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He ignores me, leaning into the van and unearthing a snow scraper that was wedged behind the passenger seat. He starts to clear the sides, the windows.
“Rhett!”
“What?!” he asks, turning on me. “You can leave if you don’t want to stick around.”
His tone is defensive but strong. Those sharp blue eyes stare straight into mine.
I allow my own voice to soften. “What the hell are we doing here?” I ask.
Rhett chews the inside of his cheek again, something I’m coming to realize he does when he doesn’t want to answer a question. Then he drops the scraper and puts his hands on his hips.
“I’ve saved some money over the years,” he says. “Doing mods for friends, repairs. Just whatever people wanted to float my way as a thank you. Also saved some prize pools from back when I was racing. I hoped I’d never need it, but… Well, here we are.”
“So you’re using it to buy this? Come on. There has to be something better. You could get a newer coupe for probably half the price. I mean, imagine trying to drive this in Manhattan. It’d be impossible to park.”
Rhett rubs his eyes in frustration. “God, Liz. I’m not going to be driving it in Manhattan.”
“What are you saying?” I ask dumbly, even though I instantly know exactly what he means.
“I’m going to take it south. It’ll be warmer. And I need something big that I can sleep in until I figure out what’s next.”
My breath catches in my throat to hear it said out loud. I’d thought Rhett was in complete denial about his impending cutoff. Apparently, I just wasn’t deemed need-to-know about this next, horrible step.
I don’t blame him at all.
Rhett’s eyes finally drop in my silence. He sits on the edge of the van’s interior. After a moment, I drop beside him.
“Marie is coming around,” I say.
“You don’t know that for sure,” he says quietly.
“I think we can make it work.”
“Please don’t,” he says. “Don’t get my hopes up.” He wipes his face. “Look, it isn’t that bad. This could be good for me. I wouldn’t have been able to do it myself, make a clean break. I’ve thought about just packing up and leaving enough times. Now I can’t talk myself out of it.” He chuckles wryly. “It’s just ironic that…”
He trails off. The silence is filled only by the restless waves, every other sound muffled by the blanket of snow. I wait for him to finish.
At last Rhett laughs a little to himself. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this but I never enjoyed working for the bank until yesterday. I was doing the wrong stuff all these years, sitting around the office, playing online poker and avoiding any semblance of responsibility. Anything that might look like commitment.
“But what we did together? That’s the kind of action I could get behind.”
Rhett finally felt what I feel every time I get my man. The rush. The excitement. Unfortunately his realization had to come at the worst possible time.
“Even if Marie doesn’t come around,” I say, “you could tell this to your mother. Maybe she’d—”
He waves away my words. “Mother has given me so many second chances. I’m not groveling to her, and I doubt she’d believe it anyway. Besides, she’s not the one I have to live up to. That honor belongs to my dad.”
I bite my lip. “I heard he passed away.”
“He died a war hero. The only thing I ever wanted was to make him proud of me. Mother denied me a chance of following in his footsteps. I’m too old now for the military, and I wasted the opportunity I had at running the bank. I’ve always hated the place, but at least I would have been carrying on something that bared his name, even if he was barely involved in it.”
“I’d always thought he and your mother started it together, like the Alencars.”
Rhett laughs. “God no. He wasn’t one to sit in an office. The bank was all Mother, but she never would have used her maiden name on the place.”
“What was it?”
“Sloane Duffy,” Rhett says.
