Page 89 of Everything We Give

“What happened, Lacy?” I ask.

“Thomas saw you at the cafe’s soft opening. He figured out what you were doing.”

I look at Aimee, wide-eyed, then look at Lacy. She’s nodding. “Something else happened at the café. Fate is a mysterious, fickle woman who loves to play practical jokes. Imagine my surprise when I saw you.” She snares me in her gaze. Her words are cubes of ice dropping from a freezer dispenser through me. My limbs chill. “I saw your connection to Aimee, and I saw again, my connection to you. There’s a red string that binds us. I realized, once again, I was destined to help you. That’s when I decided to speed up the process, Imelda’s fear be damned. I shipped James’s painting to Aimee. She had to see for herself that the red string didn’t link her to James. It links her to you, Ian.”

Aimee and I share a look. Soul mates or not, psychic meddling or not, I didn’t want to spend my life with anyone but Aimee. But something else occurs to me and I frown. “You might think you helped me, but what about Imelda? James didn’t go home.”

“But I did help her. She no longer had to lie to James. That’s the secret that was making her miserable.” She sips her lemonade.

“Huh.” I look at Aimee, wondering what she thinks about all this. She shrugs a shoulder and I make a show of looking under the table for the string that attaches us. A short laugh escapes her and she shushes me to stop messing around. Red strings, soul mates, fated connections, oh my! I’ve mentioned to Aimee on several occasions that I’ve seen and experienced some surreal things during my travels that I couldn’t necessarily explain. There was that out-of-body experience I had after a night of hookah smoking in India. There were three of us—me, Dave, and Peter—and we’d just finished a three-day photography hike in Manali. I had an insane dream of running back up the trail we’d just come down because I wanted to take more photos. The kicker is that the temperature at night dropped into the tens and I was shirtless. Dave, who didn’t smoke, and I had a good laugh when I told him the next morning about how Peter was in my dream and he wasn’t. Peter didn’t have a shirt on either or his shoes. Thank God, it was a dream, else we’d have frozen our asses off. Anyway, it was a good laugh until Peter woke up and told us he had the same dream. Then he showed us his feet. They were cut up, bruised, and caked with dirt. The ridiculous thing is, Dave was up most of the night reading. He said we never left our mats after we’d passed out.

I don’t have a logical explanation for that night, other than we were too high to remember, and Dave had to have fallen asleep for several hours for Peter and me to slip past him on our way to be idiots. As for Lacy’s “red string” theory, she can call it what she wants. I think her connection to Aimee and me is nothing more than an it’s-a-small-world coincidence. Serendipity.

Lacy looks around the dining room, studying the crystal chandelier overhead and satin curtains, the hems dirty from years of dust. “I always wondered what Sarah’s house looked like.”

I sit upright in the chair. She said my mom’s name with the familiarity of a friend. That’s not something I expected. “How do you know my mother?”

Lacy smiled tenderly, her sadness evident in the gentle curve of her mouth. “She’s my stepsister.”

Aimee gasps. My back slams into the chair. I feel the blood drain from my face, and my fingers reflexively squeeze Aimee’s hand. The woman sitting across from us, sipping lemonade from my father’s glass, the one I welcomed into his home, is Frank’s daughter, the man Jackie shot. I read about him in my mom’s court transcripts. He’d sexually abused my mom since she was twelve, around the time her mother, my grandmother, married him and he moved into their home. He continued to abuse her until the day she ran away. She’d been eighteen.

My mom had taken on odd jobs to survive, doing what she could to remain invisible to Frank until the day she met my dad. She saw a protector in him, the one man who could keep her safe from Frank. Move her far away from the stepfather, which made sense to me once I connected the story my mom told me of how she met my dad to her testimony at the trial.

Something clicks inside me and I make another connection. The legal name Thomas gave Aimee for Lacy. Charity Watson.Charity.

“Impossible,” I murmur to Aimee. “She can’t be her stepsister.”

“I don’t understand,” Aimee whispers back.

“I’ll explain later.”

“My father was abusive. Sarah wasn’t his only victim,” Lacy acknowledges.

“Oh dear,” Aimee says.

“We should all be thankful that man is locked away.”

My mind takes an excursion to that night. I hear the gun blast, feel it reverberate in my ears, see it blow out Frank’s knee. My skin itches the way it had when it healed from the asphalt abrasions. I scratch at my thigh.

“As Ian recalls it, you met Stu at a diner and offered to help find Ian, but that’s not what happened, is it?” Aimee asks, and Lacy slowly shakes her head. “I’m going to venture to guess you didn’t use ‘psychic powers’ either.” She draws quote marks in the air.

I peel my hand from Aimee’s and look at her in question. “What are you saying?”

“If she really is Sarah’s stepsister, I think she was told where you might have been, which would have made it easier to locate you.”

“Is that true?” I ask and Lacy nods. Damn, my wife is perceptive. “What happened?” I demanded, needing answers to all the questions I had as a kid.

“Sarah showed up at my house. She wasn’t acting herself. She insisted her name was Jackie. I didn’t know then that she had a personality disorder. I thought she was on something. Her behavior was erratic.”

“That was Jackie.”

“And she was looking for Frank. Sarah had left Jackie a note on where to find me. She thought I’d know where he was. I didn’t at the time, of course. And I didn’t want to look for him. My parents had joint custody when I was a kid. I hated the weekends I spent at Sarah’s house with my father. But that’s beside the point. Jackie bragged about what she’d done to you. She was betting you were stupid enough to listen to her and walk home. Then she left. I assume she eventually returned here.” She looks around the room. “I called your father and he confirmed you were still missing. Together we found you based on what Jackie told me.”

My hands fist under the table. “Did Stu know who you were?”

“That I was his stepsister-in-law? Not at first. I think Sarah eventually told him.”

I shoot up from the chair. It falls back with a thud. Hands gripping my hips, I pace the room. Aimee gets out of her chair and leans over to right mine. I’m at her side in two long strides. “Thanks, hon, I’ve got it.” I pick up my chair for her and brace my hands on the seat back. “You’ve got my attention. What’s going on? Why’d you bring me here?”

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