened by the tears she fought to hold back. “I know you think I should go out there and face them down, but I can do that here. I am doing it here.”
“Who said anything about facing anyone down?” Rob’s hand fluttered in and out of her vision until one finger settled gently beneath her chin and tipped it up. “He wants you there, Jennie Jenkins. He wants you there so much that he called me and asked me to bring you up there.”
She swallowed hard. “But why?”
“All he said was that he wanted to make things right.”
Go away, stupid hope.
“That could mean a lot of things,” she said.
“It could. But have you ever known him to be cruel or vindictive?”
Cole? No. Never. That’s wasn’t who he was.
“Jenna, I know you hate me. You have that right. But I’m still your father and I still want you to be happy. So take off your apron and let’s go.”