When We Were Friends Read online

  The bubble burst.

  Lexi reached across the table and squeezed Frannie’s hand. “You said you have—what was it—six weeks left on parole? Move here. Spend time with me. Meet my husband and my stepdaughter and—”

  Frannie yanked her hand out of Lexi’s grasp. “And what? Pick up where we left off? Pretend nothing ever happened? That’s a terrible idea, Lexi.”

  Lexi sat up straight and made herself look as imposing as a day-care teacher in a floral print dress could. “Terrible or not, that’s my condition. Six weeks, and it’s all yours. Or you can walk away today. With nothing.”

  Frannie ground her teeth together. Of all the times for Lexi to grow a spine. How could her ex-friend not see that Frannie was toxic? And it wasn’t like she could fly under the radar in a town this small. If Jack Greene looked hard enough, he could find her. And then he would find Lexi, and he would get suspicious that Frannie hadn’t acted alone.

  Frannie shifted tactics. “I can’t just move. There are terms of my parole. I have to have a job, a place to live.”

  “Done and done.” Lexi turned toward the kitchen. “Patrice, can you come out for a minute?” She turned back to Frannie. “Patrice owns the diner and a few other businesses in town.”

  “So Patty is Patrice,” Frannie said.

  Lexi shook her head. “Patty is Patrice’s daughter.”

  The woman in the pantsuit reappeared, carrying a pot of coffee and an empty mug. “My Patty is all grown up and a big-shot lawyer now.” She set down the mug on the table. “Nice to meet you, Frannie. I noticed you didn’t touch your tea. Thought you might like to try my coffee. Best in the state.”

  “I would. Thanks.” Frannie took a sip of hot black coffee that melted over her tongue. “That’s amazing.”

  “I’ve already told Patrice you worked at the diner back home for a few years and then were the head server at that nice Italian restaurant,” Lexi said. “She needs the help, and she’ll be a good boss.” She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “And she responds well to flattery.”

  Patrice grinned. “No need for flattery. If Lexi vouches for you, you’re good people.”

  The woman was sweet. Kind. Likely not a person who would want an ex-con working in her diner. Which could work to Frannie’s advantage.

  “Lexi said you’re willing to give me a job,” Frannie said, “but I think you should know, I just got out of prison last summer. I’m still on parole.”

  Patrice frowned. “Did you think I wouldn’t know that? My daughter is an attorney. She’d have a fit if I hired anyone without doing a background check. And Lexi told me herself. Vouched for you too. That’s good enough for me.”

  Leave it to Lexi to find a town full of people with hearts of gold. Or more likely, people willing to do anything for Lexi. She had that effect on people. And she actually deserved it, she was that sweet. If Patrice expected more of the same from Frannie, she was in for a rude surprise.

  “You start tomorrow,” Patrice continued as though it were a done deal. “We start serving breakfast at seven, and it’s usually packed, which means you have to be here at six to set up.”

  “Six a.m.?”

  Patrice glanced at Lexi. “She does know breakfast is in the a.m., right?”

  Lexi grinned. “Yes, ma’am. And she’ll be here. Right, Frannie?” Her pale-blue eyes held a hint of defiance. Behind those eyes was the only person who knew where Frannie’s money was.

  Frannie sighed and turned to Patrice. “You’ll have to talk to my parole officer after I tell her you’re hiring me. And I hope the tips are good because I’ll need to rent a room.”

  Patrice pulled a business card from her apron pocket and handed it to Frannie. “Here’s my information. I’ll also tell her I’m your landlord. I own the apartment building next door. Nothing fancy, but you get your own parking spot and an outside entrance with a terrace.”

  The place Frannie thought was an old motel. Outside terrace just meant a cement walkway with an iron railing. But even that was probably too rich for her blood. One of the best things about the halfway house, besides the protection it provided from Jack Greene, was that it was dirt cheap.

  “How much?” Frannie asked.

  “I’ll float it to you for the first month, take it out of your wages. You’ll keep all your tips. Utilities are included, and you can eat here before and after your shifts.”

  Frannie looked at Lexi and Patrice, pretty sure they’d had this whole conversation long before she had arrived. It might be a done deal, but she wasn’t giving up without some negotiation. “I’ll stay one month.”

