Page 27 of April Flowers

Not wanting her mother or the teenager to hear, Margot stepped into the little storage room near the front door and closed the door behind her.

“Yeah. She just turned up,” Margot said. She sounded on the brink of tears.

“That’s great!” Sam cried. “Wow. What did she say? Does she seem okay?”

“She seems fine. Grumpy. Maybe even grumpier than she was twenty years ago.”

“I think that’s the disease,” Sam offered sadly.

“Yeah. But some guy brought her back. Vic Rondell?”

“I don’t know the name. Are they dating, maybe?”

“No way. I mean, I don’t think so.” Margot wanted to laugh but couldn’t. “He’s a little older than me. Forties. Handsome. He looks vaguely familiar to me, but I can’t say why. He says they met playing cards.”

“Huh.”

Margot wondered where Sam was right now. Had she been driving around all day, searching?

“Thank you for your help, Sam,” Margot said softly. “It’s been a nightmare.”

“I’m so glad she turned up. Listen, I’m not far. Want me to swing over?”

“That would be great.” Margot swallowed. “Something else is happening. Something even weirder.”

“Uh-oh.”

Margot explained that the teenager, who was sixteen or seventeen, was hiding out in the boathouse and raiding her mother’s fridge. “She won’t tell me anything. But she knows my name, Sam.”

Sam was just as shocked as she was. “Maybe she needs a warm place to crash?”

“Maybe,” Margot said.

“I’m twenty minutes away,” Sam assured her. “Hang tight.”

Margot thanked her and hung up. Slowly, she crept back out of the storage room and through the living room, lookingdown at her mother, who maintained focused eye contact on the television. She was watching a cooking show in which a tiny blonde made a ton of pasta. Margot’s stomach groaned.

“Mom, can I get you anything?” Margot asked. “Can I make you a sandwich? Pasta?”

Lillian waved her hand. “Melissa, can’t you see I’m watching this?”

Margot knew her mother was sick. She knew she was here to make sure Lillian was all right and someone was watching out for her. But hearing her sister’s name instead of her own stung more than it should have.

“I’m going to get you a pudding. And some tea,” Margot said because she didn’t know what else to do.

Besides, she wanted to check on the teenager.

But when she entered the kitchen, the girl was nowhere to be found. The only proof she’d been there was the wrappers all over the table and the dirty spoon in the sink. Margot let out an exhausted cry. Before she cleaned up, she left the house, speeding out to the boathouse to see if the girl had taken refuge there. But it looked as though the girl had flown the coop.

Chapter Eleven

During Noah’s search for Avery, he suddenly found himself driving toward the old family property, the house where he and Mona had been raised long ago. Surprised, he slammed the brakes and remained stopped in front of the old house, his mind whirring. There was no way Avery would have come out here, was there? Noah and Mona’s parents—Avery’s grandparents—had died before Avery was born, and Noah and Mona had sold the family house when Avery was six or seven months old.

For years, Noah kept himself at a distance from the place. But now, sitting in front of it with his heart an open wound, he reckoned with what the new owners had changed: the fresh dark-gray paint, the new driveway, the basketball hoop they’d put above the garage door. From what Noah remembered, the new owners who’d purchased the place sixteen years ago were a married couple, maybe with a toddler and a baby or a baby on the way. He wasn’t sure. He could remember the mother's smiling face and the father's sturdy handshake. He also remembered how jealous he’d been of them. How much it had made his heart ache to see a couple around his age doing everything he’d imagined himself doing: buying a house andraising a family. At the time, he’d been telling his friends he never wanted kids. They were so dirty and messy, and he liked to live his own life. But he’d been lying. Everyone knew he was lying, yet nobody had called him out on it.

Wasn’t that part of the reason he’d gotten into his line of work? He’d wanted to be a father. He had so much love to give.

But now that he actually needed to be a father for Avery, he was messing everything up.

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