A California Christmas (Silver Springs #7) - Brenda Novak Page 0,89
so that her poor mother wouldn’t have to worry about her dwindling reserves along with everything else. Emery had never been a spendthrift, but it was expensive to live in LA, her job hadn’t paid all that much to begin with—she hadn’t been there long enough to work her way up the pay scale—and she hadn’t anticipated losing it. She hadn’t been prepared for such an unexpected and serious setback.
Her phone rang. Apparently, she’d been so nice her mother now felt safe to call.
“Thank you, honey,” Connie said as soon as Emery picked up.
“Of course. No worries at all.”
“Grandma is only getting worse,” her mother complained. “Each day, she slips a little further away. It’s so difficult to watch the woman who raised me regress into someone so childlike and lost. I’m just...beside myself,” she admitted.
It was hard to hear about her grandmother, but the hurt and bewilderment in her mother’s voice was even more difficult. “That’s terrible.”
“And someone broke the window out of my car last night. There wasn’t even anything in it to steal! I hate to accuse anyone, but I wouldn’t put it past that tramp your father has taken up with. Deseret seems to think he shouldn’t have to pay me anything—as if his money is her money, and she’s the one who can call the shots. After more than thirty years of marriage, this is what I get. She’s what’s making everything so much more difficult than it has to be.”
Emery recalled her father saying that he had more people to consider then just his original family and had to admit her mother could be right. Deseret wasn’t helping. But would her father’s new girlfriend really go so far as to vandalize Connie’s car?
Maybe it wasn’t Deseret. Maybe Marvin had done it. It could be that he was so frustrated that he couldn’t please the new woman in his life—and so afraid he might lose her—he’d broken the window himself.
Where would it all end? Emery asked herself. “I’m sorry, Mom. You don’t deserve what you’re going through.”
“How are you doing?” Connie asked, but that question came across as somewhat timid—as though she was afraid of what she was about to hear.
Emery thought of Ethan’s vile texts only an hour earlier but put some energy into her voice to make her response believable when she said, “I’m doing better. Much better. I’m going to be fine. Don’t worry about me.”
“What’s changed?” her mother asked in surprise.
Dallas. Emery now had someone she could lean on. He’d come into her life right when she needed him most—but she wasn’t about to mention him to her mother. She was afraid Connie would read too much into it. “Staying with Aiyana has given me a chance to catch my breath and recoup.”
“Any word from Ethan?”
“No,” she lied.
“Are you still going to sue him and the station?”
“Yeah, but my attorney will take care of that. I don’t have to do anything, except wait to see how it all turns out.”
“That’s a relief.”
“It is. And you know I’m working again. So...see? Everything’s looking up. You don’t have to worry because you have me. Just let me know if you need more money.”
Her mother started to cry, which made Emery cry, too. “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too, honey.”
“We’ll both get through this.”
“I hope so.”
Emery had hung up and was just blowing her nose and wiping her eyes when Dallas ducked into the kitchen. “Would you like to join us in the living room for a glass of eggnog?” he asked as he got the carton out of the refrigerator.
She kept her face averted so that he wouldn’t be able to tell she’d been crying. “No, I’m okay. I’m just going to finish up here and go to bed.”
“You still have that headache? Can I get you a painkiller?”
She tried to staunch more tears as she rinsed the last of the suds down the sink. “No, I’ll be fine. Go ahead and enjoy your family.”
He came over and caught her chin, forcing her to look up at him. “What’s going on? That asshole isn’t bothering you again, is he?”
She shook her head. She was afraid her voice would crack if she tried to speak.
“You’d tell me?”
She nodded and he kissed the top of her head before pulling her into his arms. “Whatever it is, it’ll be okay,” he murmured. “You’ll see.”
She closed her eyes as she rested her cheek against his chest and tried to absorb the warmth of his body, to