Merry Christmas, Babies

The room was warm. Joe chugged the last of his drink.

“I’m not the woman you see, Joe.”

He didn’t believe her.

CHAPTER TWO

ELISE WATCHED THE EMOTIONS flit across the face of her dear friend and partner. Joe had always been so easy to read. He didn’t have anything to hide.

His open honesty made him a great salesman.

And a horrible poker player.

He didn’t want to hear what she had to say.

But he had to hear it.

Maybe as badly as she now needed to quit hiding from the truth.

“This face you find strikingly beautiful…” The words caught in her throat. She’d loved hearing Joe describe her that way, but she needed to bury her head and cry at the same time. It wasn’t her he was admiring.

It wasn’t ever her.

“It’s not me, Joe. It’s a piece of art—the award-winning work of a very talented craftsman.”

Dr. Thomas Fuller hadn’t told her about the public acknowledgment of his work—or the pictures of her face that had been passed around. She’d seen a magazine open to an article in his office one day.

And had rushed to his private bathroom to throw up.

“I don’t understand,” Joe said.

“You know B&R’s start-up money came from a life insurance policy my father purchased before he died.” When it came right down to it, even after all the years of counseling, the new steps she’d vowed to take, she still couldn’t find the words to speak of the night that had irrevocably changed her life forever.

“Yes.” Joe twirled his glass, moving the ice cubes around and around.

“I’ll get you another drink.”

He didn’t argue.

“I was born in Arkansas,” she said as she came back into the room and handed him the full glass. She took her bottle of water to the other end of the sofa. Opened it. Played with the lid. “I was third youngest of four kids.”

“You have siblings?”

She couldn’t blame him for sounding so shocked. Yet the reaction cut her to the core.

And that was why she was speaking up. People couldn’t know what she didn’t tell them.

“A brother and two sisters.”

He threw up a hand. “Why haven’t I ever met them? You know all my brothers and sisters. Hell, you know their kids better than I do.”

She’d spent a lot of holidays with his family.

And she’d hurt him. She hadn’t expected that.

They’re dead, Joe. The words said themselves in her head.

“You’re welcome to meet my family right now if you’d like to take a five-minute drive with me to the cemetery.”

“They’re dead?”

She tried to nod. Meant to nod. She stared at him. Not even blinking.

“All of them?”

Now she blinked, opened her mouth, but it was trembling too badly to wrap around words.

His face stiffened, and paled. “How?”

“A fire. The electrical system in our house shorted.”

JOE’S SKIN WAS CLAMMY. Chilled. He needed to walk. Do something. But he couldn’t move.

Surely the horror he was beginning to picture wasn’t as bad as he was seeing it. Elise was his friend—probably the best friend he’d ever had. She was strong and steady. Nothing bad ever happened to her.

How could he have been so blind? So damned self-interested that he hadn’t known she was hiding?

“They didn’t have time to get out?” he asked now, aghast at the thought of her siblings trapped in a burning home.

“It was the middle of the night.”

The story she’d had to tell him was simple enough. But it contained images he was never going to forget. His beautiful, self-sufficient partner sitting on her sofa, hunched over, consumed by inner visions. And a fear so real she was shaking with it.

“What about your parents?”

“Them, too.”

She’d lost her entire family in one tragic night. He couldn’t even fathom such a thing. Not when his siblings, his parents, were still very much alive and in his life, an intrinsic part of who he was.

He stared at his friend, seeing someone completely different, someone his heart bled for. Someone he was in awe of.

“How old were you?”

She didn’t seem to see him. “Eleven.”

A child. An innocent. Six years before he met her. Six years of growing up…where? With whom?

“Where were you at the time?” How had she been told? Did she see the house?