Steadfast (True North #2)

  Grandpa Shipley said grace and then dishes began to circle the table. Tonight Mrs. Shipley had made braised beef short ribs and Audrey had done spicy broccoli rabe and a mushroom risotto that smelled so good it made me want to weep.

  An unfamiliar young woman sat across the table from me tonight. She had beautiful dark hair and a round, very pregnant belly.

  “Have you met our friend, Zara?” Griffin asked.

  “I’m Audrey’s friend,” Zara corrected. “Griffin I could take or leave.”

  That got her some laughs all around.

  “You manage the Mountain Goat,” I said, remembering where I’d heard her name before. Zara was Griff’s ex, but they were friendly now, even if she liked to tease him. “We haven’t met because bars aren’t really my thing anymore.”

  “Well, they seem to run in my family,” she said, passing a basket of bread to Grandpa Shipley. “Did you hear? My brother Alec wants to buy that mill the state is auctioning off. The announcement was in the paper every day this month.”

  “Does he really? It’s a cool old structure,” Griffin said. “I think it’s been empty since the flooding from Hurricane Irene. I would have assumed it was too much of a wreck to save.”

  “It’s not in bad shape,” she said. “Here, I’ll show you.” She dug her phone out of her purse and tapped the screen to pull up some photos she’d taken. “It has a beautiful interior,” she said. “The exposed brick walls still look great, and the original floorboards are mostly intact.”

  “Is your brother really going to buy it?” Audrey wanted to know.

  “If he can get it cheaply enough. My uncles are worried that he’ll overpay. They keep telling him how hard it is to make money running a bar. But I think they just don’t want the competition.”

  Audrey whistled. “Ouch.”

  “Right? At least I’m not the one everybody’s mad at this month. Becoming an unwed mother is old news now, I guess.”

  “Does the place need a lot of renovation?” Griff asked.

  “Yes and no. Alec has big plans for the building. He wants to make himself a big apartment upstairs. That will take a lot of labor. But apparently just getting the bar up and running won’t be such a big deal. They won’t serve food, so they don’t need a functioning kitchen.”

  “Just a liquor license and a pool table,” May suggested.

  “Works for me,” Griff agreed. “We’ll be his first customers.”

  “Zara, would you jump ship and work for him?” Audrey asked.

  Zara shook her head. “I don’t think I could work for Alec. We’d kill each other. The only reason I can manage my uncles’ place is that Uncle Bill never shows up. Though he’s going to have to in the springtime.” She rubbed her belly.

  “How’ve you been feeling?” May asked.

  “Can’t complain. I’ve stopped feeling nauseous, which really helps. The baby is kicking me right now. Want to feel?”

  May got up and stood by Zara, putting a hand to her round belly. “Omigod. That’s so cool. I think she’s doing yoga in there.”

  “Who says it’s a girl?” Griff demanded.

  “Who says it’s not?” Audrey challenged, giving her man a big, teasing smile.

  He gave her a hot look, and I had to look away. Those two had what Sophie and I used to have—love, passion and the promise of more to come.

  “So, Jude?” Zachariah said quietly from a couple seats away.

  He was a soft-spoken guy, so I had to strain to hear him. “What’s up, Zach?”

  “I went up to Marker Motors to order some parts last week, and I heard Marker say he was looking for a body guy.”

  “Did he, now?”

  “Yeah. He was grumbling about his guy moving away to get married. Marker’s a good dude, too. I like ’im.”

  “Do you know him well?” I had to ask. “If I just walked in there and filled out an application, I’d never get a call.”

  “Why not?” asked Dylan Shipley.

  “My resume is pretty shaky,” I said, which made a few people laugh. “Seriously, though. There’s always a box to check that asks if you’ve been convicted of a crime. You check that box, nobody calls you back. The end.”

  Griffin refilled his girlfriend’s wine glass, a thoughtful expression on his face. “What if we all had to confess the worst thing we’d ever done to the people we meet—the meanest thing you ever said or the most careless you’ve ever been?” He made a face. “It wouldn’t be pretty. Just because someone hasn’t broken the law doesn’t mean they’re a good person.”

