Page 116 of Ten Beach Road

“My FBI agent Joe,” Nikki corrected. “I called him and told him where to find Malcolm.” She swallowed. “I imagine they’ve taken him into custody by now. I haven’t seen anything on the news. I headed right for Bella Flora when I saw the hurricane warning for Pass-a-Grille.”

Maddie didn’t know whether Avery was as floored by Nikki’s revelations as she was, but she didn’t press for more detail. The blonde’s gaze slid from Nicole to the rattling window where she could just make out the shadows of what might be a stand of palm trees—or some triple-headed monster—swaying madly in the wind.

The lights flickered and snapped off. The air-conditioning shuddered to a halt and the blare of the TV went off in midbeep. It grew deadly calm outside.

No one spoke. Or moved. Until Kyra lifted her cell phone up and pressed a key creating a small glow of light. The others followed suit.

“This is when you’re not supposed to go outside,” Kyra whispered in the same kind of voice one might use to tell spooky stories around a campfire. “It’s either the wind changing direction or maybe part of the eye passing over us. You go out thinking it’s over and get trampled by the rest of the hurricane.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Maddie said. “And neither is anyone else.”

“I couldn’t get out of this bathtub if I wanted to,” Avery said. “Not without a crowbar.”

“I hope Bella Flora is okay.” Kyra still whispered. Maddie reached over and slipped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders.

“She has to be. I refuse to believe fate, or nature, or whatever is at work could ignore how much we poured into her,” Maddie said.

“Do you really think it works that way?” Deirdre asked. “That hard work is rewarded and evil gets punished? Where have you been living—in never-never land?”

Maddie flushed with anger. They were cowering in a moldy bathroom; how many other harsh realities did they have to face?

“Call it whatever you want, but where I come from we don’t abandon our children.”

Avery went very still and Maddie feared she’d somehow managed to offend both mother and daughter. “I’m sorry, that was . . .”

“No, don’t apologize,” Avery said. “I’d really like to hear what Deirdre has to say to that.”

They all turned to Deirdre, who looked slightly less regal on her toilet throne. “I’ll say what I’ve been trying to say all along,” Deirdre began.

Avery’s tone was taunting, but even in the muted glow of their cell phones, Maddie could see that her eyes were sad. “You mean before we found out you were just using us to get your career back on track or after? Before you exposed Kyra and us to the paparazzi and the foul-mouthed Tonja Kay or after? Before you . . .”

“That’s enough!” Deirdre snapped. She stood and began to pace, but of course there was nowhere to go in the tiny and too-full space. In a certain kind of film, she’d go running out into the eye of the storm trying to outrun her daughter’s censure and never be heard from again. Maddie smiled at her flight of fancy. They were jammed into a really crappy hotel bathroom in a hurricane, not a Nicholas Sparks movie.

Deirdre stopped and leaned against the bathroom wall. “I’m sorry that being here has helped my career. I know that’s the worst possible insult to you, Avery. But that isn’t why I came.”

“Right.”

“Oh, I did come because my career was in the toilet. Just like you did,” she said. “But that was because there was no longer anything holding me there. I was out of excuses. I couldn’t pretend I was too busy to find you and try to make amends.”

If there had been anywhere else to go, Maddie would have led Kyra and Nikki out of the bathroom, but they were a captive audience. She remained still, wishing she could don Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, but she wasn’t sure it mattered. Deirdre seemed far too intent on getting through to Avery to worry about them.

“Do you really think that before I came I knew about the merry band that would be assembled? Or that one of them would be a filmmaker with Internet savvy? That she’d happen to be pregnant by the husband of a Hollywood celebrity? You give me far too much credit, Avery. I’m a shitty mother, but even I am not that Machiavellian.”

They sat in the near dark listening to the wind whip back up again. The trees outlined in the window no longer swayed, they jitterbugged.

“Bottom line,” Deirdre continued, ignoring everything but the daughter who refused to look at her, “my career sucked. The thing I’d put before everything else had simply shriveled up and died. I heard you were in trouble and I hoped I could help enough that you’d want me around. That was my big plan.”

Avery made no comment. But Maddie could feel how intently she was listening.

“I married your father because he was a wonderful man and he loved me more than anybody ever had. Certainly more than my parents did.”

Deirdre’s smile was rueful, her tone almost wistful. “I told him that I wasn’t ready to settle down—I was barely twenty-one—and that I didn’t feel the same way he did, that I wanted to go to Hollywood and have a design career. Oh, I was brutally honest.

“I told him I didn’t want to be a mother; my mother was appalling at it. I didn’t even know how one was supposed to behave. But he thought that the way he felt about me trumped all that. ‘It’ll all work out,’ he said. ‘I love enough for both of us.’ That’s what he said.”

Deirdre looked down at her hands, which were clasped around her phone. For the first time since Maddie had met her she didn’t look remotely “together,” and it had nothing to do with the hurricane or the dim glow from their cell phones. “But it doesn’t work like that. Not even when you want it to. It has to be equal. Or at least somewhere close.”

She blinked back tears. “I was too young and far too messed up to handle things as I should have. And it didn’t help that I got pregnant on our honeymoon. When you were born I loved you more than I’d ever loved anything. And you scared me to death. I was so afraid I’d screw everything up, that I’d screw you up.”

She paused, searching Avery’s face for something. All Maddie saw on it was horror and dislike.

“I stayed because you were mine and I loved you. I did my best to settle in and make things work. But I never loved your father to the exclusion of everything else, like he wanted. And I just didn’t know how to be a mother.”

Deirdre paused and the silence in the bathroom was in stark contrast to the howl of nature outside. Sirens blared. There was a crash of something large onto metal. None of them moved.

“Your father was born to be a parent,” Deirdre said, staring into Avery’s no-longer-averted eyes. “Your parent. I just got out of the way.” She sighed. “And, of course, by the time I realized I’d done the absolute wrong thing and desperately wanted to beg your forgiveness, you wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” She paused for a moment, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I’m so sorry, Avery. I’m so very, very sorry.”

Maddie drew her knees up to her chest and rested her forehead on them. She felt Deirdre’s pain and Avery’s deep down into her skin. Although she felt as if they’d been intruding, she was glad Kyra had heard Deirdre’s story. She hoped that Avery would find it in her heart if not to forgive, then at least to forge some sort of . . . something. The reality was, they were all each other had.

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