Page 74 of Sublimate
“I tried to capture the changes and I hope I succeeded. It was obvious when I went back to our high school yearbook,” she said. “He has a class picture and he also showed up in a few other shots in the background. He looked the same in every one, and he looked the same when I saw him in the years since,” she said. “Like he was—”
“Cadence? Are you ready?” Beau called, and she nodded.
“He seemed separate even if he was with a group and he was…remote,” she told me. “Maybe that’s not the right word, because maybe he was just sad. He doesn’t seem that way anymore and it’s the same thing I noticed about you. The first time we met, I thought you were very pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“But you were the same way. Sad,” she explained. “You guys really helped each other.”
“I mean, he helped himself a lot. I’m glad if I did something for him too, because he sure did for me.”
“I think it was mutual,” she said. “I think you’re good for each other, no matter how you want to have your relationship. It works for you.”
It did. It was hard to think that I wanted more, because what did that say about me? I was greedy enough to want all of him, and not just his body for sex…although, I’d been thinking about that a lot.
“Thank you,” I said when we got into his car. “Thank you for doing this for me.” He had already given me a homemade breakfast muffin with a candle to blow out and that had been more than enough. Then he’d done a whole party? “I was totally surprised.”
“I could tell,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone look so shocked as when you walked into the restaurant.” He smiled. “Do you want to stop and get your car at Cadence’s house or do you want to get it tomorrow so we can ride together?”
“Tomorrow is good.” I looked behind us on the road. Whoever had been following me might not know this vehicle—
“There’s no one back there,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“What?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“You never said anything to me about it but I could tell that you were nervous,” he answered. “Every time you got into the car, you repeatedly checked your mirrors.”
“Maybe I was just learning to be more like Beau and Cadence.”
“No, because I noticed it, too. I saw the same guy behind us a few times, although he was driving different rentals. Thatprobably meant that he was a professional and that someone had hired him, someone with enough funds to keep it up for several weeks. There was only one person who would want to do that.” He tapped the steering wheel. “I called my mother and we discussed it.”
“Oh.” I looked over at him. “What did she say?”
“Right now, you seem less than surprised,” he pointed out, and I nodded.
“I had a feeling that she was behind it.”
“You knew that she was paying someone to stalk you?” he asked me.
“I mean, it made the most sense,” I said. “Once I got over the idea that it was supernatural, I also figured that it was a pro. So it couldn’t have been the guys from the hotel parking lot, since they were too dumb to check for my car keys and steal what I had in there. It wasn’t any of my exes, including Kolter. He wouldn’t have been able to stay hidden for so long because he got caught at everything. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”
“You’re good at that, though. You knew that someone was tailing you and it was bothering you, but you didn’t tell me. It wasn’t just you, either. She had people watching Kolter as well, and maybe Cadence.”
“I didn’t want you to get mad at her,” I explained. “You came back home after being with them over Thanksgiving and you talked about how she was acting different—better. You thought that your parents might have been falling in love again. Wouldn’t that be great?”
“It’s not happening,” he informed me. “They’re not really going to reset and become totally different.”
“But—”
“Viv, they like their lives. Maybe it’s just that they’re comfortable in their misery, but they’re already back into their former patterns. My dad is carrying on with his assistant and my mom decided to transform the guest bedroom back into a secondary downstairs home office. They updated her profile on the law firm website to reflect that she has three spaces to work at her house, since she’s so busy.”
“Oh.”
“And this, hiring someone to follow you, was my limit,” Nolan stated. “I told her that we would not be visiting until she apologized to you, which might happen when she sprouts wings—no, I don’t really believe that she’s magic.”
I hadn’t totally discounted supernatural stuff but I agreed that his mother was fully human. “I’m sorry that I came between you and your parents.”
“There was nothing for you to come between,” he answered. “I realized that I was hoping for a transformation but I need to accept things the way they are. My mother loves me in an odd, twisted way that involves her surveilling you to try to protect me. My dad is happy to see me, to some extent, but he’s more interested in seeing the back of me so that he can start drinking again. At least he restrains himself in my presence.”
