After finishing her lunch in the teacher’s lounge, Kat had headed to the restroom before returning to her classroom for the rest of the afternoon. As she passed a supply closet, she noticed that the door was cracked open, but there was no janitor in sight. She knew the cleaning staff never left the door unlocked or open in case kids wandered inside and played with things they shouldn’t, and as she was about to shut the door, she saw movement in the corner.Her heart stuttered. A rat? Maybe a raccoon that had gotten in last night? Or had a kid gotten inside? She walked in, flicking on the light overhead, and scanned the room. She saw a flash of pink in the corner. Kat was about to reprimand whoever had decided playing in the supply closet had been a good idea when she saw that the child in question was huddled on the floor, her head in between her knees, completely still and quiet, even as Kat approached.“Emma,” she breathed, kneeling in front of her. She touched her shoulder gently
After the closet incident, as Gavin had dubbed it, Emma seemed to bounce back to her mostly normal self. She’d admitted to Gavin that she’d been afraid that “the people were coming to get her.” When he’d pressed her to explain, she’d clammed up and refused to say any more. She hadn’t said anything more about what had happened, and although part of him wanted to understand his daughter, another part was hopeful she could get past this and they could somehow make a normal life for themselves in Heron’s Landing.Now, a few weeks after the closet incident, Gavin sat in Emma’s second-grade classroom for the semester’s parent-teacher conference. Emma’s teacher, Mrs. Gentry, was a woman in her late thirties who looked more like she was fifty, mostly because she wore her hair in the tightest bun Gavin had ever seen and wore clothes that were probably older than Gavin himself. Mrs. Gentry had recently divorced, and sometimes Gavin wondered if she hated him on sight for being male.Really, he
When are you coming back to LA?Kat stared at the Facebook message in her inbox and sighed. She wished she had an answer to that particular question, but at the moment, she had no idea. Would she go back to LA at all? It would make sense. She had come to Heron’s Landing to care for her grandmother, but now that Lillian had passed away, she was just kind of hanging around, perpetually in limbo.I’m not sure. But I’ll let you know, she wrote, hitting enter before she could rethink her response to her ex-boyfriend’s question. She and Marcus had dated for close to three years while she’d attended UCLA and then worked as a computer programmer. Their breakup hadn’t been messy or bitter; in fact, it had been a mutual decision. She was moving to Missouri, he wasn’t, neither wanted to do long distance. So they’d parted ways and that was that.Kat sighed again. Was that her life, then? To be logical, practical, but without passion or any real emotion? Her list of boyfriends wasn’t extensive,
“Emma, could you set the table?” Gavin called from the kitchen.He could see his daughter’s blonde head pop up from the couch before she called back, “What?”He sighed. “Come set the table, please!”“Why? We never set the table for dinner.”God save him from questioning eight-year-olds. Although Emma was shy around people she didn’t know and was often extremely self-conscious in public, she managed to seem more like your usual kid when at home. It was some small comfort to Gavin that the daughter he’d gotten used to before everything that had happened still existed.Emma wandered into the kitchen to watch him. “What are you doing?”“What does it look like I’m doing?”“You’re cooking.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”“Ms. Williamson is coming to dinner, that’s why. Now, go set the table like I asked you to.”Emma rolled her eyes, but Gavin was so happy to see her acting like a real kid that he didn’t have the heart to reprimand her for it. Better to have a daughter rolling her eyes t
“Ms. Williamson, I think my computer froze.”Kat looked up from her own computer to see Danny Tucker raising his hand. She restrained a sigh. The kid’s computer inevitably froze at least twice each class period, mostly because he seemed determined to press as many buttons as possible until the computer gave up the fight.Kat fiddled with the mouse and, seeing that the cursor was frozen, she used the tried and true Control-Alt-Delete and told Danny to do only exactly as he was told when the computer rebooted. Danny nodded, but she knew that was basically code for “I’m going to mess around again the second your back is turned.”Kat didn’t mind teaching most days. The kids were entertaining, and she essentially babysat while they played keyboard games to improve their typing skills. It was a far cry from her work as a computer programmer, and if she thought about how she was wasting her own education to sit here and make sure kids like Danny didn’t cause their computers to explode, she
The day after Emma’s incident—what did they call it this time? the computer lab incident?—Gavin told himself he had every right to be angry at Kat and it was none of her business what he did in regards to his daughter. She didn’t know Emma’s history. How could he explain that the three times he had taken Emma to therapy, his daughter would become so panicked afterward that it was like talking a person off of a mental ledge? Every time had been worse than the time before. After the third therapist, Gavin had vowed never to put Emma through that ever again.He told himself that as he got Emma to go to sleep the night after this incident. He told himself the same thing a day later, even though guilt had started to niggle at him. The day after that, he told himself he’d maybe been a little harsh, but he’d still been well within his rights to tell her to back off. He couldn’t think about the look on her face, or how he’d probably screwed up everything with her already, and as he did work a
As Kat lay in Gavin’s bed, staring up at the ceiling, she knew she wasn’t going to sleep tonight. For one, the sheets smelled like him, and she couldn’t help but inhale that scent and think of kissing him. Thoughts of kissing only made her more awake than ever, and so by one in the morning, she’d given up all hope of sleeping.She debated whether or not she wanted to make herself a cup of tea. Would she wake up Gavin if she did? But something warm sounded too good to pass up, and besides, she’d gotten good at being quiet when Lillian had been alive. Kat had gotten up so many times in the middle of the night for one reason or another as her grandmother had declined, losing more and more of herself to the dementia taking hold of her mind.Kat sighed. Getting up out of bed, she snagged her robe and her glasses. She tiptoed past Emma’s room and entered the living room to get to the small apartment kitchen. But when she saw a figure sitting up on the couch, she stifled a gasp. Gavin. It w
Gavin realized the irony that was his life when he wanted the woman who was currently staying at his apartment and driving him crazy. Not because she was a bad houseguest. No, she was the ideal houseguest, he had to admit: clean, quiet, and she cooked. But it was seeing her walk around his apartment, seeing her toothbrush next to his on the bathroom counter, and smelling her scent everywhere that drove him insane. It was like having a wife again.And he really, really didn’t need to think of Kat as his wife.It didn’t take long for word to get around town about what had happened. Joy had stopped by Gavin’s to see Kat, and Adam had also dropped in, asking if they could help in any way. Soon it seemed like everyone in town wanted to help: Grace, Jaime, even Gavin’s parents, along with every person who had ever talked to Kat. Her coworkers from school stopped by in droves, bringing casseroles and other dishes, hugging Kat and offering her various condolences. And then, of course, there