Finally, Lindsey stepped back and wiped away the tears from her cheeks. We sat down at the bar, and Nick walked around behind it to get her a glass of ice water. Lindsey sipped from it with a tremulous hand, then drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly to try to gain her composure again.
“You okay?” Nick asked, rubbing her back.
Lindsey nodded. “Thank you for coming.”
“Of course. Tell me what’s going on.”
She flattened the papers on the bar and slid them over between Nick and me so we could look at them.
“I’m not even sure what they say, but it feels like he’s threatening me.”
It was all so surreal. The bar looked strange in the daylight, and I was still trying to wrap my head around the past I didn’t even know Lindsey had. It didn’t bother me that she had a child, of course. It was just something new about her I didn’t know. What mattered to me right then was the pain she was obviously in and the terror in her eyes. I didn’t have all the details, but it felt like pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. This could definitely explain why she was so upset at the bar and why she’d shown up to Nick’s house so worked up.
Even without knowing everything that was going on, it was obvious Lindsey needed help. I had a good lawyer, so as I watched her try to piece together the words to explain what happened, I used my phone to jot out a quick email.10Lindsey“I honestly thought things were going to be fine. I can’t believe I was so stupid,” I said.
Nick shook his head. “You aren’t stupid. You can’t do that to yourself.”
“What do you call it? The way Grant treated me the whole time we were together, not to mention his parents. Then how they reacted when I told him that I was pregnant. All that, and I still managed to let them manipulate me into letting them take my son. Even after all that, I still convinced myself things were going to work out okay. If that isn’t stupid, I don’t know what is,” I said.
“It’s not stupid that you want what’s best for your son and that at the time, that was what you thought would be best for him. Before you left when you were working at the bar with your father, it was starting to decline. You’ve said that to me a thousand times. You love the place and wanted to make the most of it, but you could see all the ways it was starting to go downhill. Then you came back to take it over and you had no idea if it was going to survive, much less do well enough to support you in the way you would want your son supported. The Waters family has money. You did what you thought you had to do,” Nick said.
I hated hearing it come out of his mouth that way. It was so simplified. I rarely talked about the time I spent away from here. Growing up in the same neighborhood my father did, just miles from where his father grew up, there was always the pressure to stay there. Bloom where I was planted and all that. It wasn’t that I wanted to get out of Charlotte or that I didn’t want anything to do with the area where my family had such deep roots. As an only child, I knew if the bar was still going when my father died, it was going to be up to me to carry on the family business.
And even if it wasn’t, my connections to Charlotte were going to see me here throughout my adult life. One way or another, I was going to find my way home. But I needed to experience something else. I needed, at least for a little while, to have a life I chose rather than the one that was chosen for me. It wasn’t like I went very far. It was only a couple of towns over. Meeting Grant threw off my plans in more ways than one. As soon as I found out he lived in Charlotte, I should have walked away. That should have been the indication he wasn’t what I needed right at that moment. Instead, I took it as a sign that he was perfect.
After all, if I was going to settle down someday, it was going to be with someone from my hometown. Just like I could never imagine moving to another place for somebody, I wouldn’t ever ask them to move for me. Running into a charming, sophisticated, and wealthy man from my town when we were both away from home just seemed like the universe trying to tell me something.