“Cam, my darling, I admire your can-do attitude, but the only way burning sage is going to help this situation is if we shove it down the back of Warren Reeves’s trousers,” said Aunt Aggie.
“Violence is never the answer,” Aunt Cam reprimanded her.
“The man’s a liar, he deserves to have his pants on fire!” Aunt Aggie leaned back in her chair, arms folded.
“I need to find Ryan,” said Fred. “I have to explain that I had nothing to do with it.”
“He’ll know that,” Aunt Cam assured her.
“Will he?”
Bella closed the paper, pushing her chair back from the table without a word, and left the room.
“Mum?” Fred called after her. “Mum!”
But she didn’t answer.
“Is Bella all right?” asked Aunt Cam. “She’s pale as mist.”
The sick feeling climbed higher up Fred’s throat. “Um, we had words. We were in the middle of something…”
“What kind of words?” Aunt Aggie narrowed her eyes at her.
Fred could feel herself being pulled taut in two different directions. She needed to settle things with her mum, and she needed to find Ryan; she couldn’t help feeling that this article was her fault.
“Mum and Liam are together, kind of, and I wasn’t exactly understanding when she told me.” Fred winced as she said it; her head was in twenty different places.
The front door slammed.
“Did Mum just go out?” She ran to the door and pulled it open in time to see her mum’s car screeching out onto the road.
This was bad. If there was one rule that they absolutelyabided by in this family, it was that you never walked out on an argument, and now her mum had steamed off with Fred’s harsh words still hanging in the ether. Fred turned back to see both aunts standing in the hall, watching her with steely glares.
“What exactly did you say to your mother?” Aggie asked, her eyes fixed and narrowed.
“Um”—Fred pulled at the neck of her jumper—“I may have asked her to promise to call it off…” The breeze from the open door was cold at her back, but it was nothing compared to the chill coming from her aunts. “But I changed my mind,” Fred continued in a rush. “I was going to tell her to, you know, go ahead and be in love with Liam, but then you came in with the paper and it all got sidetracked.”
Aggie took a deep breath in through her nose, her lips pursed. Cam laid a hand on her arm, as though to steady or calm her.
“You changed your mind.” Aggie’s words stabbed at her like thorns. “How fucking gracious of you.”
Fred took a step backward. “I m-mean,” she began, stutteringly. “You have to admit…her track record…” She felt herself shrinking under her aunts’ scrutiny.
“Did it ever occur to you that you might be wrong?” Aunt Aggie cut her off, her voice shaking with outrage.
“Fred, dear, there is more to this than you know,” Cam added, calmly.
Fred’s phone rang out from the kitchen table, turning itself in circles as it buzzed impatiently. She rushed to it, hoping it was her mum or Ryan, the aunts stepping aside for herto pass. But it was a number Fred didn’t recognize, so she dismissed the call. It began to ring again immediately.FFS!
“Hello?” Fred answered, shortly.
“How could you?” A woman’s voice sobbed down the phone. “My parents-in-law started this restaurant. Seventy-five years we’ve been here…”
“Mrs. Doukas?”
More sobbing.
“Mrs. Doukas, I’m so sorry, I had no idea….” The line went dead. She shoved her phone into her jeans pocket and passed the aunts again. “I have to go.”
