Yours to Keep (28 page)

Theo.

“Ana!” Ethan said, before he realized that—of course—she knew.

She grinned at him.

Theo was holding a shiny wine-red electric guitar. He picked up the end of the amp cable and jammed it into the socket on the side of his guitar. Gave his father a nod of acknowledgment.

He began playing. Ethan recognized the guitar solo from Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” Good. Better than good, the slight slide of it, the way it grew and reached further, the squirrelly, swirling, psychedelic twirl of it. Not David Gilmour, of course, but pretty amazing for a fifteen-year-old. He watched his son’s hands move over the frets. Effortless. Big hands, finding the chords with total mastery, total certainty. Only long hours of practice could have gotten Theo to this place, and all those long hours had been hours when Ethan hadn’t heard, hadn’t been there to hear. He watched Theo’s fingers slide up and down the neck of the guitar as the solo reached frenzy—he could hear in his mind the rest of the band, imaginary musicians filling in behind his son, who was now in the zone, he could see it, eyes closed, guitar almost loose in his grasp, although he commanded it thoroughly. Those last notes, while the solo refused to end, and then did, the rocker’s final, dramatic sweep-thrust of his instrument.

Theo’s eyes were still shut, his lashes long and black on his cheeks. His right hand dropped to his side; his left still cradled the neck of the guitar. Ethan had to fight the urge to turn away, as if he’d seen something he shouldn’t have, something intensely private. Instead he began clapping, and all around him there was applause and hoots of appreciation, drowning out the last vibrations of Theo’s solo. Theo opened his eyes. There was a faraway look in them. He seemed to be returning from a very long distance. He smiled dreamily.

A hand came down on Ethan’s shoulder. “Not bad, huh?” James asked.

Theo unplugged and came down from the stage, went straight into his father’s arms.

Ethan held him tight. You had to cherish every single hug from a fifteen-year-old, because they were so few and far between. “You’re amazing. I had no idea.”

Ethan thought of something that the father of one of his patients once said to him, that the older your kids got the more they needed you. Not some parent, any parent, but you,
specifically. When they were babies, anyone could hold them, feed them, comfort them. But as they got older, went to school, and fell under other influences, only you could finish the job of shaping them. Only you could give them the guidance they needed. Even if they seemed to reject it. Even if they seemed not to be listening.

“I love you,” he told Theo.

“I love you, too,” Theo whispered back.

He looked at Ana over Theo’s shoulder. Her eyes were bright. “Thank you,” he mouthed.

James came up and slung an arm over Ana’s shoulders and one over Ethan’s. Theo had drawn back a little from his father’s embrace, but James’s arm span still encompassed them all. “What a nice little family you all are,” James drawled.

His tone was mocking, but he didn’t fool Ethan; he saw the envy in his brother’s eyes. Theo and Ana both looked surprised, as if they hadn’t thought it before,
family
, but Ethan felt no surprise, only a click of recognition, as if James had just, finally, given a name to what he’d felt from the moment the door to Ed Branch’s office swung open and he saw her standing there.

It was a bitterly cold Friday afternoon. The wind cut straight through Ana’s fleece jacket, her sweater, and her thin long-sleeved T-shirt, bit into her flesh and chilled her to the bone. She crammed her hands into her pockets, which made it harder to walk up the big hill and still didn’t keep her fingers from going slightly numb at the tips. She couldn’t feel her ears, nose, or toes at all.

When she finally pushed open the door of Starbucks, where Ethan was supposed to pick her up when he was done with work, a wave of coffee-scented warmth washed over her. She wanted nothing more than to slump into one of those big armchairs in the corner, a paper cup of something hot between her frozen hands.

Then motion at the table near the big armchairs caught her eye and she saw Mrs. Abrams, waving furiously for her to join her and her two friends.

Her first impulse was to flee. But she didn’t think she could stand to go out into the cold again. She gave Mrs. Abrams a feeble wave and pointed to the front counter.
Let me order my drink and I’ll be right over.

She ordered tea, because it was the least expensive thing on the menu and because she knew that it would be near boiling hot. She collected her paper cup and headed over to Mrs. Abrams’s table. Maybe she could linger for a minute or two before claiming her armchair.

“Sit, Ana, sit!” cried Mrs. Abrams. “These are my friends, Jennifer and Alyssa. Ladies, this is Ana. She’s the amazing tutor I told you about.”

