LITMIR.BIZ

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walk again, leaving imprints to fill with water behind him. With a couple of quick steps, Juliet caught up with him.

      “What’s so funny?”

      “Not funny,” he said, still grinning as he looked down at her with an expression that was more bemused than humorous. “I’m just trying to imagine two of you in the same house.”

      “Marcie isn’t like me,” she assured him. “She’s a lot more laid-back.”

      “You sound as if that’s a bad thing.”

      “Of course it’s not bad.” She reached down to pick up a beautiful, luminescent shell. A rare find. “It’s just like anything else, though. For every good side, there’s a corresponding bad. Take me, for instance. I’m a go-getter, but I push too hard sometimes. I don’t always know when to quit.”

      And take you. You’re so caught up in telling the complete truth you aren’t ever going to forgive me if you find out the truth I haven’t told you.

      “So what’s the downside that brought that worried tone to your voice when you mentioned your sister?”

      It had been like this nine years ago. Her urge to confide in this man—to tell him things she didn’t talk to anyone about. Back then it had been dreams of the future and her need to prove herself.

      That was how they’d started that long-ago night—drinking and confiding, partly because it had been so safe. They’d been strangers, with nothing invested in the relationship, who would never see each other again.

      A couple of kids were throwing a Frisbee behind one of the houses above them. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the innocence in their laughter carried clearly.

      “Marcie has a tendency to settle for less than she wants. Our mother did that. And I saw how it ended. I will not see my sister die the same way. I don’t think I’d survive.”

      “If your sister is anything like you, she has that core of inner steel we spoke about earlier. It would stop her before she took her own life.”

      Maybe. But then, Juliet had been fairly certain her mother had that same core. Where did Blake think Juliet had gotten it from? Certainly not from the weak and clinging man who’d fathered her.

      She had to tell him about the bank statements, and then leave. Juliet smoothed her thumb over the soft inside of the shell in her palm.

      Not that she had to hurry home. Tonight was Mary Jane and Marcie’s night together.

      “Marcie’s pregnant.”

      He was the only person she trusted who would never know her sister. That was the reason she’d confided something that wasn’t hers to tell.

      “I take it there’s not a husband who also lives with you?”

      She shook her head, watching for more shells. “The father is in Maple Grove. They’ve been dating since high school but the relationship is more of a habit than a romance.”

      “He hit the road when he found out she was pregnant?”

      “No.” She should never have started this. There was no way he, or anyone else, would ever understand.

      The waves lapped against the shore and Juliet heard other water. Saw again that tiny, plastic bathtub in the matching tiny bathroom in the trailer where she and Marcie had grown from girls into women. She’d been home for the weekend, preparing for her final exams in law school.

      She’d come from Marcie’s shop. They’d planned a surprise trip to San Francisco to celebrate their mother’s birthday. They’d had reservations at a rooftop restaurant. Juliet had gone home to tell her mother to put on her best dress….

      “Marcie hit the road. She’s only been living with me for a little over a week,” Juliet said slowly. “She and Hank have had years to get married. Neither one of them has ever been motivated enough—or in love enough, she says—to make it happen. He works in the family hardware store and has no desire to be anywhere else. Ever. He’s committed to his family and the store. She hates Maple Grove. Is bored out of her mind half the time. If she marries Hank because of this baby, she’s going to get tied to that town just like our mother was. The reasons might be different, but the result will be the same.”

      “A lot of people live very happy lives in small towns.”

      “I know they do!” Although a depressed transient town like Maple Grove didn’t have a high percentage of them. “But Marcie isn’t happy there! She wants to travel. To see the world. To have a social life. All she could talk about while we were in high school was getting out.”

      “So why didn’t she?”

      “She met Hank and got a job at the local beauty shop. She’s always been into hair and makeup and stuff like that. She’s really good. She drove an hour each way to take classes in San Francisco and got her cosmetology license long before I finished college.” She ground her foot into the sand, comforted by the feel of it against her arch. “Before she knew it, she had more than half the ladies in Maple Grove coming to her. In a San Francisco salon she’d still have been making minimum wage washing hair for some high-paid designer. A couple of years later, when she was talking about moving here to try for a job at a big salon—which had always been her dream—she was offered the chance to go into partnership in Maple Grove. The lure of her own place, and the safety of her relationship with Hank, kept her there. Dreaming.”

      She’d never meant to say anything. Let alone so much.

      “It’s those dreams that kill you,” she said a couple of seconds later. “They eat at you until there’s nothing left.”

      If she thought for one second that Marcie would ever be happy in Maple Grove, if her sister had given any indication of wanting a life there…

      “But they didn’t this time.” Blake’s voice was soft. Empathetic. “She got out.”

      And Juliet went to bed every night worrying that Marcie wasn’t going to settle in as quickly as she wanted to, that she wouldn’t find a job right away, that she’d let the lure of security in Maple Grove call her back in a weak moment and put in motion the beginning of the end.

      THE SUN WAS SINKING over the ocean by the time Blake turned around to head back toward their cars. Another mile or so and they’d have been at his place. He wasn’t sure he trusted himself to have her there.

      Especially not now, when she was becoming more friend than attorney. They were treading dangerous ground. And he couldn’t afford any extra danger in his life at the moment. He was too aware of his aloneness to be sure he wouldn’t do anything stupid. Like hit on his lawyer.

      “I guess we’ve avoided the bad news long enough,” he told her as they headed back up the beach.

      He had to get home anyway. Freedom would be ready for his run on the beach. And then a nice ground-beef dinner. The little guy needed some fattening up.

      As Juliet told him about the key she’d received in the mail, and more horrifically, the contents of the post-office box, Blake continued to put one sandy foot in front of the other. And that was all. The waves that normally called to him were no more than a roaring in his ears, drowning out all but the far-off voice of his defense attorney.

      He ran every day. Several miles at a time. And came home barely winded. Now, just strolling the beach, his chest was so tight he could hardly pull in air.

      There was a United States post-office box registered in Eaton James’s name with his father as a cosigner. And a bank account in the Cayman Islands in his name, complete with bank statements addressed to him.

      The voice fell away. Blake fought through the dark fog to focus on only one thing. The problem at hand. Not its ramifications.

      “This makes the Cayman Island account admissible as evidence, doesn’t it?”

      They were walking more

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