is stressful. You’re probably going to have sex while you’re back out in the world. Don’t let it become a wall between you and us. Sin should always be a bridge that brings you back to God, not a wall between you and Him.’”
“You had a nice abbot.”
“He’s a very wise man,” Roland said. “He also told me to be honest with whoever I’m with. Don’t raise expectations, that sort of thing.”
“I’m not expecting a marriage proposal.”
“You can be honest with me, Allison. Don’t let me being a monk put a wall between you and me. If you have something to tell me, tell me.”
“I keep thinking you’re going to judge me.”
“If I wanted to judge people all day I’d either be a priest or get a Facebook account,” Roland said. “I didn’t do either.”
A night breeze blew past, and she shivered. She wanted to ask Roland to put his arms around her to warm her up, but she didn’t. They were strangers again. He’d been inside her not half an hour ago and now she couldn’t even ask him to hold her. She and McQueen had been willing strangers, especially during sex. She’d played her role and he’d played his and the unspoken agreement was to never peek behind the curtain. And she’d never wanted to peek. But with Roland she did. She wanted him behind the curtain with her. She didn’t want to pretend anymore.
“If you weren’t a monk this would easier,” she said.
“Even if I were the judgmental type,” Roland said, “I don’t have much of a leg to stand on after tonight.”
“Good point,” she said, dropping her head between her arms to hide her smile.
“Are you thinking about him? Your ex?” Roland asked. He sounded serious now. It was so strange to hear his voice like that.
“I’m thinking about you,” she said. “And him. How to tell you about him.”
“Just tell me.”
“I lied to you, too,” she said at last.
“About what?”
“McQueen.”
“What? Cooper McQueen? Your boss?”
She nodded.
“He wasn’t my boss.”
Roland stared at her, wide-eyed in surprise. “Cooper McQueen...the billionaire investor guy? You were his girlfriend for six years?”
“No. We were sleeping together,” she said. “For six years. But I wasn’t his girlfriend.”
“Then what were you? Secret wife?”
“Secret mistress. His bought and paid-for secret mistress.”
Roland turned his head quickly and looked at her through narrowed eyes.
“Told you so,” she said. He was clearly stunned. No words necessary.
“A mistress?” Roland said.
“Or a kept woman. I’ve called myself that a few times.”
“So...that’s still a thing? Kept women?”
She laughed. She hadn’t expected to laugh during this conversation.
“Yeah,” she said. “Kept women are still a thing. Where there are men with money and women without it, it’ll be a thing.”
Roland waved his hand to indicate she should keep talking. At first the words didn’t want to come out, but then eventually everything started to spill. Finally she managed to look Roland in the face. He didn’t seem to be mad, though he didn’t seem all that happy, either.
“You expected better of me, didn’t you?” she asked him.
“I expected better for you,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Obviously you and I never had a normal brother-sister bond,” he said.
“Obviously,” Allison said.
“But I always loved you,” he said. “I don’t like the thought of you being trapped in a tower by some rich guy using you for sex.”
Allison smiled wanly, her laugh hollow and cynical to her own ears. She felt older than Roland then. He seemed so innocent to her, this noble-hearted monk. He had no idea what her life had been like with McQueen.
“I wasn’t trapped except by choice. I have could left him if I’d wanted to. And I’m not ashamed of my relationship with him. I’m not comfortable talking about it with people but...but I know I should have told you about it before we slept together.”
“I’m glad you didn’t tell me first. I might not have slept with you otherwise.”
“Ah-ha. Judging. I knew it.”
“No, it’s not that, I swear,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. “I mean... I wouldn’t want you to think I came to your room because I thought you were, you know, easy.”
“I’m not easy at all,” she said. “McQueen’s handsome and a billionaire. Fact is, I’m quite difficult.”
Roland held up two fingers.
“What?” she asked, eyeing those two fingers.
“I’m pretty difficult, too,” he said.
“Wait. I was your second?” she asked, pointing at herself. He nodded. “Wow. So it was me and someone from a long time ago?”
He nodded again.
“Hope it was worth the wait,” she said.
He nodded again, slowly, and with his eyes wide open.
“I feel very honored to be your second,” she said.
“And I’m honored to be your rebound monk,” Roland said. “I’m not anywhere close to being a billionaire.”
“It wasn’t really the money, you know,” she said. “The money made it possible but...truth is, I didn’t want to be alone. I needed someone in my life. McQueen was definitely better than nothing.”
