“Thanks. For everything. I really didn’t come over here with the intention of falling apart on you.”
“Do you feel better?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it was exactly what you needed.” Molly moved to the sink with her plate. “You’re an incredibly strong woman, but I get the sense that you think that means you can’t ever lean on anybody else. That needing somebody else to shoulder some of the load somehow makes you weak.”
“We Burkes are a self-sufficient lot.”
“Self-sufficiency and strength aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes the strong thing is admitting you’re not and knowing that is absolutely okay.”
Norah sighed. “Then I’ll have to work on that.”
Molly wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “That’s the beautiful thing about life, sweetie. We’re all constant works in progress.”
~*~
She’d taken all her stuff.
By the time Cam got home from one of the crappiest workdays on record, he found that Norah had been by. Hush made a thorough inspection of the apartment and whined when she found no evidence of her favorite person. Everyt
hing was gone, down to her last pen—her shoes, her toothbrush, all her office supplies. The key he’d given her lay on the kitchen island without a note. The only things left were the copies of the city financial records she’d gone over for her rural tourism presentation, stacked neatly on the bottom shelf of the coffee table. She’d probably just overlooked them when cleaning herself out of his life.
He’d hoped beyond hope that he’d been wrong, that she’d have some kind of explanation for Chicago and Denver that would make all his imaginings some kind of bad dream. But she hadn’t said a word to contradict him. And now this.
They really were finished.
How the hell was he going to get through the next couple of weeks? If she even stayed that long. Who knew when she was due to report to her new job in Denver?
How would he survive after that? Wishful wasn’t the haven it had been when he and Melody split up. She’d never really been a part of his life here. But there was nowhere in his town that he didn’t associate with Norah now. She’d become a part of the town’s fabric. Now he’d only see the jagged tear she left behind.
And wasn’t that a bunch of melodramatic bullshit?
Retrieving the remaining half of a six pack from the fridge, Cam sank down on the sofa and pulled out the city financials. Hush scrambled onto her end of the couch and plopped down, staring at him with soulful eyes that seemed to say, What did you do? Ignoring his dog and the guilt that look engendered, he opened the binder. The sight of all the color-coded sticky tabs and post-it notes made his throat squeeze tight. This was the only thing she’d touched that she’d left behind.
Christ, he was in bad shape.
The records were arranged in chronological reverse order, beginning with the numbers for the last quarter. He flipped through, fingers tracing the notes she’d made in the margins. Until he reached a point a year before where she’d scribbled Pattern? with a number below. He set his beer aside and paid closer attention.
It took him about twenty minutes to figure out what she’d noted, and by then he hauled out his calculator. An hour and a half later, he’d plowed through the rest of the records and had pages of notes of his own. If these numbers meant what he thought they meant…
He called his mother. “Where are you?”
“At Liz and Pete’s. What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“I need to talk to you. Stay put. I’m coming over.”
Loading up the books and his dog, he drove over to his aunt and uncle’s house. The moment he pulled to the curb he had cause to regret not asking his mother to come to him. From the look of things, the entire family was here. A quick, instinctive survey of vehicles showed him Norah’s car wasn’t among them. Not that it meant anything. She could just as easily have ridden with one of the others.
He wasn’t ready to see her again.
But it was too late to change his plan. Grammy was waving from the window. Bracing himself, Cam climbed out of the truck and headed inside. Everyone was gathered in the living room. No Norah. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
“What the hell is this? A summit meeting?”
“We were trying to figure out if it needed to be an intervention,” Grammy said.
Shit.