Like Never Before (32 page)

“Theo.” Logan lowered his voice. “You know if . . . if I end up having to go to court, I would've had to back out anyway.” How he hoped he didn't. He hadn't heard from Rick and Helen since leaving Maple Valley, didn't have a clue if Rick had gone through with his threat to meet with a lawyer.

But the threat was enough.

“It was the right thing to do.” He said the words again, a sigh stitched in. Maybe he was trying to convince himself as much as Theo. Not just about calling the campaign manager, but—he glanced around his apartment, dusty and unkempt after two months away—about this, all of it. Coming back so quickly. Leaving home.

Leaving Amelia.

It killed him the way they'd left things. The way he'd hurt her. The papers for the sale of the
News
sat on the peninsula counter even now, just waiting for his signature.

“When are they going to let you know what's happening?”

The water bottle crinkled under Logan's fingers. “Dunno.”

Theo sighed and crossed the room. He paused by Charlie to muss her hair. “Take care of that arm, Little Charlie.”

She saluted with her un-casted arm. “Aye aye, captain.” Who'd taught her that? Seth or Colt?

And had she noticed how much quieter their apartment was than Dad's house? Because he sure did.

He saw Theo to the entryway. “I am sorry, man. I never meant to mess things up.”

Theo pulled open the apartment's front door, someone else's footsteps from down the hall sounding behind him. “I know you didn't. Jill and I are heading out to Allentown this weekend, by
the way. We're going to try to get a townhouse or apartment. We'd rather do that than camp out in a hotel for a year and a half. We can ask around for you, too, if you want.”

“Sure, go ahead.” What would it hurt?

They parted, and Logan started toward the living room, only to hear another knock on the door. He angled back around. “Forget someth—”

Only it wasn't Theo standing on the other side of the door. He gasped. “Beckett?”

His brother's form filled the doorway, his rumpled clothes evidence of a cross-country plane ride.

“I heard you might need legal counsel.”

An honest-to-goodness laugh erupted from his lungs, hearty and homesick all at once. “Get in here.” He grabbed his brother by the shirt and pulled him into a hug. When he stepped back, he studied his little brother. His hair was longer than when Logan had seen him last, and the circles under his eyes deeper.

Either his little brother was working sixty-hour weeks . . . or the ghosts that'd chased him from Maple Valley haunted him still.

Very possibly both.

“Seriously, what are you doing here?”

“Don't I get to see Charlie first?” He strode past Logan and into the living room. “Hey, kid, your favorite uncle is here.”

Charlie pushed away from the coffee table and met him halfway across the room. Beckett swung her into his arms, ruffling her hair. “I hear you've gotten talkative. And what's up with that arm?”

She held her pink cast out like a display of show-and-tell. “You need to sign it.”

“That I do.”

“And then your uncle has to explain to his older brother what in the world he's doing here.” But at the moment, Logan
didn't even care. He'd wished for a piece of Iowa, of home. And unlikely as it was, he now stood right in front of him.

The next two hours passed in a blink. He ordered pizza. Beckett played with Charlie and even helped Logan give the apartment something close to a real cleaning. By eight, Charlie had conked out on the couch, and Logan transferred her to her bedroom.

When he came back, it was to find Beckett looking through a scrapbook Logan usually kept stored on the shelf under the coffee table—clips of newspaper articles about candidates and speeches, all with his name somewhere in the story.

“That's Emma's doing, originally. Alena, our intern, insists on adding to it these days.”

Beckett flipped to a page with a photo of Logan standing with the governor. “It's like when you were in high school and Mom saved all the school newspaper articles, all the ribbons and photos and whatever. Man, you drove me crazy back then.”

Logan reached for a piece of now-cold pizza from the box still sprawled atop the coffee table. “Gee, thanks.”

“No offense, but you were so stupidly good at everything. Perfect GPA. President of the student council. Valedictorian. And then to top it off, the guitar player who made all the girls swoon.”

“Uh, one girl. Emma.” He dropped into the recliner—the one Emma had called ugly and promised to eventually ban from the apartment. “You were the basketball star with the constant gaggle of cheerleaders around you.”

“That's the other thing. You use words like
gaggle
.” Beckett grabbed the last slice from the pizza box.

“I've got a good vocab. So shoot me.”

“Yeah, well, I'm a lawyer now, which means I speak legalese, which means I can out-dictionary you any day.”

They ate their cold pizza in quiet minutes while Beckett continued looking through the scrapbook. Only when he'd closed it did Logan ask again. “So you're here because . . . ?”

Beckett tossed his pizza crust onto the cardboard box like he would've a basketball, his expression finally turning serious. “Because you've never once not been there when things got messy for me.”

Messy
—the perfect word. Two months ago, life had been tidy. Maybe not perfect—there were hidden dusty spots, he knew that. Lingering hurt crouching behind a busy work schedule.

And to think he'd accused Amelia of hiding.

But at least he'd had some sense of direction before going back to Maple Valley.

“It's just weird,” Logan said. “I've always had a plan, you know? Even if it was a halfway-iffy plan like staying in Iowa for a couple months to fix up a newspaper before selling it off.” But now? He still hadn't signed the sale documents, and he could get a call any day from Hadley's people, rescinding the job offer. He didn't know whether to find a new nanny and a speech therapist here in California or wait to see if he ended up transitioning to Allentown.

And he'd left a huge chunk of his heart in the Midwest.

“I keep waiting to feel grounded.” Like when Emma was alive. Back when he'd been able to picture so clearly what the future looked like.

