Love At Peace (Hometown Heartstrings #3)

Chapter 5

Heather

T he tears did the trick.

I hated to cry because it seemed so useless. Nothing happened if I cried. Nothing could be changed or altered just because I struggled to bottle in all my anger and frustration.

But they worked.

They did serve a purpose this time.

I’d finally gotten what I’d been insisting on.

Roarke left me alone.

After all those reminders and statements about wanting to be left alone, to have the freedom and peace to mind my own business and keep to myself. He finally let me be.

He stopped driving over. He didn’t walk by and visit. No calls. No texts.

Nothing.

It was a jarring sense of whiplash, to go from him staying in my small home with me and lying in my bed as he looked online in a form of house hunting to nothing. His presence was so prominent, like he was somehow larger than life with how much he’d snuck under my skin so quickly.

Without him in my days—or nights—it was too damn easy to feel like I’d completely and irrevocably lost him.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” I muttered to myself as I finished lunch. I was in the breakroom at the office eating later than usual because I’d been stuck on a call with the bank’s IT representative. But I wasn’t alone in here to get away with talking to myself.

“What’s that?” Nance asked as she walked in to get a water bottle from the fridge.

“Nothing.” I smiled quickly and stayed busy with cleaning up my wrappers.

It was difficult for me to accept that my feelings had changed. It was wishy-washy of me to go back and forth like this—to tell Roarke to back off and that “we” were done, then in the next moment of loneliness wish he was still in my life.

If I couldn’t rationalize missing him and hanging on to a wish that we could try to be together, I wouldn’t be successful in talking about it with Nance either. She was a great sounding board, but I didn’t want to expose how messy the matters of my heart were at the moment.

I was right to keep my distance from him for as long as he represented a connection to David. And since Nevaeh was with my ex, that made him connected by association.

Nance didn’t leave the breakroom, furrowing her brow as she looked at me for a long beat. “You sure you’re doing okay?”

I held in a sigh, not wanting her to think that she was bothering me. She wasn’t.

“I know you were stuck on that call for hours,” she said. “But that will all smooth out. I know it.”

I don’t.

“Is that man bothering you again?” She glanced around, as if someone could overhear. “David?”

I shook my head. “He hasn’t approached me again.” Yet.

It was coming up on two month since I’d seen him. While that should’ve been a promising sign that he was no longer a worry, I knew better. He would lurk out of sight and reach as a threat. There was no end to games with a sadistic narcissist like him.

She sighed, still looking so worried. “I’ll keep an eye out for him.”

“Thanks, Nance.”

“But you do need to unwind. You’re stressed about those files being compromised. And that’s understandable. Anyone would feel like that in your position. But you need to balance out the stress with relaxing too.”

I smiled now. “Hey, I already said I’d come to movie night.”

She’d officially rescheduled it for the following week, and I was looking forward to hanging out with not only her but also Fergus for that.

Closing one eye and pointing at me, she grinned. “And no chance of another raincheck this time.”

I saluted her. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

She let me be after that, but her question about David reinforced the worries about him. As I left the breakroom, I spent more time thinking about him and what he could be plotting against me than I did on the toy drive and charity program.

Between debating about if I’d messed up with Roarke and wondering when David would approach me, I was a bundle of nerves and full of stress. Nance called it accurately.

Staying busy at the bank was the only means of escape I could count on, but even that wasn’t working anymore. Numbers just weren’t that interesting. I went to school more with the goal of a public relations career, and being delegated to a bank job like this wasn’t challenging enough to keep me feeling preoccupied.

The only thing that almost distracted me was walking around with Fergus for the toy donation collections. He was funny, even if I could tell he was trying too hard to amuse me. Those walks through town were better with him at my side. When I went into all the old places that I grew up with, it was easier to not think about how I was treated back then. How some stores or places of business would tell me that I wasn’t welcome because my parents had gotten on bad terms with the managers or owners. Walking into them with Fergus made it seem like I had backup. They never minded him, and with his clear friendship with me as a coworker, he paved the way for lots of them to accept me—at least to my face and outwardly.

I bet that staying here and actually having a job made a difference too. Before I left for college, I held down as many part-time gigs as I could. I had the goal to make money, not look for all the ways to just find it and demand it like my mooching parents had.

I’d been working at the bank all this time, and that, more than anything, had to go a long way in changing people’s attitudes about me.

