Madly (New York 2)

What’s your story, and can I get in on it?

That was what he was asking her. He knew it even as he shifted his body close—closer than was strictly polite, close enough to smell the fruity scent of her hair, to see her pupils widen.

Tell me your story.

He needed to know. Not for Justice’s sake, but for his own. Because he’d lived in New York nine months and he still felt like a stranger.

Because his daughter didn’t have time for him, didn’t listen to him, certainly didn’t need him.

Because he was bored, and tired of his own boredom. But here was a puzzle.

Here was a woman who was big enough to keep him interested, a woman who might draw him along, draw him in. And because he liked her, and he hated to see her this way—anxious and sad and trying to hide it.

Winston already suspected that Allie Fredericks was no threat to his client. It wasn’t that he was a better spy than she was, but that any stranger could, for instance, name Rosemary as Bea’s mother, even in a crowd of other patrician blondes.

Allie hadn’t come for the artist. She’d come for the woman Justice was with.

“Who is she?”

He knew already. He just wanted to know that she’d tell him.

When she did, she set their story in motion.

“My mom.”

Chapter 3

“You know what this is like?”

Winston plugged another quarter into the pinball machine. He was truly terrible at pinball, and his skills had not improved as they worked their way through half a bottle of whiskey.

“It’s like my friend Elvira always says, that it’s easier to be authentic with the mailman. Well, she doesn’t say it, this other woman says it, but Elvira is the one who says it to me.”

Winston rolled up his shirtsleeves to the elbow. She couldn’t remember when he’d taken off his jacket. At some point in their conversation he’d draped it over the back of the chair he pulled over from the closest table to serve as a resting place for the whiskey bottle and his cell phone, which buzzed intermittently but didn’t seem to have his attention.

She had his attention.

It felt good. She knew it didn’t mean anything—a chance meeting in a bar, a good-looking stranger keeping her company. It was the kind of thing that happened in New York, where everyone was a stranger. Even her introverted sister, May, had managed to meet a guy in a bar the first night she’d gone out on her own.

It was nice, though.

Back home in Manitowoc there weren’t a lot of unattached men floating around, available for conversation. There wasn’t anybody who didn’t already know her whole story—no shopkeeper who didn’t want to reminisce about the time she’d gotten arrested for cow-tipping, no single guy her age who hadn’t at least heard about her leaving Matt at the altar and formed some private opinion of her character.

People took sides in a breakup. Matt was popular, friendly, well-liked. She’d believed when she was with him that she was, too, and it wasn’t that she’d become some kind of pariah. But it seemed like the people she’d known in high school who had a problem with her—the girls who thought she was too strange, too different, too much—had learned to accept her as she was. Allie had been proud, even, before the breakup, of how rich and diverse her social life was. She’d felt like she could go anywhere in town and run into a friend.

Now, when she walked into a restaurant to grab a sandwich, it was fifty-fifty that one of her former “friends” would avert her eyes and pretend not to see her.

She had other friends, good friends, to make up for it. She’d just missed this kind of thing. Sociable acceptance. A blank slate.

“You’ll have to explain what you mean by that.” Winston took a drink from his whiskey glass, set it down on top of the pinball table, and pulled back the plunger to release the ball.

“By what?”

“The mailman.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.” Possibly she wasn’t entirely keeping on top of the conversation. Or the situation. Don’t think. “Everybody wants to be their authentic selves, right? But it’s kind of hard, because we have these roles. Like, in our families, we have to be who they expect us to be, and if we’ve had the same friends a long time, or, like, a boyfriend since college. We get frozen by what everyone else thinks we’re like, how they expect us to act. Like my ex, Matt? I told him once in college that I didn’t like yoga. So then, years later, I’m thinking about maybe taking a yoga class and he’s all, ‘But you don’t like yoga.’?”