Page 4 of Keeping Happily Ever After

She’d been his first kiss when they were kids and maybe it was that early experience. Or maybe it was just that Bella was beautiful and talented and kind and generous and the most perfect woman he’d ever met. But whatever it was, Jeremy knew in his heart that she was the one for him. It might still be early days in their relationship.Veryearly days. Hell, they hadn’t even made it official by putting a label on it, or whatever it was they were supposed to do, but it didn’t matter. Not to him. He’d do his best to be patient with things, especially because Bella’s career was just starting to take off. But he knew what he wanted, and it was Bella.

“Davis?” A sharp knock on the door jarred him from his daydreams of Bella. “You in there?” His rookie partner, Natalie Collins, shouted through the door.

He grabbed a towel and dried his face. “Yup. Just finishing up.”

“Your dad’s here. Waiting in the lounge.”

Dad?

It wasn’t totally unusual for his father to pop by the station to say hi, but it was starting to get late. He should be home with his mother, getting ready for dinner, not stopping by for social visits.

“Hey, Dad.” Dwayne Davis had his back to Jeremy when he walked into the room. He was looking out the window to the street below. Jeremy knew before he even turned around that something was wrong. His normally relaxed, easygoing father looked tense. He held himself straight, as if he were trying to shoulder the weight of the world. “What’s up?” Jeremy resisted the urge to ask him what was wrong.

Sure enough, as soon as he turned around, Jeremy could see it. The worry lines ran deep in the older man’s forehead. His normally smiling, happy face was twisted into a mask of worry. “Sorry to bother you at work like this, son. I was just…well, it just couldn’t…”

“Dad?” Jeremy crossed the room in two big strides. He put his arm around his father’s shoulder and guided him to the couch. “What’s going on? Is it Mom? Is everything—”

“She’s fine.” Dwayne sat heavily next to his son. “Your mother is fine. We’re both fine. It’s not that. I’m sorry, Jer. I didn’t mean to worry you, and I was hoping this could wait for a better time, or at least until I knew something definitely.” He looked away, staring into nothing for a moment. “I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to say anything at all and that I was wrong. But sometimes when you know, you just know, and I knew the moment I—”

“Dad.” Jeremy put his hand on his father’s forearm and forced Dwayne to look at him. “Tell me what the hell is going on.”

Dwayne was known for being down to earth and excessively calm. Jeremy could recall very few occasions he’d ever seen him worked up. Even when there was a real estate deal with multiple offers, or at risk of being lost entirely when he was working with Jeremy’s mother as the town’s top real estate agents. Triple D Realty. Dwayne and Darlene Davis. They’d worked hard, but always together. And even when times were tough, they managed to have fun together. Jeremy had definitely never seen this type of worry on his father’s face before. Not even during the recession when the real estate market all but dried up. Even then, Dwayne had managed to maintain a positive outlook.

“You’re scaring me.”

Dwayne took a breath and squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, he looked directly at Jeremy. “It’s your sister.”

Jeremy’s stomach immediately twisted. Blood rushed from his extremities and he was glad he was sitting, because of the very few times his dad had been upset, there had been one in particular that he remembered clearly. It was when Charlotte, his older sister, had appendicitis and had to have emergency surgery when she was sixteen. That very same look had been on his face then.

“Is she sick? Why wouldn’t she tell me?” Charlotte was his senior by two years, but despite the fact that Jeremy was the younger brother, they’d always been close. At least until she’d moved to the East Coast to be with her boyfriend who she’d met online about six months earlier. After she moved, the calls became less and less frequent, and they’d moved most of their communication to text messaging. And lately, even those had stopped.

“What’s going on, Dad?”

“That’s just it.” His dad shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

It took a moment for Jeremy to process what he’d said. Or more specifically, what he’dnotsaid. “Wait. What? If you don’t know what’s wrong, then why do you look so upset?” He shook his head and rolled it back, cracking his neck before focusing on his father again. “You need to tell me what the hell is actually going on, Dad. Because I’ve never seen you look so worked up. Especially if you’renot surewhat’s going on.”

The older man nodded and cleared his throat. “You know how your mother and I went to visit for Christmas this year?”

“Of course. You said you had a nice time.” His parents had decided to go visit Charlotte for Christmas and properly meet her boyfriend Billy while they were there. Jeremy hadn’t really asked for a lot of details about the trip because he’d been preoccupied with his own personal life, but what little they had said was positive enough.

“We did.” He stopped himself and shook his head. “No. We didn’t. When we told you that, it was a lie.”

That didn’t make any sense and Jeremy said as much. “Why would you lie about your visit?”

“Because we couldn’t really make sense of what was happening there and I didn’t want to say anything until I knew something for sure. But it just feltoff.Billy felt off. Their relationship, and…Char didn’t seem like herself. She was trying really hard for us to like him and for everything to go perfectly.”

That was finally something that made sense. He could absolutely imagine his sister working overtime for their parents to like the man who’d convinced her to quit her job in the city as an interior designer for a busy home builder, and lured her to the other side of the country to work in a coffee shop. Jeremy always thought this Billy must be pretty damn special if Char was willing to give up her career right as it was taking off. But then again, people did all kinds of things for love. Thoughts of Bella popped into his head and he knew in a flash that he would do all kinds of things for her.

But he needed to focus on the situation at hand. “I get that,” he said to his dad. “But it was her first Christmas that she hosted in her new home. I’m sure it was stressful for her because she wanted to make it all perfect, right?” Jeremy chuckled. “That doesn’t sound odd at all.”

“It was, Jeremy.” The seriousness in his father’s voice cut his laughter off. “Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on it while we were there, and I didn’t want to say anything to your mother. I didn’t want to worry her, but she noticed it, too. The way Charlotte always kind of looked over her shoulder whenever she was talking to us, as if she didn’t know if he was listening. And we were never alone with her. Ever. If we were going to go to the store, he came. If Char and her mom wanted to go for a walk, he’d insist on going, too. It was strange. I just felt like he wasn’t quite right.”

“But Billy seems like a nice guy.” It felt like a stupid thing to say considering Jeremy had never actually met the man. But they’d talked on video calls once or twice when Charlotte had first moved, and Jeremy hadn’t noticed anything strange. But now that he thought about it, those calls were a long time ago. Right after Char had moved. They hadn’t had a video chat in a long time.

“She doesn’t look like herself either,” his father continued. “She’s lost weight. Her eyes are…” Dwayne couldn’t finish the sentence. “We’re worried about her.”

“What kind of worried?” Jeremy hated asking, afraid of the answer. “Do you think that she’s—”

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