  Zara set her water glass down with a thunk. “I’d never have a job again if confession was a requirement.”

  “You’re not mean!” Audrey cried. “You’re the nicest person in Vermont.”

  Zara shook her head. “Not always. And I was a horrible teenager. Really the worst. My mother went entirely gray—every hair on her head—between my thirteenth and my eighteenth year.” She put a hand to her belly. “I hope karma isn’t real, or I’m in trouble with this one.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “If we’re all going to write down our most embarrassing thing…” Ruth paused to think before she finished her sentence. “We should also be able to write down the best thing we’ve ever done. That counts, too.”

  There were murmurs of agreement, but I didn’t feel soothed. The worst thing I’d done was easy enough to identify. But the best thing I’d ever done? Well, I hadn’t done it yet. I hoped.

  “You just missed Sophie,” my father said as I entered the garage the next day after going out to buy sandwiches.

  Damn it, my heart said even as my asshole brain said, Good thing. “What did she want?”

  “To give you this.” He passed me a sheet of paper folded in two.

  I flipped open the note.

  Jude—

  I found a good use of the money you made off the Porsche parts. I donated it to a great cause, and I really want you to see the results. Meet me at the hospital tomorrow at ten AM in the Neurology Department on the second floor, B-Wing.

  —Sophie

  “Uh. I guess I have to go somewhere tomorrow morning for a couple hours.”

  “Okay.”

  I read the letter three more times, looking for clues. Her instructions didn’t leave any room for argument—she just ordered me to show up. That pissed me off for about two seconds, maybe three. Then I spent the next twenty-four hours counting down until I could see Sophie, if only for a few minutes.

  The hospital was only a fifteen-minute drive away, but I hadn’t accounted for all the snow we’d been getting. The parking lot’s snow banks were so high that it took me extra time to find a spot. By the time I made it to the Neurology Department I was about five minutes late. Sophie wasn’t in the waiting room.

  “Are you Jude?” a woman wearing scrubs asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Please come with me. Sophie has already gone into the auditory testing room. You’re going to watch from here.”

  I followed her into a darkened, closet-sized room with a window and two chairs in it. The window was one-way glass, so I could see into an office with a table and chairs and a desk with an unusual computer on it.

  There were four people there, but my eyes found Sophie first. She looked ridiculously beautiful in a soft blue sweater and black pants. She bent over a toddler—a little girl who was sitting on her mother’s lap. Sophie seemed to be trying to entertain the child while a technician in a lab coat fit something over her ear. A hearing aid, maybe?

  The toddler watched Sophie with a rapt expression as Sophie held out a book—the kind with the cardboard pages that babies can’t destroy very easily. “What’s this?” Sophie asked, opening to a page I couldn’t see.

  With one hand, the toddler raised her fingers up in the air and made a bouncing motion.

  “Bunny!” said her mother behind her. “Good girl.”

  “Okay, we’re all set,” the technician said, leaving the hearing aid on
the baby and walking around the desk to take a seat in front of the computer monitor. “I’ll just need a minute to make some adjustments.”

  Sophie had told me about her case with the deaf toddler who needed cochlear implants. But she’d never told me how that had turned out. This must be the child?

  The baby began to look restless, as if she wouldn’t mind climbing down off her mother’s lap to go explore some of the machinery in the room. She made an impatient whine.

  “Almost there, baby girl,” Sophie said.

  “Here we go, I’m turning it on,” the woman at the terminal said. “Talk to her, Mom.”

  “Can you hear me?” the young woman asked her child. The mother could not have been more than twenty.

  The baby didn’t react to her question. She watched Sophie, waiting for her to turn another page in the book.

  “Keep talking,” the technician suggested. “I’m going to adjust the volume.”

  “Hi, baby,” the mother said as her daughter continued to look the other way. “Can you hear Mama’s voice? Hi, Samantha. How is Samantha today?”

