Because of Audrey

Better.

Ramming his shaking hands into his pants pockets, he studied the woman chained to his greenhouse and forced himself to rise above his distress to view her objectively. Studying her would give him a minute to collect himself.

He’d avoided her in high school. Looked like he wasn’t going to be able to now.

Audrey had changed. She’d been strange back then, in Doc Martens, studded dog collars and spiky black hair, but she’d traded it all in for a more sophisticated weirdness. She wore a suit—a cropped jacket and skirt, and looked like something out of a sixties society photo, Mrs. S—Lunching with Friends.

He stepped closer. Fire-engine-red lipstick that matched a ridiculous little hat perched on her head defined a sinfully full mouth. Black eyeliner framed violet eyes. A cap of black curls surrounded a pale face.

Jackie O meets Betty Boop.

Gray knew both characters well. Mom had a lifelong obsession with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, and Dad loved old cartoons, but come on, these days who dressed like an uppercrust fifties or sixties housewife out on the town?

As had happened in high school, his feelings about Audrey couldn’t be clearly defined—sometimes anger, sometimes confusion, often panic. They flummoxed him and made him a little crazy. He was a good judge of character, but who was Audrey, really, and why did he feel so strange around her?

And why did she bring up these memories of the accident?

Why would who she was even matter to him? It wasn’t as if she was anything more than another of the town’s citizens, a satellite floating around the edges of his world.

Calmer now, he stopped in front of her. If his stance was aggressive, so be it. He was in no mood to beat around the bush. “What are you doing?”

“Protecting my property.” Her body might have Betty Boop’s curves, but her voice had none of her squeaky breathlessness. No-nonsense and down-to-earth, it had an intriguing depth.

“You’ve got stuff in our greenhouses?” So this situation wasn’t Dad’s fault. Audrey was nothing more than a garden snake variety of trespasser. Harmless. “That’s squatting.”

He turned to his foreman. “Cut off the handcuffs. Escort her from the property.”

“This land belongs to me.” For a short woman, she had a big voice. Must be those well-endowed...lungs. “If any of you puts a hand on me, I’ll call the police and have you charged with both assault and trespassing. Get off my land now.”

Gray stilled. “Your land? What are you talking about?” His foreman was right. She was a nutcase.

With her free hand, she reached into a boxy white purse hanging from her handcuffed wrist and pulled out a paper, the nerves underneath her defiance betrayed by the wavering of her hand.

He snatched it, read it...and stopped breathing. A photocopy of the sale of a swath of land to her, it looked legit.

Impossible. The air around him became thin. Man, he was getting tired of being dizzy.

Dad, you didn’t—

You couldn’t have—

He had.

Dad had sold a piece of their land to Audrey Stone in...Gray checked the date...January, seven months ago, and not a corner plot, or a slice of land from one of the boundaries, but a chunk right in the blasted middle of the land Gray wanted to sell. Correction, needed to sell.

His jaw hurt with the struggle to maintain control, to keep the panic at bay. “How did you get this out of my father? What did you do, threaten him or blackmail him with something?”

“I asked him. Politely. He said yes. It’s legal.”

“We’ll see about that.” He strode away and whipped out his cell. Dad’s lawyer answered on the second ring, none too pleased to be disturbed at breakfast. Too bad. This needed to be handled. Two minutes later, Gray had an appointment to see the man in his office this morning.

He hung up and gestured to the construction crew. “Clear out. Remove the machinery.”

If this sale was legitimate, they were trespassing.

They grumbled but obeyed. Today’s debacle was going to cost Gray a bundle. If the sale of land to Audrey had been fraudulent in any way, Gray would sue for damages.

He turned to the woman unlocking herself from the greenhouse door. If he were a violent man, he’d knock her ridiculous red hat from her head.

“This isn’t over.”

“Yes, Gray, it is.” She’d just won a battle and should have looked triumphant. Her solemn frown, though, didn’t reflect victory.

The few times he’d run into her over the years, he’d gotten the feeling she knew something he didn’t. What? Her knowledge, and his ignorance of it, angered him, made him want to lash out. She was nothing more than a resident in the town he’d grown up in, so why this sense of...drama, of history?

He jumped into his car to drive home, to find out from Dad what kind of whim or idiocy had led him to sell a valuable portion of their land, but not at all sure he’d get an answer that would satisfy him. Dad had always been too softhearted, and was growing worse with age.

When Gray realized he was counting telephone poles, he pulled onto the shoulder, put the car into Park and reached into the glove compartment. Counting, for God’s sake. In the months since he’d returned to Accord, he’d started counting everything, from how many times he chewed his food before he swallowed to the number of steps between his bedroom and the bathroom. Wasn’t that a sign of OCD personality or something? He’d never done it in his life before. Moving back home had screwed him up. He loved Accord. He’d had a good, solid childhood, so why did returning give him the heebie-jeebies?

Granted, he hadn’t been himself since last year’s accident, but he’d been recovering. So, why had coming home left him reeling? Why had it brought all of those bad associations, which had finally been healing, back into play? Moving away from Boston, away from the scene of the accident, should have made him better. So, why had coming here made him worse?

He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, cursing when his hands shook. After lighting one, he blew smoke out the open window. Before last year, he’d never smoked.

Times had changed.

He’d changed.

While he smoked, he struggled for equilibrium.

Rather than calming him, the nicotine riled him—and that pissed him off. He had to stay calm. Turner Enterprises needed a strong hand at the helm. Obviously, Dad was no longer up to the task. He’d sold that piece of land. Sheer lunacy. That strong hand would have to be Gray’s, but for the first time in his career, he was afraid he wasn’t up to the job.

The cigarette tasted like crap and was making him nauseous. Not surprising, given that he’d run out the door before having breakfast. He flicked the butt onto the road.

Pull yourself together, Turner.

Before he knew it, he was lighting up a second cancer stick. It tasted as bad as the first. He tossed it out the window, too, and crushed the pack of remaining cigarettes in his fist. He needed to pick up gum or something. Inhaling tobacco was a dumb idea. Weak. Spineless.

He drummed his fingers on the window well. The scent of pine and cedar from the woods lining the road drifted in on a breeze and blew the smoke out of the car.

He started the engine, pulled a U-turn and returned to the greenhouses to have it out with Audrey. Better to push his anger on her than on his aging father.

* * *

AUDREY SHOULD HAVE been reveling in her victory—after all, she had won—but instead she watched Gray drive away and wished she could turn back history to better times. But too many years had passed. Maybe Gray wouldn’t want to go back to those times.

Maybe he was better off not remembering. He’d certainly shown no sign of recalling much about her, let alone how much they’d meant to each other all of those years ago. As much as she’d tried to forget, in many ways it seemed she was still that girl she’d been when she was only seven. And, today, seeing Gray again, all of the sadness of that time—the trauma, the tragic ending, the sad goodbye—still lingered.

When the backhoe leaned too close to the glass roof after pulling in its stabilizers, she shouted, “Careful!” then tracked its laborious journey to a flatbed and waited until every piece of machinery and every last construction worker was gone.