She expected Cal to chime in again, as supportive of this idea as she was beginning to feel, but he didn’t do so quite as readily as she would’ve liked. “What?” she said, looking for reassurance.
He put an arm around her. “It’s a bit of a risk, but I suppose you can determine how receptive Robert is once you’ve talked to him.”
She nodded, somewhat relieved just to have worked out a course of action. Even if Robert was every bit as bad as history would indicate, and she had to rely on bribery alone to get him to leave, she was willing to give him a significant sum, if only he wouldn’t ruin the next two weeks. “Can you keep the boys busy here while I go talk to him?”
“They won’t be happy when I mention more work—they think they’re done—but I can come up with something. How will you find Robert?”
“He told Eli where he’s staying.”
“You’re not going to his motel! We’re talking about a known murderer, Aiyana. I don’t want you over there, not unless I’m with you.”
“I’ll be fine. You stay here and keep the boys with you. I’ll call the motel and have Robert meet me somewhere else.”
“Demand that it be a public place.”
She didn’t want to meet him at his motel, but she didn’t want anyone to see her talking to him, either. “He has no reason to kill me.”
“I don’t care,” Cal said. “He’s fresh out of prison. I’m not willing to take the chance.”
She decided to have Robert meet her under the pavilion at the park. It was a public place, so she wouldn’t be ignoring Cal’s wishes, and yet there weren’t a lot of people who frequented the park during the rainy season.
It would be public but private. “Okay,” she said as she rose up on tiptoe to kiss him.
No one was around when Emery got home. In the winter, the store closed early on Sundays, even through the holidays, so it was only six-thirty. She figured Dallas, Aiyana and the others were still at Cal’s, getting ready for the wedding.
She considered going over to see if they needed another pair of hands. She hadn’t been able to do much before work. But she was becoming infatuated with Dallas and thought it might be wise to take a step back. Now that she was capable of leaving her room and being seen in public, she was going to meet an old friend, Cain Brennan, for dinner, who was in town for the holidays and recognized her when he’d come into the store earlier.
After a shower so that she would no longer smell like fresh-baked cookies, she got ready and hurried out of the house. She didn’t have to meet Cain for an hour yet, but she wanted to be gone before Aiyana and her family could return. Otherwise, she was afraid she’d cancel her dinner with Cain. She was far more interested in seeing Dallas, hadn’t been able to quit thinking about him all day.
She drove slowly but still arrived far too early to go in. She sat in the parking lot and called her mother, who immediately asked if she’d spoken to her father and started to complain about the mess she was in.
Emery hung up as soon as possible so that she could call her father. She’d been putting it off. She felt fragile enough without having what would, no doubt, be an upsetting conversation with the man she’d believed she could always rely on, but who had let her down right when she needed him most.
Even after she sent the call, she checked her watch, hoping for an excuse to hang up and continue to procrastinate this conversation. But she still had thirty minutes before Cain was due to arrive. Considering the brevity of her conversations with her father these days, that would be more than enough time.
You can’t cry. That was the only caveat. If she was going to meet an old friend who may have heard of her humiliation, she was at least going to do it with some dignity and not walk into the restaurant with swollen eyes, a red, splotchy face and smudged mascara.
“Hello?”
The second she heard her father’s voice she tightened her grip on the phone. He felt like a stranger to her. That was something she could never have imagined growing up. “Dad?”
“Emery, what’s going on?”
He asked that question so casually it was hard to believe he’d been paying the slightest attention to the catastrophe that had destroyed everything she’d built.
Or he no longer cared. That was the possibility that really hurt.
“Nothing,” she said. Why bother telling him, yet again, that she’d been deeply wronged and had no idea how to cope with the embarrassment and humiliation? That she’d lost her job and wasn’t likely to find another one, at least in TV, not with such a scandal on her record.
She was an adult. She had to stop leaning on her father at some point.
She’d just never expected to lose his support so suddenly or so completely. “I’m calling about Mom.”
“You mean you’re calling for her.” He sounded bitter, but she forced herself to overlook the tone of his voice.
“She has no money, no way to get by.”
“Why can’t she work like the rest of us?”
Emery drew a steadying breath, once again warning herself not to get emotional. “She has worked. It hasn’t been for a paycheck, but she has done a lot for our family.”
“You’ve been grown for years now.”
“But she’s never really held an actual job. And she didn’t see the divorce coming, had no time to get prepared. It’s not easy to jump into the workplace when it’s been decades. What is she trained to do? Technology has changed so