  Suddenly, the toddler’s whole body jerked with surprise. Her eyes popped wide and her mouth fell open. She made a breathy little gasp and turned her chin toward her mother.

  “Hi, Samantha,” her mother said, voice shaking now. “Can you hear me, baby girl?”

  Samantha gave a loud squeal. She raised both chubby arms in the air and shook them.

  “Do you hear your name?” Tears leaked from the mother’s eyes.

  Samantha squealed again. She lifted one stubby hand up to her mother’s mouth and patted her lips.

  Her mother laughed and cried at the same time. “She can! She can hear me. Finally.”

  The little girl gave another little shriek, still touching her mom’s mouth.

  “You want me to sing?” Her mother smiled through her tears. She took a shaky breath and then sang the first line of an old song. “Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…” But then she burst into tears. The toddler began to look worried. Her little chin quivered.

  Sophie to the rescue.

  My girl scooted her chair closer and took the little girl’s hand in hers, getting the baby’s attention. Then she sang the next line of the song. “If that mockingbird don’t sing, mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”

  It was the first time I’d heard Sophie sing in more than three years. Her perfect voice rose up, clear and shimmering. The baby turned to Sophie with wide-open eyes, her round face rapturous.

  “And if that diamond ring don’t shine…”

  Something wet dripped off my jaw and splashed onto my hand. Startled, I wiped my eyes with both hands. On the other side of the glass, Sophie continued to sing, her gorgeous voice cutting through every one of my defenses. The first time I ever heard her sing we were really just kids. Right away I’d wanted to be a man for her—to take good care of all that beauty.

  I’d just had no clue how.

  Her sweet voice went on, wrecking me all over again. “…you’ll still be the sweetest little baby in town.”

  Fuck. I shoved my fist against my mouth as Sophie began a new song. “You are my sunshine,” she sang.

  On the other side of the glass, the young mother wiped her eyes with a succession of tissues, and even the technician looked pretty misty as she made adjustments to her equipment and took notes.

  The tears rained down my face and I gave up trying to stop them. It had been a long time since I let myself feel hopeful. That’s what Sophie had done to me today—forced my cranky self to be optimistic. She walked into this building every day and helped people find their own miracles.

  She’d been trying to help me find mine, too. Like a jackass, I hadn’t let her.

  Shit.

  Bracing my head in my hands, I just let it out. I don’t know if it was one minute or ten minutes later when the door clicked open, and Sophie sat down on the chair beside me. I pressed my fingertips to my tear ducts and tried to breathe deeply.

  “You paid for that,” she whispered.

  “But you made it happen. You kill me, baby. Every day.”

  She took my hand in hers and held it. “But it’s the same for me. What if we stopped trying to worry so much about who was responsible for every little thing that happens? Otherwise we’ll miss all the good stuff.” She nudged me to look through the two-way glass again where the young mother was holding her little girl, telling her how much she loved her.

  Maybe Sophie was right.

  “I’m sorry,” I gasped.

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t think I deserved you. Fuck, I still don’t. But maybe it isn’t about that.”

  My words didn’t make a whole lot of sense out of context, but Sophie and I had always been on the same page. “It isn’t about that,” she agreed, laying a hand on my back and rubbing. “Maybe you also didn’t deserve a pack of shitty friends who told you it was a good idea to snort your first pill.”

  Not a bad point, really.

  “I mean it, Jude. Enough worrying about what we deserve. Let’s appreciate what we have.”

  I sat up and pulled Sophie against my chest. I buried my wet face in her hair and wrapped my arms around her. “The only thing I have ever been afraid of is losing you.”

  Sophie snorted into my shirt. “So why did you say we couldn’t be together?” She didn’t add “dumbass” to the end of that sentence, but I heard it anyway.

  “I didn’t want to dread what I thought was inevitable. That’s why I used drugs in the first place. Dread.”

  “Of what?”

