Out in the dining room it was a regular story time.
And she wanted to listen to every word and ask seven hundred follow-up questions.
You traveled with a Mongolian nomadic tribe for a month?
What does yak blood taste like?
What did you make for Prince Harry and Meghan?
Why were you arrested in France?
Did you miss us?
Did I ever cross your mind?
But the obvious answer to those last two questions was no.
The swinging door to the dining room opened as Josie took two bottles of white wine from the fridge. For the second her back was turned to the door, she foolishly hoped the footsteps belonged to Cameron.
“Josie.” It was Helen. Looking pregnant and contrite. Josie had a million things she could yell, but she swallowed them and smiled.
“I’ve got the wine,” she said, like she didn’t understand what Helen wanted.
“I’m sorry,” Helen whispered.
“For what?”
Helen shook her head and crossed the dark kitchen toward Josie.
“I’m just getting the wine,” Josie said, and she sidestepped Helen as she reached out.
“I thought it would be happy,” Helen said. “The two of you back here like this. I thought…”
What? He’d forgiven me? I’d forgotten him?
“Are you happy?” Josie asked, the words coming out harder than she’d intended. Meaner. It was like a crack in the wall, and the rest of her darker feelings rushed her, clamoring to be let out. Words she’d never said wanted to be said. Things she hardly remembered feeling.
“No.” Helen said, looking like the guiltiest, saddest pregnant girl who ever lived.
And it only made Josie angrier.
Josie stood still under the force of what she wanted to say. Scream at her cousin and best friend.
“You were both so young and you’ve both gone on to do such amazing things and you never…you never talk about him and he never talks about you and I thought…” Helen sighed. “I thought it would be happy.”
Through the swinging door came a roar of laughter.
“Stop!” Alice shrieked. “You’re making that up!”
“I’m serious,” Cameron said, and there was more laughter.
“It is happy,” she told Helen.
But she knew at once that she wasn’t going back in there. She’d take the farm truck back to her parents’ place and…she didn’t know past that.
Work?
Leave?
Hide?
“Take these to the table, would you?” She handed the wine bottles to Helen.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to my parents’.”
“But—” Helen looked over her shoulder at the door, the family and happiness on the other side.
“Tell them I got a work call,” Josie said. They’d believe it. And it wasn’t even a lie. Her phone had been buzzing in her pocket all night.
She grabbed her keys from the hook by the door, and without even her winter coat, stepped outside into the brittle cold and made her escape.
8
CAMERON
The headache woke him up. The headache and the sun slicing through the window because he’d forgotten to close the curtains.
As a rule Cameron didn’t drink. Lessons from his father and all that. But when Helen had come back into the dining room with two bottles of wine and the news that Josie had gotten a work call. Well…he’d jumped headfirst into one of those bottles.
And then Alice broke out the good whiskey and poured him a glass while he did the dishes.
He wouldn’t let her help do the dishes.
She didn’t join him in a drink.
And he remembered the promise she’d made to him so many years ago. That she would stop drinking. It had been the very first promise an adult had made to him and kept. Which, if you were a kid like he’d been, was revolutionary. He’d grown used to being disappointed and forgotten. But in that moment, Alice—practically a stranger, relatively speaking—had put him first. It had been the start of who they’d become. This bond that was more than friendship, but just left of parenthood.
Last night he’d had to look away, plunge his hands into the hot, soapy water to distract himself from the ache that memory gave him.
I should go.
It was honestly his first thought.
Before everyone woke up, he should just pack and leave a note and hit the road. He’d been invited to spend Christmas in Montreal with an ice skater he met two years ago. He and Ingrid kept in touch and spent holidays together when she was single and he had nowhere else to go.
He cooked. She trained. They had extremely athletic sex. It was not a bad arrangement.
If he stayed, things would get messy. That was just the reality of staying anywhere. But here the threat of messiness was…well, it was more of a guarantee. With Max.
With Josie.
God. The dreams he’d had of her last night. Against his leg, his dick twitched.
Calm down.
Though there was a sort of poetry to masturbating to the idea of her in the same room where he’d done it seven million times.
He still wanted her. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise.