The Liar

“Are you ready for all that?”

“Like I trust you to make everything look beautiful, I trust him to figure that out. I’ll have plenty to say about it, but I’ll let him get going on it first.”

“All right, then.” Shelby wiggled her butt back, leaned forward. “Let’s talk weddings.”

They plotted, planned, with Shelby taking notes.

“Put that down for now.” After twenty minutes, Emma Kate waved at the notebook. “It’s starting to make my head spin.”

“We got a good start here.”

“More than a good start, and it’s time to change the channel. I want to know about you. Have you heard any more from the FBI?”

“No. I keep expecting them to come to the door again, with a warrant for my arrest as accessory after the fact, or something. But they haven’t.”

“If they think you had any part of all that, they don’t deserve to be special agents.”

Forrest said the same, Shelby thought, but it steadied her ground to hear it from her best friend.

“I’m going to go over all the pictures and letters again. I needed to put it away for a couple of days so I could start fresh. Maybe I’ll remember something else, or find something else.”

“What’s the point now, Shelby?”

“Knowing. Just knowing. I don’t expect I’m going to find a treasure map to what he stole in Miami, or any of the others that are still unfound. I’m supposing there are others still unfound. But knowing feels important.”

“I wish you’d let it go, but the girl I grew up with wasn’t ever good at letting things go if they mattered to her.”

“This matters to me. What if I did find something that led to something, that took the police to somewhere else and they found them? At least that woman and her son in Miami would have that.”

“Shelby.” Emma Kate took her hand, squeezed it. “You’re looking for a way to pay them back somehow, like you’re paying off all that debt. And none of it’s yours, none of it. And that’s one of the reasons—I know you—you slapped the brakes on with Griff.”

Shifting, Shelby got busy tidying her notes. “That’s not exactly so.”

“It’s close enough. You looked happy together. You looked good together.”

“I just wanted to slow things down some.”

“You’ve got to move at your own speed, and I’d never say different.”

“I guess he had some things to say about it.”

“Not much, not to me. Not to Matt, either, or I’d’ve gotten it out of Matt. He’s not the vault Griff is, and I know the combination anyway. I expect he might say more tonight, working on the house, having a beer, that sort of thing. I’ll get that out of Matt easy enough.”

“He was awful mad. It’s hard to know how to deal with a man who gets mad so . . . reasonably.”

“I’d hate that!” Emma Kate laughed, sat back. “You can’t win against reasonable, not really.”

“And what makes it harder? He went by the house when I was working—he’d know I was working and Mama had Callie. Mama said how he went out back with Callie and spent nearly an hour with her on the swings, with the puppy.”

“Well! That shows you what kind of dastardly individual you’re dealing with.”

“All right, Emma Kate.” Shelby let out a sigh. “I don’t know what to do about it, exactly. I’ve got a right to be mad about some of the things he said.”

Sipping wine, Emma Kate lifted her eyebrows. “Reasonable things?”

“I guess from where he’s standing, but that doesn’t make them less awful for me.”

“I’m trusting you on this engagement party, and you haven’t let me down yet.”

“And I won’t.”

“That’s why I trust you. Why don’t you trust me?”

“I— Of course I do. I do trust you.”

“Good. Go over there and talk to Griff.”

“Oh, but—”

“Did I say ‘but’ on the party? I did not,” Emma Kate said definitely. “So you trust what I’m saying to you, and go over and talk to Griff. Matt says he’s been stewing for days. I can see you are, too, maybe needed to, but stewing time’s over. Go talk it out. One way or the other, both of you are bound to feel better, or at least know where you both stand.”

She wasn’t going to do it—wasn’t it better to just let things sit awhile? But the idea sat in the back of her head, nagging, through dinner, through the bedtime ritual with Callie.

She told herself to settle down, spend the rest of the evening going over the photos and letters again. But she couldn’t settle.

She went down where her parents held their own evening ritual of TV and needlework.

“Callie’s all tucked in. I wonder if you’d mind if I went out awhile? There’s something I’d like to do.”

“You go on.” Her father gave her an absent smile before he zeroed back in on the ball game. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“I’m dragging your daddy as far as the front porch when the game’s over. We’re going to sit and have ourselves a glass of tea and smell the roses rambling up the trellis.”

“You enjoy that, and thank you. I won’t be very long.”

“You take your time,” her mother said. “And you put some lipstick on, fluff your hair some. You can’t go over to Griff’s without your lipstick.”

“I didn’t say I was going to Griff’s.”

“A mama knows. You put some lipstick on.”