LITMIR.BIZ

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forward to chatting with the woman who’d helped her get through the most difficult period of her life.

      After yesterday’s blowup with her dad over Espresso’s financial woes, she was especially glad to meet with her.

      The two women greeted each other with a hug, and Tia was gratified to once again see the expertise of the spa’s staff in action.

      Carol had done an excellent job of re-creating her new look on her own. She’d applied her makeup with near-expert finesse and even customized the pixie haircut they’d given her with a few gelled spikes. She wore a denim skirt, a black T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a sixties band and a pair of wedge sandals.

      Tia glanced down at her own linen-blend shift dress. It had seemed chic and summery when she’d donned it this morning, but now it felt positively frumpy.

      She echoed Carol’s order of the restaurant’s breakfast specialty, sweet-potato pancakes, to the busy waitress and studied her friend across the red checkerboard tablecloth.

      There was something different about Carol, she observed as the waitress returned with their drinks, and it had nothing to do with her makeover.

      “This is a nice treat,” Tia said. “Usually, breakfast for me is a bowl of instant oatmeal eaten over the kitchen sink before rushing off to work.”

      “Hmm,” Carol said.

      “So how’s it going?” Tia blew on her hot tea and took a tiny sip. “We haven’t had a chance to talk since your big makeover.”

      Carol tore open a packet of sugar substitute and slowly stirred it into her coffee. “You can stop with the small talk. I already know my grandson put you up to this.”

      “He came to my office yesterday,” Tia said, not bothering to deny it.

      “More like pushed his way in.”

      Tia lifted a brow. “How’d you know?”

      “I raised him,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. He’s a fine man, but he also inherited his late grandfather’s bossy streak, and it’s currently driving me bonkers.”

      So that was where he got it. Tia remembered the way Ethan strode into her office looking like Prince Charming but acting like Attila the Hun.

      Still, a part of her understood his point.

      “He’s worried,” Tia said. “And although it’s none of my business, I was concerned myself when he mentioned having to pick you up from jail.”

      “Oh, that.” Carol waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “It wasn’t a big deal. Ethan blew it all out of proportion. You’d think I was a bank robber.”

      “Then you weren’t arrested?”

      The waitress returned with two plates piled high with pancakes and bacon and a decanter of maple syrup. “Anything else, ladies?” she asked.

      “We’re good,” Tia said with a smile, eager to hear what had actually gone down.

      Carol soaked her pancakes with syrup before cutting into them with her fork and taking a huge bite. Tia waited as she chewed and swallowed, but after her friend went in for a third bite, she couldn’t wait any longer.

      “So what really happened?” Tia squirmed in her chair, her initial concern having morphed into downright nosiness.

      Carol put down her fork. She glanced from side to side in a conspiratorial fashion before leaning in. “Well, I went to a party.”

      “Oh.” Tia shoulders slumped and she took her first bite of her own pancakes.

      Carol reached across the table and touched her free hand. “Not one of those stale-cake-and-fruit-punch events at the senior citizens’ center, where everyone treats us like two-year-olds, or the boring law-firm affairs I endured when my husband was alive, but a genuine party, where everyone was actually having a good time,” she said. “I ate. I drank. I danced. It was wonderful. I hadn’t had that much fun in years. Decades, even.”

      Tia’s slumped shoulders perked up, along with her interest.

      Carol’s brown eyes sparkled with merriment. “I even won eight hundred bucks in a poker game.”

      “Really? I didn’t know you played.”

      “Unbeknownst to my mother, my dad taught me when I was a little girl, and by college I was paying for my nursing textbooks with my winnings,” she said.

      Tia’s own eyes widened at hearing about this other side to the staid nurse she’d met years ago.

      Carol sighed. “I hadn’t played in decades. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it.”

      “So why did you stop?”

      The other woman shrugged. “Life, I guess. Marriage, motherhood, a full-time job, my daughter’s death and then raising my grandson,” she said. “I was always busy juggling so many balls. By the time Ethan was out of law school and I’d retired, my husband was dead and I’d lost sight of the things I truly liked doing.”

      Carol smiled and patted her hand. “I owe you a thank-you,” she said. “Somehow you and your team looked past my dowdy exterior and brought out the person I’d shut away for years. The true me.”

      Pride swelled in Tia’s heart. Max had been right. Her job was done.

      Ethan Wright had it all wrong. She wasn’t the one who needed to talk to his grandmother. He did. If Carol told him what she’d just told her, even her stubborn grandson would undoubtedly see her happiness and be thrilled for her.

      Still, Tia was curious about one thing.

      “So how does a trip to the slammer fit into this story?

      Carol pulled her hand back and reached for her coffee cup. “Well, in all the fun, the party may have gotten a little loud. My friend Edna’s neighbors called the cops, who asked us to hold it down,” she said. “And we tried. We really did.”

      “The police had to come back,” Tia surmised.

      Carol nodded. “But it was a different officer the second time, and he wasn’t so nice. In fact, he was rude and condescending.”

      She put her a fist on her hip and wagged the index finger of her other hand. “‘Isn’t it past you Q-tips’ bedtime?’” Carol mimicked the officer. “‘Time to break it up and head back to the old-folks’ home.’”

      “Uh-oh,” Tia said.

      “Uh-oh is right,” Carol huffed. “I consider myself an easygoing woman, but I wasn’t having it. Especially off a kid I assisted the doctor in bringing into the world. I don’t care if he was all grown up and wearing a blue uniform.”

      Tia sipped her cooling tea as she listened. At this point, Carol’s story was more interesting than her breakfast.

      “I told him to watch his tone, and he said to me, ‘Settle down. I’m warning you,’” Carol mimicked again. “He’s warning me, after I fished broken crayons out of his snotty little nose when he was two,” she said. “Long story short, we argued. He got hot around the collar and hauled me downtown on some bogus charge of breaching the peace.”

      Again, Tia wondered if Ethan had sat down and really talked to his grandmother, and gotten her side of the story. Carol may have been in the wrong for back-talking the law, but it was completely understandable.

      “Still, I can’t believe he arrested you.”

      Carol shook her head. “He didn’t. Not really. I was detained a couple of hours, and then he called Ethan, my thirty-one-year-old grandson, to come get me,” she said. “As if I were senile or a brat whose parent had been summoned to the principal’s office. I swear, I nearly lit into him all over again.”

      Only pausing to take a breath, Carol continued, “Instead of Ethan reading him

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