Cormac gentled his voice and, with what he hoped was a patient smile, once again tried to explain to Mrs. Wood—who’d brought her golden Labrador in for the second time in as many weeks because he was listless—why she couldn’t continue to overfeed her dog. “Animals are like humans,” he said. “It’s not healthy for them to be overweight. It increases the chances of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure—a whole host of problems. You don’t want to see Astro deal with such serious health issues, do you?”
She looked suitably horrified. “Of course not! But...he’s not that overweight, is he?”
“Like I told you last Wednesday, he’s a lot overweight,” Cormac replied. “He just weighed in at ninety-two pounds.”
She looked as though she was about to burst into tears, and he knew after what she’d been through, that was a real possibility. “Aren’t a lot of Labs on the heavy side?”
The last time she was in, Cormac had been a little too careful not to say anything upsetting, which was probably why she hadn’t taken his advice to heart. “Labs have a genetic tendency to be overweight, yes, but Astro should still be closer to seventy pounds. That means he has twenty-two pounds to lose—or twenty-four percent of his body weight. That’s a lot,” he emphasized so she’d finally understand the gravity of the situation.
“But to get him to lose that much, I’ll practically have to starve him! He’ll be miserable.”
Cormac surreptitiously glanced at the clock hanging on the wall. He’d given this poor woman and her dog his lunch hour but thanks to an early-morning surgery that ran long, he was still behind schedule. He didn’t want to push them out the door, though. “Dieting isn’t fun for anyone. You told me he’s listless. He doesn’t feel good—physically or emotionally. But I promise he’ll feel much better once he gets the weight off.”
“Emotionally? Are you saying he’s depressed?”
“That’s a very real possibility.”
“Won’t cutting back on his food only make that worse? He lives to eat!”
“He’ll feel better if you’ll listen to me. He should get about three cups of kibble per day. That’s all. Don’t give him any more. And lay off the treats for a while.”
She put a hand on her dog’s head and the two of them exchanged a mournful look. “This is going to hurt me more than you,” she told him.
“A lot of people show their love through food,” Cormac said. “I can see why you have a hard time restricting his diet. But there are other ways to be good to your dog. Why don’t you take him out more, get him moving? I bet he’d like that.” Cormac couldn’t say it, but he thought the exercise would do her as much good as the dog. He guessed she was depressed, too, and had even more weight to lose.
In her defense, she’d had a rough couple of years. About ten months ago, her beloved cat had run into the street and been struck by a car. Cormac had had no choice but to put Mischief down. Then, right after that, her husband of more than fifty years suffered a debilitating stroke and passed away. Since they had no children, Astro—named because Mr. Wood had been an astrophysicist—was all she had left. It was natural that she’d indulge him.
“With winter coming, it’s going to be hard to get out very often,” she said in despair.
He could hear voices in the waiting room, knew his next appointment had to be getting restless. But when Mrs. Wood had called in this morning, claiming her dog had an emergency, he’d told her to bring Astro to the office right away. He’d been afraid he’d missed something serious. He knew she couldn’t sustain another loss in her life.
But Astro was fine—other than the fact that he was too fat.
“I’ll tell you what,” Cormac said. “I take my dog and jog around the park every morning at six. Why don’t I come by and get you and Astro, and you can walk while I run? A standing date might keep you motivated, you won’t have to drive yourself, which means you won’t have to worry about taking the car out when it’s snowy and cold, and you’ll have someone to watch over both of you while you’re there.”
He glanced away as tears filled her eyes. Large displays of emotion made him uncomfortable. “You’re too important a person to go to all that trouble for me.” She lifted an arthritic hand. “I’m just an old woman.”
“People matter at every age,” he said. “Let’s do it. We can start tomorrow.”
Obviously reluctant to commit herself to such a rigorous routine, she hesitated. He knew she’d been mired in grief since she lost her husband. But she had to do this for herself and her pet. Cormac could only hope making it as easy as possible would be the catalyst she needed.
“Really, that’s too much trouble...” she said.
“I don’t mind,” he insisted. “Statistics show that being accountable to a buddy makes it easier to work out each day.”
A tear caught in her bottom eyelashes before she wiped it away with an air of impatience. “Well, how can a woman—even an old one—refuse a standing date with the most eligible bachelor in town?”
His sister Louisa, who ran the front office, poked her head into the room just then, and his rottweiler, Duke—named for where Cormac had done his undergrad years before going to North Carolina State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine—pushed past her to say hello. “Is everything okay in here? Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.
Obviously, he wasn’t the only one getting anxious about the people gathering in the waiting room.
“No, I was just leaving,” Mrs. Wood replied and called her dog, who eagerly jumped down off the examination table.
“See you tomorrow morning?” Cormac said as he crouched to pet Duke, who liked to lie around the front office near the windows, where he could see what was going on outside.
“Any chance you’d be willing to go at a more decent hour?” she asked with a hopeful wince.
