Where We Left Off

  Copyright © 2016 Megan Squires

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.

  Cover art by Cassy Roop of Pink Ink Designs

  Editing by Kerry Genova with Indie Solutions, www.murphyrae.net

  Interior Design by Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing, www.unforeseenediting.com

  ALSO BY MEGAN SQUIRES

  Demanding Ransom

  The Rules of Regret

  Draw Me In

  Love Like Crazy

  To my readers who have stuck with me this past year and a half.

  Thank you for letting me pick up right where we left off.

  Part One: November 2004

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Part Two: Twelve Years Later

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Mallory

  “I couldn’t remember if he wanted cerulean or cobalt, so he’s gonna have his pick of the blues.”

  Nana laughed into the receiver, a hearty, warm sound that reminded me of the apple pies she baked at the first sign of fall when the leaves gave up their green for rustier shades. How someone could make a noise almost edible must’ve been a talent reserved solely for grandmothers, I figured, and Nana had certainly perfected her recipe.

  I slipped the crinkled plastic bag into my backpack and slid my shoulders into the armholes, leveling out the uneven weight digging against my shoulder blades. With my schoolbooks already in the bag, it didn’t leave much room, but a promise was a promise and I wasn’t about to let him down. Not today. Not any day.

  “Can you tell Tommy I’m on my way back?”

  “Of course,” Nana said. “Be careful out there, Mallory. The roads are slick and you know all the crazies come out after dark. I worry about you. I always worry … like it’s my job.”

  “No need, Nana. It’s only four thirty, I’m on a bike, and you should be enjoying retirement. These are your golden years. Live it up. Get a country club membership or a new manicure or maybe buy yourself something sparkly.” I chuckled into the phone pressed to my cheek as I unlocked my vintage Schwinn from the lamppost outside B Street Art Supplies. The chain clanged against the frame with a metallic clinking. I hopped onto the bike. The seat was cold on my jeans and I shivered under the discomfort and then pedaled quickly down the sidewalk to try to draw some warmth to my muscles. I felt that addictive and invigorating burn in my quads as I raced over the pavement. Picking up speed, the wind burned my face and bit my roughened and chapped lips, dry from winter’s unforgiving chill. It was freezing, but I loved this. Being out in the frigid elements only made the warm harbor of shelter that much cozier. Juxtapositions were beautiful when they were in their most extreme. “See you in a jiffy, Nana!”

  With a toss of my phone into the wicker basket attached to the handlebars, I pushed up to stand against the pedals and sped through town, my legs and mind having memorized every turn, every intersection and stop like an intricately choreographed routine. It was only ten minutes before I rounded the last corner, my tires gripping what little salty pavement remained exposed, and I pulled into the driveway of our modest three-bedroom home, the one I took my first steps in, and where I would likely take my last. I couldn’t imagine ever being anywhere else and I couldn’t imagine any other location for this life of ours. It was a good place and it was a good life. I figured I’d stay here as long as I could.

  I saw Nana’s silhouette dance against the orange glow through the kitchen window, the one draped with the embroidered white linen she’d sewn for its covering. Her hazy figure disappeared the moment she spotted me trekking up the walkway. She was at the door with a smile and a hug ready for the taking and I dove into her open and readied embrace, my snow dusted jacket pressed firmly to her large chest, thawing me upon contact. Before I could fully snuggle in, she held me out at arm’s length, surveying head to toe with a keen eye. Clumps of melting slush fell to my feet, puddled dots of half-water, half-ice.

  “Made it home unscathed, looks like,” she said, nearly satisfied though not completely. As though checking every inch for a blemish, even looking behind my ears, she ultimately released me from her grip with a satisfied sigh. “Go wash up for dinner.” She twisted her hands in her red and white checkered apron. “Pot roast and sweet potatoes. Your favorite.”

  “Is he downstairs?” I asked as I fished the store bag from my backpack before dropping my school things to the hallway bench. “His room?”

  “In the study today.” Nana held her hands together through the cotton fabric. “Better light in there, you know.”

  The den was at the easternmost side of the house, which meant he’d been there since morning, the only time of day when light—ethereal in nature—streamed in abundance through the large arched bay window. When I was a little girl, I’d curl up on the window seat and watch the dust float like glitter suspended miraculously in air. I’d collect Mason jars full of it, never knowing I was storing away mites and allergens, only figuring I’d captured my own little bit of magic in that precious glass bottle. That room and what he created within it was magic to me. To everyone, really. Surely that would permeate the air, too.

  With quick strides, I jogged down the hallway. I hadn’t shed my boots at the door and I now left dirty puddles in my wake, but I was too excited to worry about that. I’d clean it up later if Nana didn’t get to it first, which I knew she would. She had a real thing for cleanliness.

  The door was slightly ajar, and though he wouldn’t likely answer, I still offered the courtesy of knocking.

