by name. “We should have taken Henry Olsen up on his offer to drive us to the hotel,” the one named Annie said. The one named Myra shaded her eyes against the October sun and squinted down the road. “I think you’re right. I think this was an exercise in futility. What did we even really learn?”
Annie poked her friend in the arm and hissed, “Check out those shoes on the woman behind us. Louboutins, and that pair goes for nine hundred bucks. Saw them in Neiman Marcus. I wonder if she’s trying to match that red hair she’s sporting. You can tell it comes out of a bottle,” Annie sniffed.
Myra shrugged to show she wasn’t interested in the woman’s red shoes or her red hair. “We should have stayed home and let Avery handle this. No one knows anything about Sara Nolan or Sara Windsor or Sara Conover or whatever name she is using at the moment.”
Nina Lofton almost fell out of her red stilettoes at the mention of her name by two strangers standing right in front of her. She did a double take, then backed up carefully, a step at a time, so as not to call undue attention to herself, and ran as fast as her spike-heeled shoes could carry her back into the airport, where she called a number she knew from memory for a car service. She walked over to the service exit and waited, her foot tapping the concrete floor, her guts churning. Weird things happened to her all the time, but this was definitely one of the weirdest things ever. Here she was, standing in a line waiting for an Uber and thinking about Andy Nolan, and two women she’d never seen in her life were talking about her. Her! She told herself that was about as weird as it could get. Why? Who were they? Why did they mention Sonia and Dan’s best friends, Maddie and Henry Olsen. Andy called them aunt and uncle, but they weren’t blood relatives. She never called them anything but the Olsens.
Sara leaned against the wall and closed her eyes while she waited for the car service she’d called. Andy’s dear sweet face swam behind her closed eyelids. Andy made her life bearable. Andy always knew just the right thing to say to her, knew when to give her a quick hug or take her hand in his. Once he’d kissed her tears away. If she lived to be a hundred years old, nothing would ever compare to that one minute of time in her young life. Instantly, things in her little world were made right when he was in her line of sight or near her. She questioned how that could be when Andy was four years younger, and everyone knew girls matured faster and more quickly than boys. She told herself whoever had made that observation didn’t know Andy Nolan.
* * *
They told each other secrets, and as far as she knew, Andy never divulged anything she ever told him. And she’d never told anyone anything he’d confided to her. In the end, who would she tell, certainly not the Olsens or Sonia and Dan, and she had no friends to speak of. Andy Nolan was her only friend. And she was okay with that.
Until . . . until Andy discovered girls. More to the point, when girls discovered Andy Nolan. Girls flocked to him because he was sweet and cute. Sweet and cute grew into handsome, and from handsome he went to drop-dead gorgeous, and then it was look-out-world-here-comes-Andy-Nolan! He took it all in stride and didn’t get serious about the adoration or admiration. Football was serious, getting ready for college was serious, and going into the military was serious. He didn’t want baggage, and girls, he’d told Sonia, were baggage. In a good way. He went on to say when he left to make his way in the big, wide world, he didn’t want to be encumbered in any way except by Sara because she was his big sister and he loved her. Like a sister.
Those three words were like a knife in Sara’s heart. That’s when she knew for certain there would be no future for her with Andy in her life. And Andy was oblivious to her feelings, which made it hurt all the more.
When it was time for college, she elected to go to the community college so she could still stay in the Nolan home while Andy finished