“Sorry, it has to be six, or I won’t be able to keep up with things around here,” he responded with a chuckle. “But nice try.”
“Okay,” she relented. “I’ll be ready.”
He gave Duke a solid pat before standing. “Dress warmly,” he told her as she went out. “It’s chilly in the mornings.”
Louisa closed the door and dropped the polite expression she’d been wearing throughout the exchange. “What was that all about?” she asked.
“Thankfully, nothing.”
“Astro’s okay?”
“He will be once we get his weight under control.”
His sister’s face revealed her confusion. “So...what was the emergency?”
“Fear.”
“Fear?” she echoed.
He set about cleaning the room in preparation for his next four-legged patient and had to dodge Duke, who kept getting in the way. “Yeah. She’s already lost too much, can’t bear the thought of saying goodbye to another member of her family, so she tends to panic if Astro shows any signs of slowing down. But they’re both going to be fine.”
She shook her head as if she still didn’t understand why he’d had to jeopardize their entire schedule to see Astro immediately. “Okay, well, we’d better get moving, or we’re going to have some very disgruntled patients this afternoon.”
He put away the antiseptic he’d just used. “I’m all set.”
She started to open the door but, before Duke could even walk out, closed it again. “I almost forgot what I came in to tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“Edith texted me while you were with Mrs. Wood.”
Edith was his other sister, the baby of the family. Although Louisa and Edith were younger than he was, they were both married with children. At thirty-four he was definitely behind the curve on starting a family—which was probably why so many of the pet owners he dealt with tried to set him up with various women. “What’d she want?”
When Louisa seemed reluctant to say, he got the impression it wasn’t good.
“Don’t tell me something’s wrong with her dog.” His youngest sister’s Corkie was getting old. Cormac had been doing all he could to prolong the dog’s life while keeping him comfortable.
“This has nothing to do with Malone.”
“Thank God.”
“I’m not sure you’ll be so relieved once you hear what she had to say.”
This must have something to do with their father. Evan had been a mess ever since Cormac was a junior in high school. He couldn’t keep up with his bills. His last wife—the fourth in a succession of marriages since their mother left him seventeen years ago—was hounding him about some charges he put on her credit card after they split up. The next-door neighbor was complaining that Evan wasn’t keeping the grass in his yard cut. Evan’s boss was threatening to fire him for having alcohol on his breath when he came to work. The list went on. “So...was it about Dad?”
“Sort of.” She lowered her voice. “Gia’s in town.”
“Gia Rossi?”
“Yes, Gia Rossi.”
The girl who’d nearly destroyed his family. The horror and humiliation he’d experienced when she’d accused his father of inappropriate sexual conduct nearly two decades ago washed over him again. “She won’t be here long,” he said to battle the rising tide of his own resentment. “She never is.” That, in his view, served as proof that she didn’t want to face the repercussions of her lies.
“Apparently she’s staying months, maybe the whole winter,” Louisa informed him.
He suddenly felt scorched, as though he’d been shoved inside an oven beneath the broiler. “How do you know?”
“One of Edith’s best friends—I think it was Janet Robel—got an email this morning saying Gia’s starting up in-person meetings for the Banned Books Club now that she’s back in town. The email was an invitation to the launch party.”
Had he received that notice? He hadn’t been on the computer to check. Usually, he handled emails while he ate lunch, but today he’d given up that time to squeeze in Mrs. Wood and Astro.
He couldn’t believe there’d be anything about the club in his inbox, however. Gia wasn’t that obtuse. “She’s probably here because of her mother,” he said. “I’ve seen Mrs. Rossi around town, at the bank and grocery store. She looks very frail. I bet she doesn’t have much longer.”
“That’s unfortunate—not only for everyone in their family but for us now that Gia’s back. How will we deal with having her around? I can only imagine how Dad’s going to react. He’s been struggling enough as it is. I can’t take another call from him for help.”
Cormac tried to picture what the next few months might be like. He knew Gia had visited Wakefield since she left, but as far as he could tell, she did it ninja-style—stealing into town after dark and leaving fairly quickly, without anyone other than her sister and parents seeing her. “Maybe their paths won’t even cross.”
She gaped at him. “I get that you’re basically an optimist, but even you must know that if he finds out she’s this close, he’ll track her down and try to set the record straight. You’ve heard him talk about how much he longs for that opportunity. And in a town this size, someone’s bound to tell him she’s here.”
Protecting his father was a role Cormac was very familiar with. After all, he’d been doing it for years. His sisters had been doing the same. “I can understand why he’d be dying to confront her,” he said. “When she was seventeen, he couldn’t go anywhere near her, not without making himself look even worse. But now that she’s an adult and it’s been so long, he’d like to have a conversation with her, see if he can talk some sense into her and finally get her to come clean and admit the truth. That’s the only way he’ll ever be able to remove the stigma he’s lived with for so long. Without a retraction that comes directly from her, everyone will continue to believe what they’ve believed since it happened.”
