oatmeal and prepares it the way she used to like it, with cinnamon and bits of chopped apple. He dishes it up when he hears her bedroom door open. Pours cream over it and sprinkles brown sugar on top. When she appears in the kitchen, he’s standing there holding the bowl in both hands, a supplicant to an exacting goddess.
Allie’s eyes go wide. One hand covers her mouth. She makes a choking noise, like she can’t breathe properly. And then she swivels around and literally runs out of the house, as if the gates of hell have opened and a thousand demons have been unleashed.
“Well, that went well,” he mutters, sinking down onto one of the stools at the counter.
He desperately needs advice but has no idea where to get it. Maybe he should call Alexandra. Maybe he should call social services. Maybe the mysterious Phee knows something about teenagers. Probably he should take Allie to a grief counselor.
Maybe he should call his sister. Jo always knows what to do.
Impossible. He brushes the idea aside, but it refuses to go away. Jo. Practical, capable.
But he can’t, won’t, call his sister for help. He burned that bridge for a very good reason. You don’t call somebody you haven’t spoken to in years at seven o’clock in the morning and ask for help with your teenage daughter. Especially when . . .
Well. You just don’t.
Unless you have hit the absolute end of your rope and have no other options. If helping Allie means calling Jo, then that’s what he’s going to have to do. He stares at the pot of congealing oatmeal on the stove. At the untouched bowl abandoned on the counter.
Braden picks up the house phone. Despite the intervening years, his fingers dial automatically, the number practically part of his DNA. Maybe she won’t answer, it’s early yet. He’ll leave a message. Or he won’t. Even if she answers, he can just—
And then her voice is on the line, clear and vigorous and thoroughly Jo. “Hello? Hello? Listen, Lilian, I don’t know what game—”
“Jo. Hey.” He closes his eyes, resisting the urge to smack himself in the head with the receiver. Of course Jo has caller ID. Of course that’s what she’d think.
“Braden?”
He grips the receiver a little tighter, plastic digging into bone. Waits.
“What the hell are you doing? If you’ve moved back in with that woman—”
“Jo.”
“Six fucking years, Braden. What the hell?”
“She’s dead, Jo. Lilian’s dead, and so is Trey.”
Nice work, he mocks himself. Way to break the news gently.
He hears the little gasp on the other end of the line, the silence that says more than words.
“Braden? Are you there?”
His blood surges loud in his ears; music plays in his head like a movie soundtrack that refuses to be put on mute.
“Here.”
“And Allie?”
“Alive. Unhurt. But she’s . . .” He doesn’t know how to explain Allie.
“I can come, if it would help.”
“I don’t think . . . it’s not like she knows you. Although anybody is probably better than me.”
“Nonsense. You’re her father.”
Laughter is bitter in his mouth. “She hates me. She won’t talk to me, won’t look at me. She explained, very clearly, that I am here as a figurehead adult until her eighteenth birthday, and then I’m out of the picture.”
Jo is so much better at being a human being than he is. She skips the recriminations, the questions, and gets straight to the point.
“She’s an angry, grieving teenager and you’re the perfect target. That’s expected.”
“I don’t know if she’s sleeping, or eating. I don’t know anything. A counselor, maybe?”
“Give her some time.”
“I don’t have much of that.”
“How long do you have?”
He does the math. Allie has an August birthday. Six months. He has half a year to repair a breach that took eleven years to create.
“Just be there,” Jo says. “Don’t let her push you away. My God, Braden, what happened?”
“There was an accident. Lilian was taking Trey to a doctor’s appointment, is what I understand. Police are still investigating, but she might have fallen asleep at the wheel.”
“God.”
“I was supposed to meet Allie that day, but I . . . didn’t. Now she won’t let me near her. Has completely cut me off.”
“Well, that sounds familiar, anyway. She always was like you, I thought.”
This is as close as Jo is going to get to laying on the guilt about the way he’s cut himself off from his own family. “It’s not the same,” he wants to tell her. “It’s not the same at all.”