The cornered animal in her skittered, but she sat in the proffered chair. Jennifer was a round-cheeked woman with dark eyeliner and poufy red hair. Alyssa had a tightly wound quality; she was on the bony side of healthy, with glossy, expensively styled dark hair. Both women smiled at her, Alyssa’s on the controlled side but a smile, nevertheless, of welcome.

“We’ve heard you’re a genius with the kids,” Alyssa said. Her S’s were expensively sibilant, her face subtly made up.

Embarrassed, Ana said, “Leah’s very smart. It’s been a pleasure to work with her.” She took a drink of her tea, to have something to do, and burned her tongue.

“She’s—Ana, do you mind if I tell them? I was so excited when I heard the news! Thrilled!” Mrs. Abrams fairly bounced in her seat.

Oh, God. There were no secrets in Beacon. And she was going to live here.

“Ana is marrying Ethan Hansen. Dr. Hansen!”

“Dr. Hansen!” echoed Jennifer. “We love Dr. Hansen! Dr. Hansen was the one who figured out that my youngest was diabetic.”

“He’s great,” affirmed Alyssa. “He was amazing when my son was having so many ear infections. Everyone loves him. You know what we all call him, right?”

The three women exchanged glances. Mrs. Abrams looked sheepish. Jennifer shrugged.

Alyssa leaned close to Ana, conspiratorial. “Dr. Handsome.”

“It’s true,” Jennifer said. “I can’t remember who came up with it, but it’s perfect, isn’t it?” She smiled at Ana. “You’re a lucky girl.”

Dr. Handsome.

She felt dizzy. She couldn’t put her finger on exactly what—

Yes, she could. They were talking about him as if he was theirs. As if they’d all known him forever, and she was—an interloper.

Did he know they called him Dr. Handsome? She sincerely hoped not. She couldn’t
imagine that he’d like it.

Or maybe he did like it. She looked around the table at them. What had Ricky said to her, that awful, awful thing he’d said?
“The spice wears off … then he divorces you and marries one of those skinny rich bitches so he can have white babies.”
And she’d said Ethan wasn’t like that, but the truth was she didn’t know him very well. She was just borrowing him from the town of Beacon.

“So how’d you guys meet?”

She had a strong desire to close her eyes in case that would make her disappear. No wonder there were no secrets in Beacon. “I tutor his son in Spanish.”

“And you guys fell in love?” demanded Alyssa, with that face women got sometimes, that Oh-my-God-it’s-so-romantic dreamy face.

The question was, how little was secret in Beacon, Massachusetts? Presumably, Theo and Leah had been talking. Did that mean that Mrs. Abrams knew the nature of Ethan’s proposal? Would she tell her friends that Ana’s marriage wasn’t a matter of love?

They were all looking at her, and Ana felt sick to her stomach. Did it always take this much mental energy to carry on a conversation in Starbucks? She was exhausted.

“Yup,” she said. Because it wasn’t a complete lie, was it? She was pretty sure she was in love with him, even if he wasn’t in love with her. And Harry Abrams had been quite clear that, fact or fiction, the appearance of love was key to the venture.

“Do you have a date yet?” Alyssa asked.

“Not yet.”

To her great relief, Jennifer—possibly sensing Ana’s discomfort—said, “What are everyone’s Thanksgiving plans?”

It would be a little bit of a miracle, Ethan reflected, if he’d managed not to misdiagnose or mis-prescribe to or otherwise endanger his patients this afternoon, because he’d been somewhere else entirely.

He’d been over and under and in, definitely in, Ana. In his bed. From behind, bent over his bed. Standing, hoisting her up the wall, her legs around his waist. And—in honor of the fact that Theo was going to the mall again tonight with Leah, “chauffeured” by Rena—on the kitchen counter, the kitchen table, the living-room couch …

Could you do it over the back of the couch? Or would the height be all wrong?

And did it really matter? He’d be perfectly content with the floor, to be honest.

Repeatedly he’d wrenched his mind back to where it belonged. Dragged it away from its romp through the house, through her mane of hair, through the damp curls of …

The afternoon crawled by. A sore throat and vomiting, probably strep. A drooling and miserable toddler who wasn’t teething, probably Coxsackie. A tick bite ringed with that peculiar red rash typical of—

A piece fell into place in his mind. His head cleared suddenly, a brisk wind sweeping clouds out to sea. He wrote a prescription for amoxicillin, politely shook hands with the worried mother, and practically ran down the hall to his office.

