The Sheriff's Second Chance

“I really hate it when you use your Vulcan logic on me,” Caitie said, dropping her chin in her hand. She wouldn’t bother trying to deny that she and Nate had unresolved issues. Issues that he clearly had no desire to work through. And she just flat out didn’t see the point. They’d had their inevitable, awkward confrontation—which, if anything, made matters worse—and now it was over. The trick was to avoid him as long as she was here, and then, after she’d returned to New York and got back to her real life, she could forget all about him.

As if.

After seven years, she still hadn’t figured out how.

“Any plans for the rest of the day?” her mom asked, and Caitie was grateful for the change of subject.

“Job hunting.” Caitie grabbed an energy drink from the fridge, but as she was walking through the doorway to the living room, she had a thought. She stopped and turned back to the stove, where her mom was stirring the sauce again. “Just out of curiosity, Mom. Why did Dad send those papers home to you?”

Her mom blinked, looking confused. “What do you mean?”

“Couldn’t he have just brought them home tonight? Since you said yourself it was nothing urgent. Or better yet, why didn’t he just email then to the home computer?”

Her mom sighed, realizing the jig was up. “Your dad said you were very upset after seeing Nate. He just wanted an excuse to get you out of the diner. But he knew if he tried to give you the rest of the day off you would balk.”

He was right. “Did Deb really come back early, or did he have to find someone else to cover the rest of the shift?”

“He called someone in. Though I’m sure he wouldn’t have sent you home if he knew it would become such a fiasco.”

“I could have worked. Yes, I was upset, but I would have gotten over it.”

“He was just trying to help.”

She knew that, and she loved him for it. But she was a grown woman now, and this was one problem she needed to figure out on her own.

* * *

On his way back to the station, Nate checked his phone, which had been ringing almost nonstop for the past thirty minutes or so, and saw that his ex-wife, Melanie, had left him three messages. He didn’t have to hear them to know what they were concerning. Paradise was a hotbed of gossip, and Mel’s salon was the main hub, with Simmons Hardware trailing at a close second.

Nate stuffed his phone back in his pocket. This was a conversation they needed to have face-to-face.

He drove to the salon and steered his cruiser into an open spot on the street out front. The door jingled and the stench of acetone and perm solution assaulted him as he stepped inside. Being the only salon within ten miles, business was steady. All but one of the six hair stations had customers and two nail techs worked on manicures. Meaning fourteen pairs of curious eyes settled on him.

Clearly everyone had heard the news.

Nate usually took comfort in the fact that when he walked down the street, or entered a local business, nearly every face there was a familiar one. Today, he longed for a modicum of anonymity. Or at the very least, a little personal space.

“Good morning, ladies,” he said.

Mel stood at her station finishing a comb-out on Mrs. Samuels, who at ninety-two still kept her flat black hair teased into a beehive and sprayed to the consistency of fiberglass. Which not only added six inches to her four-foot-eleven-inch frame, but gave her papery skin an ethereal, grayish cast. Nate had seen corpses with more color. Once, a few years back, when Mrs. Samuels had dozed off under the dryer, she was so pale that Mel thought she had shuffled loose the mortal coil right there in the salon. Everyone had been too weirded out to try and wake her. Ultimately they’d held a hand mirror under her nose to make sure she was still breathing.

Regina, one of the stylists, smiled sympathetically at Nate and said, “We all heard.”

One sharp look from Mel shut her down, but Nate could feel the silent tension growing.

“All finished, Miz Samuels,” Mel said loudly, helping her client up from the chair. Mrs. Samuels was by no means spry, but considering her advanced age she still got around fairly well. At least once a day she could be seen tooling around town in her mint condition, canary-yellow 1970 Mustang Fastback. A gift from her husband, Walter—God rest his saintly soul—on her forty-fifth birthday.

As Mel opened the door for her, her eyes snagged on Nathan’s and a silent understanding passed between them. He followed her through the salon, past the nail techs and washbowls to her office in the back.

When they were inside, she closed and locked the door, then leaned against it. “Are you okay? As soon as I heard I called to warn you, but you didn’t answer. You saw her at the diner?”

“Yes. And I’m fine,” he told her.

She lifted a questioning brow.

He sighed. If there was one person he trusted with his true feelings, it was Mel. They were best friends. “Okay, I’m coping.”

“I guess we both knew Caitie coming back was a possibility.”

Yet they had never discussed how they would handle it if she did. An oversight he now regretted.

“How does she look?” Mel asked. She had once admitted to Nate that deep down she had always been a little jealous of Caitie. It had seemed to Mel that all the good stuff happened to her best friend. She did better in school than Mel, who, like their son, had a mild form of dyslexia. Caitie’s hair, a natural pale honey blond, always seemed to fall perfectly into place with hardly any effort while Mel had to wrestle with her naturally curly auburn locks for an hour every morning. Caitie’s creamy smooth complexion had been flawless while Mel battled teenage acne and oily skin. Caitie was also tall, slender and lithe, and never had to watch what she ate. Mel was forever battling the bulge and swore she gained weight just looking at food. And no matter how many times he told her she was beautiful—which she was, both inside and out—she’d wrestled with her insecurities. And still did, which is why he chose his next words very carefully.

“She looks...the same.” He didn’t mention her weight, since it was such a sore spot with Mel. She had tried every diet craze and exercise gimmick known to man, yet she never lost more than ten or fifteen pounds. Which was twenty to twenty-five pounds less than she wanted to lose.

A deck chair off the Titanic, she’d called it.

“I heard she’s in some sort of trouble,” Mel said. “Someone even suggested that she’s on the run from the FBI.”

He’d heard that, too, when he stopped by the station after breakfast. But no one as intelligent as Caitie would be dense enough to hide from law enforcement in her hometown right under her parents’ roof. And if there were a manhunt to find her, as local law enforcement, he would have heard about it by now. “I seriously doubt that.”

“So she’s probably not going into witness protection, either,” Mel said.

“Not that I’m aware.”

“Do you know how long she’s staying?”

Hopefully not long. “Nope.”

Mel gnawed her bottom lip. “What was it like to see her again?”

He shrugged and told a little white lie. “It was disturbing to see her again...at first. But now I don’t feel much of anything about it.”

“This could get awkward,” she said. “And complicated.”

Story of his life.

“I’m not going to let it come between us,” he assured her. “Our friendship means more to me than Caitie ever could.”

She didn’t look as if she believed him. “I was invisible to you until she left.”

“Mel—”

She stopped him midsentence, brushing away the tear that leaked down her cheek. “That wasn’t fair, I know. Please, ignore me. I’m feeling sorry for myself. I just can’t help thinking, now that she’s back, you’re going to forget all about me and Cody.”

“That will never happen.” He pulled Mel into his arms and kissed the top of her head, his heart hurting for her, wishing he could have loved her as something other than a friend. He did try, but after six months of marriage counseling, even the therapist agreed they would be better off as partners in parenting and good friends. Divorce had been the only viable option if they had any hope of preserving their friendship. It hadn’t been easy, but they were in a good place now. And to this day he had no regrets, not when he looked at their son. “If Caitie never left, Cody wouldn’t even exist.”

“That’s true,” she said.