“I thought he had a girlfriend. In the article where I found your name...he definitely had a girlfriend.”
“Oh, he did,” she said. “And he had me, too.”
“You deserve more than that,” Roland said.
“Maybe,” she said. “But in fairness to McQueen, he made it very clear from the beginning what I was going to be to him. I was in his life to provide sex on demand. Girlfriends had their own lives. Girlfriends could say, ‘Not tonight, dear, I have a headache.’ My job was to be the girl who never had a headache. I was a luxury purchase, and the luxury was that I was there when he wanted me, and when he didn’t, I simply ceased to exist. I was—” she blew on her fingertips “—a ghost.”
“A ghost in love,” Roland said.
“He called me Cricket,” she said. “How can you not fall in love with someone who calls you Cricket?”
“Why Cricket?”
“Our first trip he took me on was to New York. I was twenty, summer before my junior year of college. We went to a Broadway play and it was a nice night so we walked back to the hotel. We passed some homeless people and I told McQueen he should give them money. He said being with me was like having his own personal Jiminy Cricket. I was his conscience.”
“It sounds like he cared about you.”
“You’re being nice.”
“He kept you for six years,” Roland said. “He must have cared about you a little bit, anyway.”
“Maybe. Not that it matters one way or another. It’s over. He met someone and they had a one-night stand. And, bam, she’s pregnant. So goodbye to me.”
“Ouch,” Roland said, wincing dramatically.
“Yeah, ouch,” she said. “But it’s the right thing to do. There’s a kid involved now so...” She took a shuddering breath, wiped her own tears before Roland could. “It’s for the best. I had to put my whole life on hold for him. No job. No boyfriend. The girl in the tower is a romantic image to anybody but the girl in the tower.”
Allison felt the tears threatening to come again and she blinked and blinked until she’d blinked them away. Roland stood between her knees, his hands warm on her bare thighs. She covered his hands with hers and looked at their entwined fingers.
“So that’s it,” she whispered. “The story.”
“Is it the whole story?” Roland asked.
“When he walked out the door two days ago,” Allison said, “I was seven years old again waiting for my mom to come home from the drugstore where she’d gone to get m
e some cough syrup. It should have taken thirty minutes. Two hours later she still wasn’t back. I just... I walked around the apartment calling for her like a lost dog or something. Like she’d hear me calling and come back.” Allison blinked more hot tears from her eyes. “She never came back. I barely remember her, but I still hate being left alone.”
“Is that why you’re here? You didn’t want to be alone?”
“Probably.” She realized as she said it how cold that sounded. “Sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. If Dad wasn’t dying, I doubt I would have had the guts to write you, anyway. I’m glad I did, though.”
“Even knowing who you just slept with?”
“Especially knowing who I just slept with,” he said, smiling.
She playfully but not-terribly-gently elbowed him in the ribs.
“I deserved that,” he said. “You okay?”
“I will be.” Allison shrugged, pretending she was fine already. “You know what’s funny? His new lady told him that I couldn’t be in the picture anymore. That’s what she said. I was never in the picture. Except the sort of pictures you shred and then burn the negatives after.”
“Negatives, huh?” Roland said.
“McQueen doesn’t trust the Cloud with his dick pics.”
Roland laughed. At least one of them could laugh about it.
“If it helps, you’re in our pictures,” Roland said. “Lots of them. They’re up in Dad’s office.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, then laughed tiredly.
“What’s funny?”
“Oh, thinking about the things we let rich men get away with. McQueen’s girlfriends knew about me. I mean, they didn’t know my name, where I lived, but they all knew he had someone on the side. He warned them. And they let him get away with it. Never would have happened if he’d been a mailman or a mechanic.”
“Look at Dad,” Roland said. “You think a normal man, a poor guy, would do what he did? He could literally walk into a foster home, snap his fingers and walk out with a kid.” He raised his hand and snapped his fingers like a diner rudely summoning a waiter. “When a rich man does it, it’s philanthropy. When a poor man does it, they call the cops on him.”
“Dr. Capello helped people. McQueen helped himself,” Allison said. “Must be nice, though.”
“Being that rich?” Roland said.
“Yeah, so rich you can snap your fingers and get someone to come home with you just like that,” she said. “Think it would work for us?”
Roland looked at her before raising his hand and snapping his fingers in the air twice. Allison grinned and crooked her finger at him. He wrapped a strong arm around her waist and pulled her away from the deck railing, leading her by the hand into the sunroom.
“Hey,” he said, once they were back inside the house. “What do you know? It does work.”