Louisa nibbled on her bottom lip. “Mom thinks he did it. That’s why she divorced him.”
Cormac had met their mother for dinner last night after he got off work. She’d lost quite a bit of weight, was obviously working out and looked better than she had in ages. She’d been wearing a pricey sweater dress with a long leather coat and had a handbag that was so expensive he’d nearly choked on his drink when she told him how much it cost. As a nurse, she made a decent living, but she certainly wasn’t wealthy. The way she’d been spending lately, she often had to borrow money from him just to get through the month.
“I know, but Mom’s wrong, okay? Dad had a great career going, an impeccable record of working with children and young adults, and Gia took that from him. Not only did they fire him, they prosecuted him—all because of what she said he’d done. There was no evidence whatsoever. It was her word against his. That was all it took.”
They’d had this conversation a million times, but he assumed they’d have it a million more—unless they could finally achieve some resolution. It was impossible to get over the injustice of it.
“Maybe for Mom it wasn’t about guilt or innocence as much as embarrassment,” Louisa said. “She couldn’t live with the humiliation. She said people in town looked at her like she couldn’t keep her man satisfied, as if they were thinking, ‘Why wasn’t he getting what he needed at home? Why would he ruin his career and his reputation going after a high school girl?’”
Cormac wished their mother hadn’t folded on Evan. The fact that she’d defected to the other side made her husband look even guiltier. “The lies Gia told back then changed the trajectory of all our lives.”
“And yet she was able to go on as if nothing ever happened,” Louisa said bitterly. “It’s not fair.”
Duke’s tail was thumping the floor as he waited patiently by the door to be let back out. Cormac wasn’t feeling quite so patient. He was conscious of all the people waiting to have their animals seen and felt pressure to get back to work. But having Gia in town made it hard to focus. “Maybe I should talk to her...”
“And say what?” his sister gasped.
“See if I can convince her to tell the truth. Apologize. Right the record. If I do it, Dad won’t have to, so she won’t be able to claim he came after her again.”
Skepticism descended on Louisa’s face. “You’d rather she told people you came after her? No way. I won’t have her maligning you next. Besides, have you forgotten what happened the last time you confronted her?”
“That got a little out of control,” he admitted. “But I was young, and I’d just found out what she was saying about Dad. I’ve had to live with the situation long enough that I’ve gained some perspective—at least on how not to approach her.”
“Any way you approach her would not be good,” Louisa insisted. “Even if it doesn’t get as explosive as it did before, she can’t take back what she’s done. There’s been too much fallout. So what would be the point?”
“The point would be closure,” he argued. “Don’t you want the truth to finally come out? To feel vindicated for remaining loyal to a man who was a good teacher, a great father and an upstanding citizen—instead of continuing, like we have for seventeen years, to deny that any impropriety took place? So many people are convinced Dad did it. I’m tired of all the doubt, would love to show them how wrong they’ve been.”
“So would I. There hasn’t been one other girl, ever, who has accused Dad of anything even remotely like what Gia said he did to her.” Louisa shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense that he would have done that to her.”
Actually, it sort of made sense to Cormac. Gia had been unlike anyone he’d ever met. Vital. Full of life. Confident. And sexy as hell. He could easily see a man wanting her. Although he wasn’t about to admit it, he’d once wanted her himself. That was why he’d joined her Banned Books Club. At that age, he hadn’t been much of a reader—or even an advocate for books. He’d just wanted to see her, be near her. Although he’d never held out much hope that she’d be interested in him—he was a year younger—her sex appeal had been that potent.
But the false claims she’d made had essentially tossed a hand grenade into his family’s living room. Once it exploded, the pieces of their lives flew in every direction. “She was attractive. I can’t deny that,” he said, admitting only to a watered-down version of the truth. “But Dad wouldn’t lie to us. He wouldn’t let us make fools of ourselves standing up for him all these years if he’d done such a terrible thing. He was nothing but kind and fair—completely consistent—all the time we were growing up. If that doesn’t earn him a little loyalty and trust, what will?”
“Exactly! The way so many people turned on him was gut-wrenching. I’ve seen him cry over this, cry so hard his shoulders were shaking!”
Cormac had seen his father break down, too. It made him hate Gia Rossi even more—for costing Evan his dignity along with everything else.
“So are you going to try to talk to her?” Louisa asked, seemingly warming up to the idea.
A knock interrupted them. “Dr. Hart?”
Louisa barred Duke’s exit with one leg while she cracked open the door to find one of Cormac’s next appointments—Venice Gomez, a middle-aged bank teller with purple hair who had a labradoodle on a leash.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but—” Venice lifted her arm to indicate her watch “—I need to be back at work in fifteen minutes. Are we going to have to reschedule?”
“No,” Louisa said. “I’m sorry for the wait. We...we ran into an issue, but Dr. Hart can see you and Trixie now.”
“Thank you,” Venice said, and his sister cast him a final worried glance that indicated they’d have to finish their Gia Rossi conversation later.