“Maybe you're not supposed to feel grounded.” Beckett had shifted so he leaned forward now, folded hands dangling over his knees.

Logan lifted his head, let his expression ask his question for him.

“Maybe there comes a point when God doesn't want you all grounded and secure and confident in your plans. Maybe he wants you churned up and uncertain for a while. So you'll look
to him, depend on him instead of your usual got-it-all-together Logan Walker roadmap.”

Logan's conversation with Bear that day in the square came back. Bear had said something about the wide-open spaces of his future—that when you knew who you trusted, the openness became invigorating instead of intimidating.

Beckett straightened and rubbed his palms over his jeans before settling back against the couch. “Then again, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, and I'm the last one who should be giving advice, and you should hash this out with Dad.”

“No, you're . . .” He met Beckett's eyes. “You're more right than you know.”

The foggy lemon smell of the Pledge they'd used to dust all the hard surfaces in the living room nearly masked the faint lingering smell of smoke damage. Somewhere a car honked.

Okay, God. If you need to take everything off my plate in
order for me to hear you, go for it. If
a clean slate and an invisible roadmap means I'll learn how to trust you, then all right.

The lazy whir of the overhead fan and the distant moan of traffic settled into silence.

“Just a sec.” Beckett stood. “I left something in the hallway.”

His brother returned seconds later, Logan's guitar case in hand.

“What? How did you get that?”

“Kate called the other night. Told me everything that'd happened recently and basically ordered me to get on a plane. And then Rae got on the line and said she'd already found a flight with a layover in Des Moines. They both met me there.”

And gave him the guitar. But why?

“Raegan said to remind you that you're the one who told her it's okay to have varied interests, multiple dreams, and change paths as many times as she needs to.”

He had said that, but he'd been talking about her part-time jobs . . . not his old love of music.

“And Kate said she's not going to let Colton propose until you're playing again, because she wants you to sing at their wedding.”

“Do we have pushy sisters or what?”

“And I say the least you can do in exchange for me coming all this way is promise me you'll open this when you're ready.”

He eyed the case. “That thing was out in the hall for two hours. What if someone had stolen it?”

“Then I wouldn't have mentioned it, and you wouldn't have been any the wiser.” Beckett set it aside. “When you're ready, Logan. Oh, and one more thing.”

Beckett reached into his pocket and pulled out a flat, square paper envelope.

New guitar strings.

Three years of motherhood had aged Dani Malone, but in a good way, a graceful way, Amelia decided. Gone were her dark, waist-length curls, and in their place, a stylish pixie cut framed her face. Her cheeks were fuller, sprinkled with freckles and a few faint lines that made her seem older than her twenty-one years.

But there was a peace in her eyes that Amelia had never seen back when she was a scared barely-eighteen-year-old. High school senior. Pregnant. Desperate.

“Amelia?”

Amelia stood on the front steps of the miniscule bungalow home on 31st Street in Des Moines. Hadn't even had to look up the address after writing it on so many unmailed envelopes, the letters to Mary she'd never sent. She'd simply ignored the
turnoff for Maple Valley on her way back from the Cranford offices and found herself here.

“I know I should've called.”

Dani's smile shifted out of surprise and into something warm as she ignored Amelia's hesitance and lunged for a hug. “Are you kidding me? I've been waiting for this.” When she stepped back, there were tears in her eyes. “Come in. You've got good timing. My aunt watches Mary a couple days a week while I'm in class, and she just dropped her off ten minutes ago.”

Mary.

Weirdly, her heart didn't even lurch at the thought of seeing the baby—no, now a three-year-old, just like Charlie—she'd once considered her daughter. Instead, a humming curiosity had settled in someplace between Dixon and here.

She followed Dani through the modest living room. Futon in place of a couch. Old fireplace that must not be usable considering the candles crowded into its base. A pile of textbooks on the coffee table.

“You're taking classes?”

“Yep, summer courses just started. I'm finishing up my gen eds this summer at the community college and then transferring to ISU this fall.”

“What are you studying?”

Dani stopped near the kitchen. Its appliances looked like remnants of the seventies, the gold refrigerator crammed with crayon pictures. “Actually, you kind of helped me choose without realizing. I don't know if you'll remember this, but before I even got pregnant, when I'd only been coming to church a couple months, we were talking once after youth group about going to college and picking a major and all that. And I told you I had no idea what I wanted to do, that I didn't think I had any major skills or talents, and all I knew was I didn't want to end
up living on welfare like my mom. I wanted to have a dream, I just couldn't find one.”

Amelia did remember that. They'd been sitting on one of the ratty couches in the church youth room. Just that night Jeremy had told the group of kids it was his last night. His speaking career was getting off the ground, and he'd just landed his first book contract.

“I'll never forget what you said. You said, ‘Dani, if you really want the dreams and desires in your heart to come into any kind of focus, maybe start by getting to know the one who gives us dreams in the first place.'”

“I said that, huh?” And she'd probably believed it, too. A wistfulness crept in then—for the faith she used to cling to.

“When Mary turned one and I started thinking about finally doing the college thing, it came back to me. I realized I wanted to do for other kids what you did for me—help them get to know God, I guess. But I'd like to do it outside church walls, so I'm double majoring in nonprofit administration and social work with the hope of eventually working for a youth organization.”

Could this really be the same kid who'd shown up at church an angry teenager, sullen and sick of her life? Amelia couldn't find the words to express the mix of disbelief and pride and yes, even joy warming through her.