Almost Home. Debbie Macomber

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      I drew my strutting rooster and my busy-body chickens. I drew the blue ocean in back of them. I drew Gordon, the anxiety-ridden horse. I drew my barn. And I wrote the dialogue between the animals as they figured out who would be president of the farm.

      Goose couldn’t simply take over because she wanted to, and Fox couldn’t be president, because he was threatening to eat the chickens unless they voted for him. Donkey couldn’t be president, because he had been bribing the other animals, telling the pigs he would bring them donuts if they voted for him.

      Next I wrote the speech that presidential candidate Cassy Cat gave to her fellow animals. Cassy Cat is a smart, calm cat who wants everyone to have a voice in her government, even the old horses, the weird new goat from a farm with a name no one can pronounce, and the duck with the green feathers who is different from all the other ducks.

      I drew and wrote until I couldn’t see straight.

      I turned off the light, but dancing before my eyes was Aiden Bridger, with his full lips, knowing green eyes, fishing pole in hand. Next to him was a giant newspaper article, my real name all over it next to my books, along with all the old photos, the old scandal, and my latest arrest for the skylight-busting incident.

      I trusted Aiden. But after this, he would probably never trust me.

      I conked my head on my table.

      For the next five days, I worked fiendishly. Hardly moved except to go and help Christie, who was crying because she didn’t know why she was crying. I made her pancakes with applesauce and crushed potato chips, as she requested, then put her to bed, as she was the size of a house. She smelled like baby powder and roses, as always.

      “Mommy has some big, fat babies in her tummy,” Wendi Jo, her daughter, whispered.

      “Yeah. I felt the babies in there,” Jeremiah said. He’s four. “One kick my hand. He wearing soccer cleats. I felt ’em.”

      “How they gonna come out?” Rosie Mae asked, three years old. “She got a zipper in her tummy?”

      Chapter Eight

      “You lied.”

      I sank into my Adirondack chair on my front porch as Aiden stalked up the steps after slamming the door of his truck. He was not happy. “You lied, Chalese. You lied by omission.”

      My lifeless fingers dropped my coffee cup which smashed on the porch. I stood up, my anger rising. I did not exactly appreciate being called a liar. “I was not required to tell you the full truth about myself, Aiden, or my past, when you were writing a story about me for a huge newspaper, one I didn’t want written in the first place. Why should I make your job easier? Why should I provide information that I didn’t want out there? Because you kissed me? Sorry, Aiden, I’m not that easy.”

      “You had to know that I would find out.” He put his palms up in the air, exasperated. “You knew it.”

      “Yeah, Aiden, I thought there was a pretty good probability that you would find out. But I was hoping, hoping against hope, that you wouldn’t dig that deep, and if you did, that you’d let it go.”

      His glare about seared me in half. “Maybe you thought if I was turned upside down by my feelings about you I wouldn’t do my job? I’d let it slide, let details slide, not do the research I always do?” His green eyes flashed with all his pent-up anger, the betrayal I knew he felt.

      “Maybe. I hoped.” He stood two feet from me. I could smell him—island air, mint, aftershave, and him. If he wasn’t mad at me, I’d want to kiss that man until my lips fell off. He was drop-dead sexy when he was ticked.

      “I know you aren’t who you say you are. I know your real name is Jennifer Piermont, your father is Richard Piermont III, your mother is Rebecca Piermont, and your sister Christie is actually Holly Piermont.”

      I swallowed real hard. Hearing his name made me feel like I was eating rocks.

      “You’re from New York City. Your father, a private investor, was arrested when you were fourteen for defrauding his clients of millions and millions of dollars. It was a huge scandal at the time because of who he was—a pillar of New York society, on all the right boards, went to all the right parties, belonged to the right country club. All those people trusted him with their last dime. He took all their dimes, their quarters, everything.”

      “He would have taken their shirts if he could have, Aiden. Ripped them right off.”

      “When the scandal broke, there were cameras and reporters stalking you and your family. During the trial, one of the disgruntled clients tried to shoot your father in open court. He missed and was tackled by a guard. Luckily you and your mother and Christie were already gone by then. Your father went to jail for ten years.”

      He put his hands on his hips, pushing his leather jacket back. “Your mother arranged to have everything sold, your apartment in New York, the house in Connecticut, the house in the Bahamas, the art, the furniture, and signed it all off to a fund set up to reimburse her husband’s clients. She made no claim to anything in the divorce, and in fact left home with you girls and nothing else. You later drove West and came to Whale Island, a place she had vacationed with her own family several times as a teenager.”

      There went my world.

      It had imploded.

      Was the article being printed as we spoke? Was it already online?

      “You all changed your names.”

      “Yes, we did. We spent much of our time in the car thinking up new names, and when we arrived my mother legally changed our names. A new identity, a new life.” Why hide anything now? “We covered up our old lives. My mother told everyone we were from the East Coast, she was divorced, and she was a housekeeper. She got jobs as a housekeeper and maid. On the side, she started her own small business.”

      “And you disappeared.”

      “Yes, from all those furious people, people who had a right to be furious, but not a right to take out their fury on me and my sister.”

      He groaned. “Want to hear what else I’ve learned? Something that makes me feel like pummeling your father?”

      I knew what was coming, and I braced myself for a nauseous cascade of black, annihilating memories.

      “Police were called to your apartment on Fifth Avenue three times for domestic abuse. Your mother went to the hospital on a number of occasions.”

      “Well, aren’t you the sleuth.” I felt hot tears swim to my eyes. “Want to know a tad more, Skyscraper? My mother told me later that when she went to the hospital for her injuries, my father told the doctors there she was mentally ill and had done it to herself. I doubt the doctors believed him, I’m sure my mother denied it, but it put my already unstable mother in an emotional tailspin.”

      “I can’t believe this.” He was furious, but I could tell it had shifted somewhat from me to my father. “I can’t believe you lived through that.”

      “Me, either.” When I remember that time, I don’t know how I survived it—except that my dad was gone a lot on business. “Once, when my mother got up enough courage and left СКАЧАТЬ