He hesitated before opening the door wider and ushering me in. I sat, though he hadn’t invited me to, but I was carrying extra weight and took any chance I had to ease the burden on my legs. My wrist ached a little, and I rubbed it. The professor didn’t offer me tea or cake, but perhaps that was only when a student scheduled a meeting.
“Can you tell me about the woman that the soccer scholarship is named after?”
He stiffened and grabbed a pen, and perhaps it was my imagination but the air became a tad more frigid.
“Her name was Charlotte Dempsey, but she went by Charlie. She’s obviously related to Rawlins and yet he never mentioned her.”
He cleared his throat, but before he could reply, there was a knock at the door.
“Come.”
Holden bowled in, but he was hefting a small box and didn’t look at me. If my interaction with the professor wasn’t awkward enough, now I had to confront my ex.
“I have the recordings you wanted, Professor.”
Professor Shaw jerked his head toward me, and Holden’s cheeks flamed.
“Oh, I didn’t see you… and your…” His face became even redder so he resembled a beetroot. “Sorry, ummm, congratulations on mating and the baby.” Despite his blush, his words carried a genuine amount of warmth. It was a distinct contrast to the professor’s coolness and apparent disapproval.
“Sorry, I can’t help you.” Professor Shaw was putting a full stop on our interaction. He may not have wanted to speak in front of Holden, but it was hardly a state secret when Charlie Dempsey had been a student here.
I pushed the chair back over the wooden floor, and the professor’s mouth twisted at the grating sound.
My mind was on Charlie Dempsey throughout the morning, and during the break, I heaved myself up the stairs, intending to have Phelan ask his father if he knew Charlie at school. But I ran into Mrs. Ardilla in the hall.
She’d always been so stern, but she was the college’s resident nurse, and whenever we met, she was babbling about birthing positions and labor. I wanted to yell, “La, la, la, la, I can’t hear you.”
Phelan and I had watched videos, and we’d said we’d practice breathing techniques, but neither of us did anything about it. I was in denial about the pain of labor.
Knowing she’d been a pupil here, I asked her about Charlie.
She gave me a look. “She was Rawlins’s sister, but surely you knew that.”
Now it was my turn not to provide an answer, but Mrs. Ardilla added that Charlie was still sponsoring the soccer scholarship that Jack received. I was aware of my bestie’s scholarship but hadn’t realized Charlotte had set it up.
Now I had more questions than answers, with the first being where was Charlie?
After class, when my mate walked into our quarters after a shift, he was sweating and he had that look in his eye that said he remembered I’d asked for a rain check. He came up behind me and smooched my neck. It would have been easy to drop my pants and fall into bed, but I was looking through the boxes of papers I’d brought from the house.
I held up the deed of sale. “Rawlins’s sister and Arnie Guthrie owned that house we visited.”
“Sister? Makes sense, I guess, though it’s weird he never mentioned her. Maybe they didn’t get along and he cut her out of his life.”
Family dynamics were complicated, but the Rawlins I knew valued family, and I’d always thought I was his only relative, though we weren’t related by blood.
I rifled through the boxes again, wishing I’d had time to organize the paperwork. I picked up a bunch of pics, and Phelan, having apparently given up on sexy times, sighed and sat beside me.
“What are we looking for?”
“That house pic with the guy, remember? Or did I put it in the notebook?” I couldn’t recall.
“This one?”
I ran my finger over the brickwork over the door. “It’s the same as the house we went to, so maybe he’s Arnie.”
Phelan shrugged. “Okay, so Rawlins had a pic of his brother-in-law outside the house he bought with Charlie. Not a surprise.”
I shuffled through more photos and paused at another one.
