Page 32 of The Perfect Secret
Jeff.
His voice, his cadence, rang through the apartment. Her stomach dropped. Acid burned the back of her throat. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t deal with him—the empty promises, the suspicions about his motives, the furtive hiding of her purse so he wouldn’t take her money. Her grandmother? She couldn’t deal with her either—her pathetic hope that all would be okay, her disappointment when Hannah refused to participate.
Her heart pounded and her hands grew clammy as she tiptoed backward, exited the apartment, and returned to the lobby. Breathless, she staggered to a chair in the corner behind apalm frond. All she wanted was to curl into a ball in the security of her home, but this place wasn’t it. Dan was. The urge to call him, to hear his voice, overwhelmed her. She dialed his number with shaking fingers and waited for him to answer.
“Hey, Hannah.” The sound of his deep caring voice, her end-of-day fatigue, her excitement from work, and her disappointment about Jeff came to a head and her eyes misted.
Her throat clogged and she croaked, “Dan?”
“Hannah, what’s wrong?”
She started to cry.
“Sweetheart, talk to me. Please.”
She took a deep shaky breath. “Jeff is here. I’m exhausted and I wanted to eat and take a bath and talk to you. I don’t want to deal with him.” She started to cry once more.
“Come over, right now. Hop a cab and take it to my apartment.”
“I don’t want to bother you and Tess.”
“You won’t. I want you to come.”
She paused. Wouldn’t it be better to stay here and wait for Jeff to leave? “Okay.”
“I’ll wait right here for you, sweetheart.”
This was stupid. It was beyond stupid, and if she carried a thesaurus in her purse, she’d look up how beyond stupid it was. But a thesaurus would weigh her down and prevent her from running away. And right now, as she shifted from one leg to the other in front of Dan’s apartment building, she wanted to run fast and far, from his apartment, from this town, from everyone.
She didn’t want to show how afraid she was, or how needy. She didn’t want to be the one with the drug-addicted brother, or with the sweet but enabling grandmother, or maybe withthe good-at-listening/bad-at-confessing boyfriend. She wanted to be someone else, only she didn’t know who or how to find her.
The cab pulled away and she was about to take her own advice and run when Dan came outside. From the way he’d spoken on the phone, she expected him to swallow her up in a hug. While the idea had appealed to her in her lobby, right at this moment, the thought scared her to death. He must have read her hesitation in her body language, or maybe there was a sign blinking over her head: Prickly, Proceed at Own Risk. Either way, he stopped a few feet away and watched her, one hand on his cane, the other in his pocket.
“Hannah.” His voice was deep, yet soft, and made her stomach flip flop.
She gripped the strap of her purse tight enough for her nails to dig into her palm, making her wince. His gaze tracked the movement, and the cause, and returned to her face.
“You don’t want to be here, do you?”
She shrugged. What “here” did he mean? Because although she’d lumped him into the list of things she wasn’t sure she wanted, she knew she didn’t want to be without him. Maybe.
“Sometimes if you let someone into your space, it changes thehereand makes it more bearable.”
She raised an eyebrow. Did he really say that?
He chuckled. “I learned it from a wise girlfriend.”
“Do you have a lot of those?”
“Just one, in fact. Not only is she wise, but she’s so beautiful she stops traffic.” The corners of his mouth twitched and his gaze slid to the side.
She turned and watched people maneuver around them, muttering under their breath.
“I don’t think they admire me right now.” She moved out of the way, toward him.
“I am.”
“Why?”