Page 97 of Claim to Fame

Headlights flashed in his rear-view mirror, and he cursed to himself, pressing harder on the gas pedal. His eyes darted between the headlights moving ever closer and the road ahead of him as it twisted and turned along the edge of town. On the passenger seat, his cell phone rang and he reached over, blindly grabbing for it, to silence it before it could wake Julie, the truck swerving into the other lane as he did.

He over-corrected, guiding the truck past his lane and onto the rumble strip at the edge of the road before finding the balance in the middle of the lane again.

And still those headlights came closer.

These paparazzi fuckers don’t give up.

With a hard turn of the steering wheel, he swung onto a narrow side street by the cemetery, his speed climbing. In the backseat, Julie snored softly, undisturbed by Ethan’s erratic driving. The phone rang again, but this time, in his fumbling to silence it, he accidentally answered.

“Dad?” Tessa’s voice came through the truck’s speakers as the phone connected. “Where are you?”

He glanced in the rear-view. Julie scrunched up her face, but kept sleeping. “I took Julie out for a drive to get her to sleep,” he whispered. “I can’t talk right now.”

“Why don’t you bring her home? I’ll meet you there. It’s slow at the bakery today anyway,” Tessa said.

Ethan was so focused on the advancing headlights in his rear-view, he blew through a stop sign without even seeing it, a car on the opposite side of the intersection laying on its horn as he flew past. “Shit,” he muttered.

“Everything okay?” Tessa asked.

“Fine. I’ll see you at your house in ten.”

He hung up before she could say anything else. He needed to stay focused on the road. And those fucking headlights were riding his tail, high beams flashing erratically, blinding him.

He sped up, flying past the smaller houses of Gavin’s mother’s neighborhood and the Portuguese butcher shops. Finally, the street widened into the larger main road, two lanes on each side, and the car that had been following him since the vineyard pulled up alongside him. He slowed the truck as the car sped past, the sides scratched and dented, with a familiar bumper sticker on the passenger side fender: “Honk if you love a frat boy.”

Ethan pulled over to the side of the road, stopping the truck, and leaning his head back against the seat.

It wasn’t a reporter chasing him down.

It was the Collins kid, out for another one of his joyrides. A fucking nineteen-year-old adrenaline junkie.

With the car parked, Julie stretched and fussed in her car seat. The sound sent guilt flooding through his veins, a sinking, nauseous feeling. He’d driven like a maniac with his granddaughter in the car—and for what?

They could have been hurt.

Shecould have been hurt, and it would have been all his fault.

Bad enough that his business was in disarray and his personal life was being ripped apart by literal strangers, but now he was putting his family’s safety at risk?

No. No more.

This has to stop.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Later, Hannah would swear there was something off from the moment she returned to Ethan’s home that afternoon. The air was thicker, or maybe thinner—either way, it had changed. The sunlight streaming through the kitchen windows seemed dimmer, the house colder.

“Ethan?”

She set her bag down on the kitchen table and made her way through the house towards the bedroom at the back. She didn’t toe off her shoes like she usually would, and later she would wonder if it was a kind of premonition, like knowing she shouldn’t get too comfortable. The door to the bedroom was open. Ethan stood in front of the closet, staring at the row of her sundresses hanging alongside his button-downs.

“Ethan?”

He turned to her, his jaw tense and skin ashen, and she knew. Her heart sank into her stomach, a strange tingly feeling climbing up the nape of her neck, like when she’d watch a scary movie and the music would change, her body responding to information she had yet to receive but knew was coming.

“What happened?” she asked, her mouth dry.

He didn’t respond at first, his eyes skittering away from hers as though the answer to her question might be found in the bed they’d shared for the last several weeks.

---