That did it.
“Go. Get out of my house. What I do and what I have is no business of yours.”
“I didn’t mean that as a shot at you, swee— Sophie. I truly don’t want you to end up like me. Alone. You’ve got so much going for you — look at your career. I couldn’t be prouder of you. For someone to survive the kind of childhood inflicted on you…” He shook his head. “You’re special, Sophie. And I’d like to believe you’re going to be okay, but…” He gestured to the empty condo. “It’s a holiday, and you’re as lonely as I am.”
Clenching her jaw so hard she thought she might chip a tooth, she marched to the door, opened it, and waited for him to leave.
Her father lifted his chin and arched his neck back in defeat. “I haven’t handled this right at all, but then I imagine neither of us is surprised.” He glanced at the tulips that lay scattered across the pass-through, no longer neatly arranged, then hiked up his pants and walked to the door. “Happy Thanksgiving, Sophie.”
She met his eyes with a glare in an attempt to convey all the years of feeling unloved, unlovable. It took every bit of willpower she had to shut the door quietly, calmly, when she felt anything but calm inside.
Leaning her forehead against the closed door, she breathed in, willing her body not to collapse like a tower of blocks when someone kicked it.
When she felt steadier, she walked to the refrigerator, opened it, took out the half-full bottle of chardonnay, got a glass down from the cabinet, and stopped with the bottle tilted over the glass.
No.
She put the glass away, set the bottle back in the fridge.
Drinking away her loneliness was not the answer. That would make her no different from her father. And dammit, what he’d said had hit too close to the truth.
She wasn’t happy. And maybe part of that was because she was alone. Maybe a big part.
That, of course, brought Nate to mind. He was never far from it anyway.
The last time her father had called, when she’d still been in the hospital recovering, Nate had been with her. She closed her eyes and remembered what it’d felt like to have him offer his silent, nonjudgmental support. His touch on her shoulder had been so simple and so … exactly what she’d needed, whether she’d been able to see it then or not.
It occurred to her at that moment that the bad stuff was less bad, a little easier to handle, when you didn’t have to handle it alone. When you had someone who cared. Someone who you cared about.
She’d spent so much of her life, so much effort convincing herself that alone was how she wanted to be, to keep from getting hurt or let down again, but from the moment she’d found herself in the fire, facing the possibility of death alone, it’d become harder to believe in.
Sophie was alone, she realized, chiefly because of the people who’d been unable to love her the way she needed to be loved — her mom to some extent, but even more so, her father. For almost twenty years now, maybe more, she’d lived in fear of not being lovable, but the problem was him.
She didn’t want to be alone anymore, and that was in large part because there was someone she wanted to be with badly enough to try.
The instant the thought coalesced, she jumped into action, pushing herself away from the kitchen counter and checking the clock on the microwave. Just after eleven a.m. She tracked down her cell phone in her purse and punched a number from her contacts.
“Iona, hi, it’s me. Are you still in town?”
“Hey, Sophie. Happy Thanksgiving! I was just getting ready to load up the car. What’s up?”
“I have a baking emergency of sorts. I was wondering if I could have your caramel brownie recipe … and, since the grocery store’s closed today, maybe you have the ingredients?”
16
It turned out Elsa, Nate’s dad’s lady friend, was okay.
She was a bigger football fan than anyone, if fandom could be judged by loudness and yelling at the refs. Nate grinned in the kitchen, where he was rinsing off some of the dirty dishes, as, in the living room, she explained to the ref exactly what pass interference was and told him to keep his goddamn eyes open for it.
Dinner had been okay too. Tasty turkey, decent sides, good desserts. It was all okay. And yet the day was lacking.
“Rotten House, you bringing in the rest of that cheesecake?” Dylan hollered from the recliner he hadn’t moved his ass from since kickoff.
Nate overlooked the demand. If Dylan hadn’t shown up today, Nate would’ve been the third wheel, big-time. And while Elsa was nice enough and Nate and his dad were close, sitting through the holiday with the two lovebirds would’ve been hell.
How the mighty of the San Amaro Island Fire Department had fallen. Five years ago, the Rottinghauses had had their biggest crowd on Turkey Day with seventeen. Seemed like, since then, everyone and his dog had hooked up, gotten married, some of them with kids, even, and now he could add his dad to the list of the “attached.”
He picked up the plate with the store-bought cheesecake and grabbed the pumpkin cookies Elsa had baked as well and took them out to the living room. Setting them on the coffee table, he verified that the score of the game hadn’t changed and then headed back toward the kitchen.
