‘Grandpa!’ Jonas dropped the snow he
was holding and ran over to the car. ‘We’ve been sledding and making a snowman and Uncle Adam was telling me all about him and my dad.’
His father glanced over at Adam, their eyes meeting in a moment of understanding, and Adam felt a shot of warmth injected into his cold body. His dad looked old – even older than his seventy years. A stark contrast to the vital, driven man Adam remembered from his youth.
‘Did he now?’ Francis stooped to cup Jonas’s cheeks. ‘I hope he told you all about the trouble they used to get up to when they were boys. They used to drive Annie crazy in their school vacations.’
‘They used to build forts and go swimming in the lake and pretend to be pirates,’ Jonas rabbited on. ‘But now they don’t like each other very much.’
Francis winced, pulling his thin lips tight. Adam couldn’t help but see the expression of pain on his father’s face. No parent liked to see their children fighting, Adam knew that, but he still couldn’t find it in himself to forgive his brother.
‘How was Mom?’ Adam asked, in a vain attempt to change the subject.
‘Comfortable. The hip’s healing nicely. And they’re managing the pain.’
Her broken hip was taking a long time to heal – to be expected, the doctor had told them, for a woman her age. Still, she was going crazy cooped up in that hospital bed.
‘Did they say when she could come home?’ Adam asked. The doctors had promised it would be before Christmas. She wouldn’t be fully mobile by then, but at least she’d be able to recuperate at home.
‘In the next few days. The doctor wants her to have an X-ray first. He doesn’t want to cause any more issues with her hip in the ambulance home. That gives us enough time to arrange for a nurse and to get her room ready.’ Francis smiled. ‘She’s going to need a special bed and a few other things.’
‘I’ll call up the agency,’ Adam offered. ‘They already have nurses on standby, we just need to give them a date.’ He’d spoken with them a few days earlier, when the doctor had first mentioned his mom coming home.
Francis nodded. ‘Thank you, son. That would take a weight from my shoulders.’
With that, Francis shuffled the final few feet to the porch. As his grandfather left, Jonas pulled Adam’s hand, pointing over to the snowman, and Adam allowed himself to be dragged back to their task.
It looked as though all the family would be home for Christmas. What a damn shame he couldn’t feel happy at that thought.
9
The cat will mew and the dog will have its day
– Hamlet
Kitty glanced in the rear-view mirror. The glass was taken up with the view of Everett Klein still talking down the mouthpiece of his phone, his voice loud and brash, as though he was shouting all the way to California. Biting down a grimace, she tapped her fingers on the wheel, wishing she could turn the stereo on and drown out the noise.
He’d been on edge for the entire journey, as though he was living on his nerves, spending the first twenty minutes of the drive in an argument with Mia. And now his assistant was taking the brunt of his ire. Kitty would have felt sorry for him, but she was just thankful Everett wasn’t shouting at her for once.
‘Drake, I’m not asking you to perform fucking miracles,’ Everett shouted. ‘Just wake up the goddamned judge, get it notarised, then bring it straight back to the office.’
There was a pause, where Kitty imagined Drake was protesting against his fate. Waking a judge up at an early hour? What was Everett thinking of?
‘Give him a freaking blow job for all I care, just get it done,’ Everett thundered. ‘I pay you the big bucks to make things happen. So get your sweet little behind out of bed and do what you’re fucking paid for.’
Delightful.
Kitty tried to remember if Drake Montgomery had a sweet little behind, but she couldn’t remember at all, even if her last memory of him was walking out of the interview.
‘I don’t give a flying rat’s ass if it’s only six o’clock in the morning, just wake the old bastard up. Hey, wait… fuck, you just missed the damned turning.’
It took a moment for Kitty to realise the last sentence was directed at her. Alarmed, she glanced at the satnav, only to see that she really had managed to ignore the right-hand turn. Shit, bugger, bollocks, that’s the last thing she needed – just when she was about to hit a highway that didn’t look like a scene out of Misery, she’d managed to botch the turn.
Her heart dropped as the I-66 disappeared into the distance in her wing mirror.
‘Can’t you read a map?’ Everett asked her, clearly agitated. ‘Jesus Christ, I should have driven myself. Or gotten somebody who knew how to drive a car.’
Kitty wondered where Jonas learned his manners, when his father clearly didn’t have any.