“Elliot.”
His neck muscles tightened. His eyes were all over her. “What?”
She tried to word an explanation. Her throat clenched. Her eyes burned with the threat of hot tears.
“Lainey, what is it?”
When you were in Milwaukee—racing home to be with me—I did something awful. She imagined speaking the words, but they wouldn’t come out.
“Just say it. You’re scaring me,” Elliot demanded. Another car honked. He took two steps to look out the front window. “Holy shit.”
Her head snapped to where Elliot was staring. His face was frozen in shock.
Because it wasn’t “a couple of random people.” It was a hoard. A swarm. Three camper vans were parked on her lawn, all in a tidy, neat row, with an RV pulling in to join the party. Half a dozen cars were parked along her private drive with slightly less precision, people pouring out of them like clowns in a circus.
“How…?” Elliot couldn’t form words.
“I’ll tell them to leave,” she assured him. Cortisol shot through her body. In an instant, she jumped up from the floor and bolted for the door.
“Let me go with you. We don’t even know who they are. Lainey, wait,” he called after her. “You’re not wearing shoes.”
She took a breath, her hand resting on the doorknob. Lainey’s work wasn’t done, and as much as she wanted the family of ten piling out of the midsize Subaru to be random locals who’d figured out tonight was the night, the Georgia plates said otherwise. This was undoubtedly her mess to fix.
“I know who they are,” she told him.
His eyes darted all over her face. “Who are they? Just tell me.”
“I know you. The second I say it, you’re always going to imagine the worst of me.”
“I wouldn’t…” His sentence drifted away as he took her face in his hands. She felt so safe, which made her feel even morerotten. “When it comes to you, I’m different. I see all of you. The good parts. The complicated parts. And still I can’t help but hope for the best possible outcome. It’s been like that with us since the very beginning.”
Hope. The word fell on her heart with a physical weight. With her, he had hope, and for Elliot, there was nothing he could have said that was bigger than that.
She felt her resolve strengthening. She had to trust him a little more. Just to see.
“They’re the group Larry set up.”
She watched his face process this information. “Are you saying he went behind our backs?”
“No…I told him yes, two days ago.”
His face twitched. “Wh-what? How did you talk to Larry two days ago?” He was no doubt remembering the state of her the other night. She’d been in no shape to conduct business meetings.
“He was at the pharmacy. When I couldn’t find my meds, I biked there to talk Ernie into an early refill—which he wouldn’t do—”
“You biked there? In the rain?” What sounded like a decommissioned ice-cream truck pulled in playing “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” over the loudspeaker.
“I didn’t have a working car, then my phone broke, and my refill was on its way to a stone supplier in Milwaukee, so what else was I supposed to do?” Her apology came out more defensive than she’d intended it.
Also, it wasn’t precisely an apology in a technical sense, or in any sense, really.
“I don’t get it. Why would you risk our permit for a little bit of money?”
“Maybe because fifteen thousand dollars isn’t ‘a little bit of money’ to me.” She closed her eyes, wishing she had the power to unsay it. She’d lost any moral high ground the moment she made financial arrangements in a pain-induced bout of insanity. She wasn’t going to win this one, and she didn’t deserve to. “That doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I said that. I’m sorry about all of this. Yesterday, I tried to fix it. I told him to take down the post.”
“That doesn’t seem to have worked,” he commented, his voice flat.
He looked between her and the people spilling onto her lawn as though debating where to begin.