  “I couldn’t remember,” I said, toeing open the door to allow me through after a respectable pause. With a paint tube in each hand, I held up the two shades of blue I’d purchased from the store. I flicked them back and forth like the swing of a pendulum. “Which one had you run out of?”

  Though the overhead lights were off—in reality probably never switched on—the last dregs of daylight funneled into the window, giving my eyes just enough assistance so I could see today’s artistic expression. And, like always, it was a breathtaking one. My heart stuttered and my throat instantly lumped up, a ball of emotion lodged within it.

  “Wow,” I whispered as I made my way to the canvas propped on his easel in the center of the room. Today’s masterpiece. “You’ve outdone yourself with this one.”

  It was abstract—like the good majority of his paintings—but this was different from the others. Where he usually preferred precise lines dissecting the colors, mood, and flow of his work, this painting blurred any boundary between shades and tones. All distinction was gone. It was swirling an
d twisting, absolute confusion articulated on the canvas with his brushes and oils.

  It felt like it could be his self-portrait.

  “I love this.”

  His deep brown eyes hadn’t strayed from their fixated and focused gaze on his work. When I spoke, though, I could see the way his right eyelid twitched upward, a slight hint of movement, a glimmer of adjustment, like the grabbing focus of a camera lens. His body language, though sometimes reserved to the flutter of eyelids, was something I’d become in tune with over the last six years. I could read the recognition in them—the hellos and goodbyes, the please stay or please go’s. I spoke his language fluently.

  “Tommy, this is phenomenal,” I told him, awe infiltrating my tone. “Is this one for the café or for keeps?”

  One blink.

  We’d be giving this away.

  I knew I shouldn’t be saddened by it—that there was no way we could keep all of his paintings without renting out a decent-sized storage unit to house them—but this is one I’d love to have. I felt him in the colors; I saw him in the strokes.

  For some reason beyond any logic I could come up with, part of me thought that maybe if I studied this particular work hard enough, maybe I could break that barrier. I knew there was a piece of every artist held within their artwork, and I was sure my dad was in his somewhere. In there somewhere.

  I looked to him, noticing that the damp cloth draped around his neck was in need of changing. With gingerly steps, so as not to startle, I crossed the room and took the fabric between my fingers, swiping his chin clean as I swept his graying hair from his eyes.

  I’m sure my dad is in there somewhere, I thought to myself again as I stared down at him, at the same tired eyes his mother wore earlier, at the drawn expression and lazy downturn of his mouth.

  I offered a small smile, the biggest one my heart was capable of manufacturing and switched my gaze over to the painting. He was in those colors. He was in the textures. He was in the paint. My dad was in there. Of course he was. He had to be.

  “I love it,” I said again, because if artists were embedded in a piece of their work, then it almost felt like a piece of me was saying I love you rather than it, and it felt genuine and right and long overdue. “I love it,” I emphasized once more, giving his shoulders the slightest of squeezes.

  Then I saw his reply, four sporadic blinks in return, but I pieced them together in my head and in my heart.

  And I knew that he loved me back.

  Heath

  “Grilled cheese, slathered in mayo and toasted on one side only. Pickle and barbecue chips. Strawberry lemonade. No ice.”

  I shot a glance over to Dom as I dumped the black plastic tub onto the Formica counter. The bucket was loaded with dirty dishes encrusted and caked with uneaten food, and my forearms killed from hauling it around the diner for the past hour. I flexed my hands and then balled them into fists to relieve some of the pressure, and it helped, only a little, though. It probably meant I should get back in the gym. I was turning into a serious weakling.

  “How do you even know her order?”

  Dom flicked his greasy hair back with a swift jerk of his head. He’d been asked by Sal to wear a hairnet, but there was no way Dom would be caught dead in one. Apparently, he preferred to risk his job over following health codes. “Because she’s weird as hell. Orders the same thing every single Tuesday. Hard to forget crazy like that.”

  He was right, she was a little different, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call her weird. Quirky, maybe. Quirky was harmless.

  I looked at her as discretely as possible, but even if I were full-on gawking, I didn’t think she’d notice. She was engrossed in the laminated menu in front of her and had ear buds tucked deep into her ears, her red hair curled around them. Why she would need a menu was beyond me since Dom said she was a regular with a “usual,” but she appeared so lost in thought I didn’t think anyone could break through it. A gargantuan jacket swallowed her whole, and she hadn’t taken off the rainbow-striped mittens from her hands. She looked like she was prepared for the blizzard of the century, and but the diner was a comfortably warm eighty degrees. Maybe it was from working my ass off for the past four hours, but I definitely had sweat collecting on my brow.

  “She’s kinda cute,” I offered with a noncommittal shrug and emptied my dishes into the sink to make room so I could go back to bussing. When I looked back to her, her mouth outlined whatever words echoed from her headphones, and she swayed a bit in a seated dance on her barstool, her eyelids slipping shut, totally lost and content. It was adorable and I felt the smile sneak onto my lips.