“Roland Capello,” she said, running her hands up his bare arms to his shoulders. “You really are the nicest boy in the world.”
“Am I? Back at the monastery it’s compline. I should be at night prayers.” Allison looked into his eyes. He didn’t have bedroom eyes, not like McQueen did. Roland had hallway eyes—labyrinthine hallways made of marble and lit by torches resting in iron sconces. She could wander those shadowy hallways forever and never once feel lost.
“You are nice,” she said, sliding her fingers slowly down his broad chest and over his tight stomach. He shivered at her soft touch and she smiled at his shivering. Her Roland, a monk. A sweet, gentle, tenderhearted monk and who’d been with two girls in his entire thirty years. She would have to teach him a few of the things McQueen had taught her.
“Very, very nice. But guess what?”
“What?” he asked as he brushed his hands through her hair.
Allison dropped down onto her knees, but not to pray.
“I’m nice, too.”
Chapter 11
Allison awoke the next morning and found herself alone in the bed. The sheets were cool next to her. Roland had been gone for some time now. Bracing herself to meet the sunlight, she opened her eyes and saw a note lying on the pillow next to hers.
Good morning, sunshine—
I’ll be at the hospital all morning with Dad. Deacon and Thora will probably be back by noon. Make yourself at home.
Thank you for last night. If you want a kept man, I promise my rates are very reasonable.
Love,
Roland
P.S. There are no secrets in this house. Be prepared for Hurricane Deacon. Once he finds out, we will not hear the end of it.
P.S. #2. I wasn’t kidding about you being in our pictures. Go look in Dad’s office on his desk.
She smiled at the letter. She was glad there didn’t seem to be any lingering awkwardness in his words. Roland had never been the dramatic sort. And Deacon? Oh, she could handle Deacon. She kind of liked the thought of being teased for sleeping with Roland. She’d never been teased over a guy before. Her one serious adult relationship had been with McQueen, and he’d been a secret.
After her shower she made herself a small breakfast of yogurt and toast. Apart from Brien, who was asleep on the sunroom sofa, she was alone in the house. For a few minutes she wandered around downstairs, letting the memories of her time here wash over her. Loud family dinners in the dining room. Playing charades in the sunroom after sunset. Dr. Capello helping her with her science project in the kitchen. They’d made a volcano, a mini Mount Hood. Happy memories, all of them. She found more happy memories on the second floor. Thora doing her hair for her—a French braid one day, pigtails the next. Deacon and Roland swinging her in a blanket while she yelled, “Faster! Faster!” She and Kendra reading on the deck while out in the ocean, the boys trying to impress them with their pitiful attempts at surfing.
Allison walked from bedroom to bedroom, growing younger as the memories teased her into smiling, tickled her into laughing. Warm memories, sunlit memories. Memories that made it almost impossible for her to reconcile the beauty she’d found in this house with the ugly way it all ended. She’d known nothing but love here, nothing but kindness. But someone must have left a door open a crack and evil had snuck in when no one was looking.
Allison climbed the stairs to the third floor, where she knew Dr. Capello’s office waited. These were the stairs, the ones they’d said she’d fallen down, which meant she’d been on the third floor for some reason. Yet, she couldn’t think of why she’d be up here. This floor had been mostly off-limits to the kids since Dr. Capello kept his office there—medical records, computers and other expensive equipment. But if they were sick and had to stay home from school, Dr. Capello would let them upstairs to spend the day with him. He had a couch in his office and Allison remembered dozing off a fever under a blanket, waking to read or watch his small portable TV while he worked on whatever it was he did back then.
Was that why she’d been up here that day? Had she been sick? It was summer, so there would have been no school to miss. Maybe she snuck up here? Did someone lure her upstairs for the sole purpose of pushing her down? Or had she fallen completely by accident and the phone call to her aunt was something entirely unrelated? If it weren’t for that call, Allison would be sure the fall was an accident. But she couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. She’d been betrayed twice in this house—first by whoever had hurt her, and then by Dr. Capello when he let her go without a fight. Allison stared down the steps, trying to trigger a memory—anything about that moment, that day, that week.
Nothing. If she had any memories of that time, they were locked up in a vault in her brain, and she’d long ago lost the combination.
Allison gave up trying to remember. She turned from the stairs and wandered down the hallway, opening the door to Dr. Capello’s office.
She smiled as she stepped inside. Dr. Capello had truly snagged the best room in the house. It was spacious and airy, with bright