  This wasn’t easy to admit. “I knew you were leaving Vermont, and I wasn’t going anywhere. You were the best thing that ever happened to me, and I knew I was going to put you on a plane to New York and you’d be gone.”

  “Jude!”

  “I’m not trying to make you feel bad.”

  “Honey, that was a really grim outlook. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened that way.”

  “I was nineteen, Soph. I thought I knew everything.”

  She hugged me tighter. “I need you, dumbass.”

  There it was. I laughed.

  “…and you are smart about a lot of things. I think so highly of you. But I need you to give yourself a little more credit.”

  “I do. I will. If you let me try again, I won’t be such an idiot.”

  “You better mean that,” she said, her voice shaky. “Don’t run away from me again, Jude Nickel.”

  “I won’t. It doesn’t fucking work, either. You own me. You always have.”

  “Even when you’re not perfect, you’re still mine.”

  Shit, I really was. “Okay, baby. Okay. I get it now. I’m truly sorry.”

  She pressed closer. “I know you are. And we’re going to be okay. But you have to believe it or it won’t be true.”

  “I want to believe it. I love you, Sophie. Always have.”

  “I love you, too.”

  My eyes leaked again. We sat there for a long time until I got myself under control. “You probably have places you need to be,” I said, rubbing her back. I could hold her all day.

  “Not for a couple hours,” she said. “Let’s go sit somewhere and have coffee.”

  “Where?” Just because I was ready to admit that I wanted to be with Sophie didn’t mean we could go public.

  “Anywhere. The diner on Main Street.”

  “But what if…?”

  She shook her head. “We’re not in Colebury. It will be fine. My dad’s spies are at work or sleeping off the night shift. Let’s not worry so much for once. Come on.” She offered me her hand.

  I took it.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Sophie

  Internal DJ tuned to: “You Are My Sunshine”

  Sitting there in the booth with Jude, I felt happier than I’d felt in a long time. He watched me with big silver eyes and listened to baby Samantha’s story.

  “Ev
ery month that went by without her hearing could have produced up to a three-month language lag,” I told him. “No moment of my work life has ever been as rewarding as watching her hear for the first time.”

  Jude smiled at me over his coffee cup. “It was so freaking cool, Soph. I can’t believe a machine can make a deaf child hear.”

  “It depends on the cause of deafness. But it works for Samantha. After she gets used to the implant, hopefully she can get another one in the other ear. But insurance doesn’t always pay for two. It barely paid for this one. That’s why I kicked in that money…”

  He put his ridiculously attractive face in one hand and smiled at me again. “Good use for it.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  The waitress brought us our food—BLTs with extra-crispy bacon. As he took his first bite, Jude’s feet captured mine under the table. He and I were due for some peaceful, sunlit moments together. I watched the man I loved eat his sandwich, and my heart swelled a little more.

  “What?” he asked, wiping his mouth. “Did I get mayo somewhere mayo shouldn’t be?”

  “No,” I whispered. “You’re just beautiful, that’s all.”

  He rolled his eyes a little, because men don’t like to be called “beautiful,” even when it’s true. “Back atcha, babe.”

  “I have some things I need to ask you about,” I admitted. “But I think I know a way that we can stop rehashing the past. If you’ll hear me out.”

  Jude tucked his napkin into his lap and studied me. “I’ll always hear you out. But I do worry about you.”

  “I know. And it’s possible that I’ve been a tiny little bit obsessive with my curiosity.”

  “A tiny bit, huh?” He hid his smile behind his coffee mug.

  “Okay, a lot obsessive. But I have a plan to settle things once and for all.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  I cleared my throat. “You know May is in her second year at the Vermont Law School.”

  “Right.”

  “She has a lawyer friend there who looks at criminal appeals on a pro-bono basis. What if we shared with him all the things that I think are strange about the way your case was handled? If he thinks there’s something there, you would ask him to pursue it. But if he doesn’t think it looks fishy, I’ll just drop it. I’ll stop asking questions.”