  “You need your eyes checked, Bro.”

  “Whatever,” was all the comeback I had.

  Dom was right about her order, and the way she ate it wasn’t any less bizarre. It was one bite of grilled cheese, two tiny nibbles of pickle, one long swallow of lemonade followed by three chips. I felt like a stalker that I was even aware of the science to it, but I couldn’t help but watch. She’d bit off her knit gloves with her teeth, one finger at a time, and arranged them on the counter so they were positioned one above the other, the fingers fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Then she picked up her sandwich, careful to flip it over so she couldn’t see the grill-lined underbelly, which left only the mayonnaise-coated side. Which was totally gross, but something about it didn’t seem gross because I was enamored by the detailed thought and meticulous purpose behind everything she did.

  At some point in the evening, things picked up and I actually had to do my job. That meant I wasn’t free to study this strange girl’s even stranger eating habits any longer. I supposed that was probably a good thing because I’d developed an unhealthy interest in the way she prepared and consumed her dinner. Dom said she was a regular customer. That would mean all my Tuesdays would be shot to hell from here on out if I remained this transfixed on her. My schedule had recently changed and now I only worked Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I needed to focus during more than two-thirds of my shifts. My paycheck depended on it.

  The Blue Duck Diner shut down at ten every night—eleven on weekends—but Sal, my boss, always instructed me to leave early. I had school in the morning and apparently there were child labor laws, all which worked to my benefit since I had one more year until adulthood. It meant I didn’t have to stay and close up. I left that dirty work to guys like Dom who were already eighteen and didn’t have school or curfew or laws protecting them from working a little too hard for a few too many hours.

  The diner had one of those vintage Mickey Mouse clocks where his arms and hands would spin around his body like a contortionist, and when he twisted impossibly to the ten o’clock position, I clocked out, giving a wave and a holler to my coworkers as I shouldered the door open, slipping my beanie onto my head. The diner’s bell chimed and I was greeted with a blast of icy air that felt like a cheese grater against my skin. It had been snowing with a vengeance for the last three weeks. At first, everyone got excited by that initial snowflake. How quickly we forgot that those downy white flutters quickly turned into black sludge that collected against the curbs and wedged cars in driveways as ice barricades. Winter was angry this year, and I was ready for Mother Nature to stop with the PMS.

  My family’s apartment was three blocks down from my work. Dad had offered me his car, but I figured waiting for it to warm up, along with scraping the sheet of ice from the windshield, would amount to work that didn’t outweigh the benefit of temporary shelter. Instead, I just pulled my wool scarf tighter to my neck and jammed my hands into my pockets. I kept my arms flush to my sides in an effort to trap the heat to my body, but what resulted was a waddle that made me look like a penguin.

  Which would’ve been fine had I been alone, without any witnesses.

  But I wasn’t alone. Grilled cheese girl was there.

  Well, not really there, but up ahead peddling clumsily on her bike. She looked like she’d just gotten her training wheels removed. The only thing that seemed
less uncertain than walking on an ice-coated sidewalk was biking on an ice-coated sidewalk. While the tread of my shoes slipped against the pavement, her tires wobbled in an uncoordinated way and it made me hold my breath tightly in my lungs. That hurt. Crazy bad. Everything hurt when you were freezing from the outside in. It was like I was watching a circus performer on a unicycle, waiting for one false move, one slip or fall.

  It occurred to me that I’d been waiting for that false move all night. I had to admit, it was mildly refreshing to see her a little out of control like this. Her meal at the diner had been so controlled that it made me wonder about her. It made me question whether every aspect of her life was as methodically planned and executed. I couldn’t imagine living like that. It would feel like a trap, a sort of prison, I supposed, and that seemed awful.

  Seeing her weave and slide back and forth on the walkway made me smile.

  Maybe that made me sick, but I didn’t care. It was just my natural response to her.

  And apparently my other natural response was to jog as briskly as I could to match her pace. I suddenly found myself gaining speed, my boots pounding the pavement, legs racing to catch up. And then, as the red DON’T WALK hand flashed on the light in the intersection, I was right at her side.

  And she was on the ground.

  I hadn’t meant to startle her, but I guess when I said, “Hi,”—or more accurately screamed it—something about the act pushed her completely off her bicycle and onto the icy ground. She’d turned into an upside down turtle wearing a ridiculously large parka.

  Words came out louder when you breathed heavier. Like all that extra air added volume, too. So I’d screamed at her. I felt horrible. And awkward. Why had I felt the need to run up to her? And why did I shout out my hello? God, I was terrible at this whole life thing. And now she was on the ground, her bike a crumpled metal heap on top of her body. Hurriedly, I bent down to lift the bicycle from her. I set it to the side and then offered my hand, not sure how else to repair this.