Her Second-Chance Family

“Then I want to be clear this is your friend speaking, not your boss. Because a boss shouldn’t get too involved in an employee’s life. But a friend should.”

“Okay.” She had no idea where he was going with this.

“If I went out with Maggie and got my heart broken, that would not be your fault. It would be mine. Maybe hers. Not yours. When you interned here, I thought you were the most responsible twenty-something I’d ever met. I thought it was a strength, and that sense of responsibility is one of the reasons I hired you. And as a boss, it is a strength. But as a friend, I think there’s a chance it’s conversely one of your greatest weaknesses. You can’t be responsible for everyone’s pain.”

“I just didn’t want to see you...”

“Everyone gets hurt, honey,” he said firmly. “And if you never get hurt, then you’re never risking yourself. And playing it safe isn’t really living.”

“Okay.”

He sighed. “I’ve offended you now.”

“No. Really.” She forced a smile. “Nothing could bother me today. I plan to walk on air. Mr. Lebowitz, thank you again.”

“You did this on your own, Audrey.”

“No, I didn’t. I did this with your help and with the kids’ support.” And she knew that she’d also done it because of that night so long ago. A night that threw her onto a new and unplanned path.

Maybe Mr. Lebowitz was right. Maybe she did take responsibility for things outside her control. Maybe she needed to risk herself more.

Maybe.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_65d86ea3-6c87-5e4d-8c63-a515e284fb80)

SAWYER OCCASIONALLY WORKED on Saturdays, and routinely pulled longer than eight-hour days, which meant he generally had some comp time available. He liked that his position gave him a little flexibility with his hours.

Frankly, he just liked his job.

When he was younger, he’d dreamed about being a firefighter, not a banker. He imagined there were a lot of jobs that children never dreamed of doing. Sometimes he wondered how anyone landed where they did.

For him, it started in college. He’d taken some business classes and then he’d interned at a bank. When his internship was over, he’d gotten a job at the bank and one day he’d realized that he’d found his niche.

He liked the certainty of numbers.

He liked working with people.

He’d juggled his hours this week so he could be home early this afternoon. He was in his upstairs office now, but no matter how many times he tried to focus on the computer, he kept looking out the window, watching Willow Jones mow his lawn.

The girl might be a thief, but she was a meticulous worker. Each swipe of the lawn mower was parallel to the last. One neat row after another.

She stopped every couple passes to empty the bag into a garbage can.

When she was done mowing, she walked along the planting beds, pulling weeds and putting those in the bins, as well.

He glanced at his watch. She’d been at it almost two hours without stopping for much more than a sip from her water bottle—a stainless-steel bottle she must have filled from a tap at home.

It had to be beyond tepid at this point.

He wasn’t sure why he was concerned, but he found himself going downstairs to the fridge for a cold bottle of water. Then he stopped. He didn’t know much about this girl, other than she was on probation for breaking into his house and that she lived with a hippie woman who probably frowned on store-bought water. That would explain why the kid had a stainless-steel water bottle.

He grabbed a glass instead, filled it with ice and tap water and then headed to the backyard.

“Thought you might want something cold,” he said by way of greeting.

Willow looked at him a moment, then nodded. “Thanks. I should have stuck my water bottle in a cooler.”

“I wasn’t sure if your hippie chick allowed things like ice,” he teased.

He saw immediately that his joke fell flat.

Willow shot him a penetrating glare. “Listen, the other kids and I can call her that and joke about it all we want. Well, the other kids wouldn’t tease her because they’re so used to her they don’t see anything odd anymore. But you don’t know her. You don’t have the right.”

Sawyer wasn’t used to being called on the carpet by anyone, especially not a sixteen-year-old thief. But he simply acknowledged her comment and nodded. “Sorry.”

Her annoyed expression softened slightly. “Yeah, me, too. You probably just picked up on it from me. I wasn’t fair to her then, or you now. So I guess I’m the one who’s sorry.”

Sawyer liked to think he was a quick character study. That he could assess people in short order, but he was stymied by Willow Jones.

A thief—for sure. But also someone who admitted when she’d made a mistake. And a hard worker. And someone who wasn’t afraid to call an adult out when they were in the wrong.

“You sure you want to do this the whole summer? Even with the pool eating into it, I’ve got a lot of yard.”

Sawyer had fallen in love with the house the first time he’d walked through it with his real estate agent. He loved the hardwood floors and the open concept downstairs, but he’d almost turned it down because the yard was so big, and he thought a pool in Erie was really a waste of money and space. There were maybe three months out of the year that you could use it unless you heated it.

“I consider what you did today enough to balance your karma,” he added, and immediately hoped that he hadn’t put his foot in his mouth with the comment.

Willow shook her head, then took a long drink before saying, “No, Audrey’s right. She normally is. Don’t tell her I said that,” she added. “But I’ve thought about it and I do owe you.”

“I got all my stuff back.”

He’d been working the day Willow and her friends had broken into the house. He’d taken his car into the shop and their shuttle service had dropped him off at home. He assumed that was why the kids thought he wasn’t there.

He’d heard voices and a commotion downstairs, realized what was happening and called 9-1-1. Then he’d simply waited upstairs in his office for the cops to come.

A couple of his buddies had ribbed him about not playing Rambo, and if he’d known the thief was a teenage girl, he might have considered it. But there was nothing in his house he was willing to risk his life over. He’d just thrown the lock on the office door and waited.

Because he lived in Harborcreek, just outside of Erie proper, the state police were the responding officers. There was a barracks nearby and they were on the scene in five minutes.

They’d caught Willow red-handed.

She denied that she’d had accomplices, but Sawyer knew what he’d heard. And he really doubted that she was able to move his flat-screen TV on her own.

The cops had found that the trunk of his 1966 Pontiac GTO red convertible in the garage was loaded with other valuables. The fact that the miscreants had been planning to steal his car had made him the angriest. It was originally his father’s car and had languished in the barn out back until Sawyer fixed it up when he was sixteen. He’d worked for two summers to pay to rebuild it.

Willow hadn’t ever given the cops the names of the other thieves. She insisted that she’d been the only one.

When Sawyer said he’d heard conversations downstairs, she’d retorted, “I talk to myself. Most days, it’s the best conversation I’m likely to get.”