Claws for Alarm by Karen MacInerney

Author:Karen MacInerney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gray Whale Press

* * *

It was after nine by the time Charlene headed home. Willow was tidying up the yoga mats when I went out to the parlor a few minutes later. Her eyes were red, as if she'd been crying.

"How's it going?" I asked.

"Terrible," she said. "Rainy's in the hospital, and James is acting like he's never met me before, and...” She took a deep, shuddery breath. "I'm sorry. You don't need to hear this."

"I'm happy to listen," I said, putting a hand on her sculpted shoulder. "Do you want to come to the kitchen and have a cup of tea?"

"I'd love that, to be honest," she said. "Sequoia went up to bed early, and I have to be on for the retreat participants, and I have no one to talk to."

"Leave the yoga mats for later," I suggested, and led her to the kitchen, where I put the kettle on. "Would you like a piece of cake?" I asked. "I think Charlene left a little bit."

"That sounds great," she said, and I cut two slim slices of cake as she sat down at my big pine table. It wouldn't do to let her eat alone, after all.

"It's got to be hard running the retreat with your ex-boyfriend in it," I said as I slid a plate of cake across the table to her and sat down across from her with my own plate.

"It's a nightmare," she said. "I'm not really surprised he's here, though. He seems able to just kind of box things up and not think about them. Unless he's obsessed with something, that is."

"Like food?"

"Oh, totally," she said, cutting a piece of cake. "If I ate this while we were together, I wouldn't hear the end of it for a week."

"Sounds kind of controlling," I said.

"He is," she said. "He had a fiancée who died a while back; I've always wondered if that had something to do with it."

"How tragic," I said. "What happened?"

"He refuses to talk about it," Willow said. "Or refused anyway. We don't really talk at all now. I might as well be another piece of furniture." She stabbed at a piece of cake. "I know I shouldn't think this way, but it makes me wonder if he ever had feelings for me at all."

"I'm sure he did," I said. "If you don't mind my asking, why did you break up?"

She gave me a haunted look. "I don't know. He just said... we weren't right for each other." She squeezed her eyes shut, and a tear rolled down her cheek. "I'm sorry. It wasn't that it was perfect, it was just... I loved him. Or I thought I did."

"I know how that is," I said softly. I'd been dumped myself.

"The thing is, I wouldn't even be having this retreat on Cranberry Island if it wasn't for him. It was his idea. And now I have to see him all day, every day, and still be perky."

My antennae perked up. "It was his idea to hold the retreat, or to hold the retreat on Cranberry Island?"

"On the island, I mean.

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