In his head, he heard the echo of the words Nicole Freyer had uttered when she first brought Mary to the office at the preschool teacher’s urging. She’d been comforting herself aloud. She’d said,
“Like Mary’s Lyme test in the spring. That turned out to be a false alarm.”

How could he have missed such an obvious clue for so long?

He knew the answer. He’d been distracted by the developmental angle. He hadn’t thought he was looking at an infectious disease. He thought he was looking at a kid on the spectrum, and then he thought he was looking at a desperate mommy.

He’d let his ego keep him from seeing what was right in front of him.

But he’d caught it now. He could still turn the Freyers’ luck for the better.

He dialed their number. “Did we test Mary for Lyme last spring?” he demanded.

“Yes,” Nicole said. “I don’t think we saw you on that visit, though. I think it was Dr. Cahill that time.”

Dr. Cahill. A good man, an old-school pediatrician with the best bedside manner around. He could be stubborn, though, about admitting that the world had changed. He was the one doctor who hadn’t liked the office’s new Lyme protocol. Test and retest. A waste of money, he’d told them in the meeting when they made the decision to err on the side of conservatism.

“How long after she was bitten was she tested?”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Not sure,” she admitted.

He pulled up Mary’s chart, found the date in early June when she’d seen Dr. Cahill.
Eight days. They’d tested her eight days after the bite. He searched for a retest, but there was none.

“I need you to bring her back for labs one more time. Tomorrow.”

Chapter 25

After he hung up the phone, he locked up his charts, grabbed his coat, and headed out. He went up the stairs and out the door to the back parking lot. There were only a few cars left, none of which he recognized. His car was at the far end of the lot. He’d been later than he intended this morning; fatigue had caught up with him and slowed down his morning routine after he’d dropped Ana off.

Now Ana was hanging out at Starbucks, waiting for him to pick her up. He’d told her that he thought he could meet her by six-thirty. He was a few minutes late, but just a few.

He pictured her, sitting at a small corner table, coffee mug clutched in two hands. Would she be reading? Probably—she’d told him she was an avid reader. She’d look up and see him come into the shop, and she’d smile across the room at him. He smiled, thinking of it.

An enormous shadow separated itself from the huge tree at the far end of the parking lot. His breath whooshed out of him; his heart leaped into top gear. He almost fled but found himself frozen in the act of stepping forward. His hand had found his cell phone in his pocket without his mind even commanding it, had already unlocked the phone by the time he was conscious of acting.

His brain began, finally, to make sense of what he was seeing. The shadow was a man, an enormous black man. And there was another, slighter man behind him.

“Ricky?” he guessed. As he said it, he realized that part of him had been expecting something like this.

“That’s me,” said the smaller shadow, taking a step toward him. He was a big man in his own right, tall, lean, with close-cropped kinky hair. Despite what Ana had said about her sister and brother not looking like her, he could see the resemblance immediately—the wary intelligence in their eyes, something stubborn in the jaw. Ricky wore a baseball jacket and jeans. Neither man appeared particularly menacing, and Ethan couldn’t see any weapons.

Ricky held up his hands. “We just want to talk.”

Ethan dropped his phone back into his pocket. His heart had slowed considerably since the shadow first stepped forward. He could breathe, and although he was shaking all
over, it was more surprise than fear.

Ricky took a step closer. “I want you to stop seeing Ana.”

He wasn’t surprised. As soon as he saw the men, as soon as he guessed Ricky’s identity, he knew why they were here.

“Look,” Ethan said reasonably. He had to give Ricky credit. It took balls to show up in person to deliver a message like that. He deserved honesty in return. “I care deeply about your sister. She’s—”

“I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.” Ricky’s eyes narrowed.

“And I’m telling you it’s not going to happen.” He wasn’t afraid. At times like this or like the moment when he’d opened the door into Ed Branch’s office, everything slowed down for him, including his own blood. It gave him a preternatural calm.

The larger man stepped close and leaned down so that his face was right next to Ethan’s. His breath smelled like buffalo wings. “I told you he’d need convincing.” His voice was surprisingly high and light for such a big man. Ethan would have expected it to boom.