Adam looked around, trying to work out who she was yelling at.
‘You think I can’t see you behind the trees, Adam? I can see you perfectly fine. You’ll be pleased to hear that it’s just me and Jonas, so you might as well come in and have a coffee.’
Running a hand through his hair, Adam stepped free of the forest and across the driveway, where Annie and Jonas were standing in the shelter of the porch. His nephew grinned wildly, delighted to see him, while Annie wrinkled her nose at his dishevelled appearance. A bead of perspiration ran down his forehead.
‘You go and take a shower while I fill up the coffee pot.’ She fussed around him, the same way she did when he was about ten years old. Some things didn’t change. ‘I can’t have you stinking out my kitchen.’
Adam smiled, pulling her into a hug that made her squeal.
‘Get your hands off me, you dirty, sweaty boy.’
‘What shall I put on after my shower? Or do you want me sitting in your kitchen in my birthday suit?’ He raised his eyebrows at her, his voice teasing. Annie grabbed a dishcloth from beside the stove, attempting to swat him with it.
‘It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, young man,’ she grumbled. ‘But there’s plenty of clean clothes in the laundry room. Unless you’ve put weight on since you brought them over, of course, in which case maybe you should go back and finish your run.’
‘Where is everybody anyway?’ Adam asked. He knew that Annie would never swing a trap on him. If she said it was only she and Jonas, he believed her.
‘Mrs Klein has gone to Fragrant Pines,’ Annie told him, referring to an expensive spa near on sixty miles away. ‘And Everett has been called back to LA.’
Adam swallowed, staring out of the window. ‘Why’s he taken the nanny with him?’
Annie tipped her head, staring at him strangely. ‘Kitty?’ she asked. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I don’t,’ he replied hastily. ‘I was just making conversation.’
Annie narrowed her eyes. ‘Whatever you say. I’ll believe it if you do. And anyway, she’s not heading back to LA, she’s just dropping him off. You’ll be pleased to know that after that, she’s coming straight back here.’
Not wanting to get embroiled in that kind of conversation, he gave an enigmatic shrug then headed for the stairs. ‘Guess that’s my cue to take a shower,’ he called back to her with a grin. ‘Unless you want me to stand here gossiping like an old woman.’
The dishcloth whistled through the air, narrowly avoiding his head. Adam reached down to grab it, flicking it back easily, so it landed on the kitchen table. It all felt so normal, so real. Like he was a kid again, with little more than an assignment to mar his day.
For the first time in for ever, it was hard to wipe the smile from his face.
‘Uncle Adam, why don’t you like my dad?’ Jonas leaned down to grab a handful of snow, patting it onto the abdomen of the giant snowman they were building. Spending alone-time with his nephew was a pleasure, and one Adam hadn’t had much chance to indulge in since Everett and his family had arrived in Cutler’s Gap. There was something about the innocence of Jonas that took his mind off things, stopped him from getting too lost in his own thoughts.
Adam wasn’t so keen on the penetrating questions, though.
‘I don’t hate him, we just don’t get on very well. He wanted me to do something I didn’t want to do, and we ended up having a big argument.’
‘Was that why you left California without saying goodbye?’
Adam frowned. ‘Something like that.’ He had no idea how much Jonas knew about that day in LA. Hopefully very little.
‘I asked Dad where you’d gone and he wouldn’t tell me, he just stomped off and went out to work. Mom told me to stop asking so many questions, and that I was upsetting him.’
‘You don’t ask too many questions,’ Adam said, his voice thick. ‘You just ask the questions people are afraid to answer. The right kind of questions.’
Jonas looked surprised. ‘I do?’
‘Yes, you do. That doesn’t mean I always want to answer them, though. Doesn’t mean I will, either. But you shouldn’t stop asking questions because they make people uncomfortable. That only means you’re on the right track.’
Jonas took this as a green light for more. ‘So why did you leave? Was it because I used to bother you all the time?’
Dropping onto his haunches, Adam pulled his nephew close. He yanked his glove off along with Jonas’s hat, ruffling the boy’s blond curls with his large, calloused hands. ‘That wasn’t why I left. The reason I had to go was because your dad and I had a big falling-out, the same way you do with some of your friends. We decided it would be better if I came back here.’ Not quite the truth, but not a lie either.
From the look on Jonas’s face he didn’t understand. Not that Adam could blame him. In Jonas’s world grudges were held for hours, not days or months. And in the schoolyard, resentments were held over some imagined slight that was soon forgotten.
Jonas opened his mouth to ask another question, then closed it again as a car swung into the driveway, its wheels crunching on the gravelled path. The old Ford came to a stop by the porch steps, and Francis Klein – Adam’s dad – climbed out, pausing before he closed the door to rub his hands across the face.