I wasn’t sure if it was enough to make me want to stay for good. A childhood’s worth of no welcome wasn’t something that could be erased quickly. So far, I was in the “running” for that job Janelle mentioned. I told Roarke definitively that I’d be leaving, but that was an error in counting the chickens before they hatched. I hadn’t interviewed with anyone. I hadn’t even officially submitted an application for transfer. The job wasn’t available to be applied to yet.

Still, I’d told him that with the frantic need to get away. To leave. I refused to stay where David could linger.

The potential irony wasn’t lost on me though. Just when it could really seem like Burton was accepting me, I’d leave again? I wasn’t sure how long I’d let my past dictate all of my future.

At the end of the day, Fergus stopped me in my office. “Hey, I know we said we’d go back to the hardware store and get the donations from their box after we were done here, but I forgot that I have an appointment for a teeth cleaning. I just, like, totally forgot about it.”

I dismissed him with a wave. “Eh. No worries. I’ll get it on my way out of here.” I doubted there would be anything in it to collect this week anyway. They had a low rate of donations.

“You sure?”

I nodded. When we walked around and did our stops earlier, we found a sign taped to the door about a late lunch and that they’d reopen in an hour. So, we’d planned to tackle that business at the end of the day. “Yeah. It won’t take me more than a couple of minutes.”

We parted ways and I drove the short distance to Burton’s only hardware store. A younger guy had bought it out from the old cranky guy I remembered from before. Jonas was all right, but he was one of those kinds of people who always seemed to be in a hurry to do something else.

“Hey, Heather,” he greeted when I came in.

“Just here to grab the donations.”

He huffed, checking a print-out of what looked like inventory. “I doubt there’s a damn thing in there. Maybe after payday,” he joked.

I smiled and used the key Janelle had given me to check anyway. “You called it.”

He looked up. “Does Janelle actually make you check those things every week?”

“She doesn’t. But the county officials in charge of it expect routine checks. So...” I shrugged.

“I like that. It isn’t often that people do what’s expected of them even if it’s kinda pointless.”

“Like doing the right thing when no one’s looking?”

He smiled slightly. “Yeah. Integrity. It’s lost nowadays.” Then he furrowed his brow, standing straighter. “Hey. Speaking of people who say they’ll do something and don’t...” He lowered to look under the counter. The long cardboard box he set on top of the surface sounded heavy, landing with a thud. “Eric said he would be in to get this adaptor and he hasn’t gotten it yet.”

“Oh.” I frowned. “Um...”

“It’s something he wanted for the bathroom in that house he’s been flipping forever.”

“Ah. Well, I can drop it off to him if you want.” I didn’t make a habit of seeing my cousin, but it’d been a while.

Jonas shook his head. “Nah. He’s gotta pay first. I called him when it came in. I left reminders.” He frowned and rubbed his jaw, seeming perplexed. “It’s not like him not to come grab it like this.”

“Maybe he’s been busier at the ranch than not.”

“Nah. It’s been almost two weeks now. He’s been looking forward to this part coming in because it’s not always in stock. If he’s not here to get it soon, I’ve gotta let the next customer who’s contacted me about it have it. I reminded him about how in demand this particular brand is when he ordered it.”

“That’s weird.” I looked at the box again, as if it would offer up clues. I couldn’t claim to know much about my cousin, but I was aware of how much pride he seemed to put into flipping that house.

“I know he was sick a while back.”

He nodded. “Yeah. I know. But when I left a reminder, he was already getting better.”

The longer I let this settle in my mind, the less it became about the part. I grew uneasy about this oddity.

“It’s just not like him,” Jonas said with a shrug.

Worry kicked in. I wouldn’t panic until I knew more, but I couldn’t ignore this sense of dread about my cousin.

Calm down.

There’s got to be plenty of reasons why he hasn’t come to get this part.

Maybe it’s nothing.

But with the paranoia and anxiety ruling my life lately, I got sucked into a spiral of worrisome what-ifs.

What if something happened to him?

What if—

“Heather?” Jonas raised his brows, seeming concerned.

I blinked then cleared my throat, realizing I might have looked panicked despite my inner thoughts to not jump to any conclusions yet.

“I’ll go check on him,” I said. “If he knows that this part is only available on a limited basis, I’m sure he would like to get t before it’s too late.”

“Okay. Thanks, Heather,” he said as I hurried out the door.

But...what if something happened to him?

I didn’t need another worry. I didn’t want the responsibility of another burden on my shoulders when I was already on high alert and defensive. But there was no stopping me from borrowing the bad vibe and feeling I got at the idea of something bad happening to the only family I had left.