Page 9 of Where Are You Now
After Ava’s father died, unable to exist in the house she’d shared with her husband, and suddenly the beneficiary of his meager insurance payout, her mother had sold their childhood home on Willow Road in Spring Hill and bought a lake house on Marrowbone Lake, about a half hour outside Nashville. The cabin sat in the middle of the wilderness. Her mom hadn’t gotten a job. She was careful with her money, so she didn’t have to. Ava always found the idea of that much free time to be overwhelming. But maybe there was something to it.
“It might be nice to get away from your day-to-day for a while, and you can sort through everything you’ve endured. You can clear your head,” her mom encouraged. “I’d love to have the company.”
If the experience had been real, Ava hadn’t been given atimeframe to find Lucas or the understanding of the stakes of not finding him, if there were any. As long as she still planned to look for him, certainly she’d be allowed to recover first, right? He wasn’t in the state anyway, apparently. And if she sat in this apartment, with no computer or phone, she might lose her mind.
“It’s a lovely time to be at the lake,” Martha continued. “The leaves are starting to change, and the mornings are cool. We could be in Nashville in two and a half hours by plane. My car’s still parked at the airport there. What do you think?”
“What about my physical therapy?”
“I could call to see if you can have it switched to Vanderbilt.”
“I’m not sure I could get to the gate if we flew.”
“We can request a wheelchair. A week or two by the water might be nice.”
Ava chewed her battered lip. It would be good to spend some time with her mom. She never got a chance to. And her mother probably had a computer. She could log in to her portal at work and find out what Scott Strobel had secured on the Coleman deal. She could work on an add-on proposal for anything he didn’t get them to agree to. After that, she could do a little research to see where Lucas Phillips was now. He was sure to have a social media account on one of the platforms.
“Yeah, let’s go,” she said to Martha.
“I’ll see if I can get us a flight for tomorrow, and then I’ll call the doctor about changing your therapy to Nashville.”
“Could I borrow your phone to call work and tell them where I’ll be?”
“I’ll let them know for you,” her mother said firmly.
Ava stood up with a groan, already feeling stir-crazy and glad they were filling the time with travel. Although she might be bored to tears when she got to the cabin, at least the lakewas relaxing. Her apartment just reminded her of all the work she needed to get done. The walls were closing in on her already. Not to mention that she’d never find Lucas while sitting in this room with no connection to the outside world.
“Could you help me pack?”
“Right now?”
“Yeah.” Ava hobbled into her bedroom and through the Jack-and-Jill bathroom to get to her clothes.
She’d converted the second bedroom in her apartment into her closet. She opened the door and flicked on the chandelier that illuminated the marble table sitting in the center of the white shag rug, and the built-in shelves she’d had installed on all four walls, which she’d painstakingly organized.
With labored steps, she went to a corner and pulled out her Louis Vuitton luggage, bracing her core as she bent over mechanically to unzip it.
“I’ve got that,” Martha said, rushing to assist. She easily unzipped the bag and left it open on the floor. “Hand me what you want to pack, and I’ll get it into the suitcase for you.”
Ava scrutinized the casual-clothes section, taking down a few oversized sweaters and handing them to her mom. She flicked through her jeans section, deciding on the pairs she could kick around in at the cabin. She pulled them off their hangers and passed them to her mother, who folded them and set them neatly in the suitcase.
They continued, Ava taking careful steps across the room. She packed clothes for every season, given the wild swing of the Tennessee fall temperatures. She pulled down a deep dusty-rose-pink A-line skirt with a matching silk button-up and held it out to her mom.
“You won’t need that,” her mother said. “Remember, there isn’t a single place to wear something that fancy in the woods.”
“Maybe we’ll go out in Nashville. You never know.”
“You’ve just survived an almost fatal car crash. I doubt we’ll go out in Nashville.”
“I might dress up just to feel normal,” she said, passing the outfit to her mother. “We can put it in my hanging bag.” She took her pink Jimmy Choos off the backlit shelf. “And pack these.” Nothing about this trip felt normal. The least she could do was dress the part.
Chapter Four
When the plane took off, Ava tightened her muscles to brace her tender ribcage as the force pressed her to the back of the seat. She clutched her paper cup of airport coffee that her mom had thought would be “a soothing treat” while she’d pushed Ava’s wheelchair through the airport. She took in a deep, slow breath, letting it out as the aircraft leveled off.
Once they were in the air smoothly, she took a drink of the warm, nutty oat-milk latte with honey—an extravagance she usually only allowed herself on leg day when she ate extra carbs.
Her mom’s eyes were closed, her head against the back of the seat, a book in her lap. This last week or so had probably been a lot on her. Martha had pretty much stayed at the lake house ever since she’d bought it, so flying to New York was quite a journey.
