Page 43 of Win Some Love Some
“You don’t know that. A lot of shit went down before Antony and Birdie found me and that doesn’t just go away.”
“I do know that,” I said with authority. “You’ve been around kids since you were fifteen and you’ve never been anything other than kind or patient with any of them. My parents trusted you with me when I was just a toddler.”
“Well, that didn’t work out so well, did it?” He said with a self-deprecating wince. I was stunned that he was even making a joke about it. “I actually think what has me the most nervous about settling down is Birdie.”
“Birdie?” I asked. His adoptive mother had been nothing but loving towards him.
“She cares so much, you know?” He looked up at me and then back down at the eggs he was pushing around on his plate. “When something good happens, like opening the garage? She’s so happy for me. Like the most happy, but sometimes I think she’s worried too. Like, what if it’s all taken away and I get hurt again?”
It was true. It was how I thought my parents looked at me sometimes too.
Being a parent was hard. He wasn’t wrong.
The mood at our celebration breakfast had dropped and I was reeling from this amount of Nick Renard honesty. So, I did a very Old Normal Nora thing and cracked a joke to change the mood.
“Sure, it could be that,” I mused. “Or you’re still dealing with abandonment issues, which have resurfaced given your two half-brothers, born of the mother who abandoned you first, have returned to reclaim you.”
He glared at me, and I beamed at him.
“Finish your eggs,Kiddo.”
I stuck out my tongue and he smiled. We both went back to our eggs and bacon. I wouldn’t tell Nick, what telling him the whole truth did for me – but I did feel better.
“Hello, I’m home!”I called out as soon as I opened the front door. “Someone pop the champagne, your oldest daughter has a job!”
“Nor,” my dad called out. “We’re in the kitchen.”
There was something about his voice. A tightness that made me feel like a teenager coming home late for curfew.
In the kitchen, Mom and Dad sat at the table with a man I didn’t recognize wearing a suit, a buzz cut and a grim expression.
My stomach sank. I’d met plenty of men and women who had the same look. The same grim expression. Even the same haircut. Not a single one of them ever had good news to share.
“This is Special Agent Naugle,” Dad said.
Of course he is.
“You have bad news,” I said, ripping off the Band-Aid.
I’d talked to a lot of cops in the fallout of Rene. The police in Paris. The DST. Interpol Agents.
Each time I talked to a different agency – the crime grew and my stupidity with it. Rene wasn’t just a con man, he was a world class con man, with years’ worth of victims all over Europe and in the States too.
I’d told every one of them everything I knew about Rene. His habits, how and where he liked to spend money. Places he liked to be seen. Over and over. At this point they should talk to each other instead of me.
“We’ve lost him again,” the man said as he stood up and offered his hand.
I gave it a brief shake.
“I didn’t know he was found,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I hadn’t heard.”
“We caught up with him in Prague. Interpol had set up a sting operation, but he sniffed it out. I say all this to tell you we believe he’s headed back to the US. He’s been reaching out to some contacts in New York.” My stomach rolled thinking of him here. New York was too close. “I wanted to know if he’d been in contact. Or what the likelihood of him showing up in town might be.”
I shook my head. “He won’t come here. It’s too boring. To provincial. There is not enough to keep him entertained.”
The agent looked grim. “The man is on the run. Desperate. He’s going to look for some friendly shelter.”
A burst of laughter scraped my throat. “Well, he’s not going to get it from me!”