  Lexi pressed her lips together.

  “Take it or leave it,” Frannie said, pushing her luck.

  The hard defiance in Lexi’s gaze flexed a bit. “Fine. One month. Then if you want to leave, you can go with my blessing.”

  By blessing, Lexi meant money, all hundred grand of it. Frannie stuck out her hand, and they shook on it.

  Patrice pointed out the window. “Here comes Miss Bettina, dragging that sad thing behind her.”

  Frannie looked out the window at the pale blond kid and her mangy mutt. Of course. “Your stepdaughter.”

  “And her dog, Max. We just got him last week. She picked him herself at the shelter.” Lexi’s face beamed with pride and love as she spoke. She slid out of the booth. “Come on. You can get to know them on the walk home. You’re coming to our house for dinner.”

  Frannie swigged down more of the coffee and stood to follow Lexi. “That really is great,” she told Patrice, her new boss and landlord who looked at her with neither pity nor disdain. “Has anyone ever told you blue is your color?”

  Patrice smiled. “We’re gonna get along just fine.”

  Lexi was already out the door and kneeling on the sidewalk to hug the kid and pet the mutt. When Frannie joined them, Lexi would have just what she wanted: a full complement of strays.

  One month. Just thirty days. Then Frannie would get her money, and a couple of weeks after that, Indiana would cut her loose. Freedom, real freedom from everyone who had ever known her, pegged her for a loser, and been proven right, was almost in her grasp. And then the people she had disappointed the most could get on with their lives without her.

  One month, she repeated like a silent mantra as she stepped outside the diner and into Lexi’s life. One long, god-awful month.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The kid kept things close to the vest, Frannie had to give her that. She could respect that.

  Not that Frannie particularly enjoyed sitting in a lawn chair on the back patio, untouched glass of sweet tea in front of her, while the wispy thing and her mangy dog sat in the middle of the large diamond of freshly cut lawn and stared at her.

  “Shouldn’t you climb one of those trees or something?” Frannie knew from Bettina’s half smirk that Frannie had just lost a game she hadn’t known they had been playing.

  “The weeping willow won’t hold my weight, and the low branches of the other trees are too high. Daddy has to give me a boost. Besides, Max doesn’t like that game. He can’t climb.” Bettina laid her hand on the dog’s head, and with his tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth, it was quite possible that Max smiled at her.

  Frannie took a sip of tea—very sweet with just a hint of lemon because of course Lexi remembered how she liked it—and stood. Through the open kitchen window, she heard Lexi stirring and chopping and rattling pans. Which meant Lexi could probably hear her too. So she moved onto the lawn and sat on Max’s other side.

  She plucked a piece of short, smooth grass and rubbed it between her fingers, trying to remember how to make a duck call with it. Remembering Lexi had taught her that, she dropped the blade.

  “I noticed you kept a close eye on me the whole walk home,” Frannie said.

  Bettina leaned forward to peer around Max. “My home, not yours.”

  Frannie nodded. “I’m just passing through town.”

  “I thought you were staying.” r />
  Frannie shrugged. “For a short while. Visiting, I guess. I’ll be staying in the apartment building next to the diner.”

  “What aren’t they telling me about you?”

  “They?”

  “The adults.”

  Frannie glanced at the child. Her big blue eyes were intense and penetrating, demanding absolute honesty. Frannie couldn’t do absolute, but she could come pretty close to honest. She stared up at the clear evening sky, but even without an orange jumpsuit, barbed wire, and armed guards, she was still trapped. Penned into a box she would never escape, at least not as long as she was somewhere anyone knew her.

  “I was in jail.”

  Bettina’s eyes widened, and she leaned her shoulder into Max, who licked the girl’s cheek and bore her weight gracefully. “Jail is where bad people go.”

  “Sometimes.” Frannie selected another blade of grass, this one longer. The perfect-looking lawn wasn’t so perfect after all. Neither were descriptions of people. Good or bad. Smart or stupid. Redeemable or lost cause. The worst person she had known on the inside had never committed a violent act or held a weapon, but she had destroyed lives and would destroy more when she had the chance.

  “Sometimes,” Frannie continued, “a good person does a bad thing.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  She sighed. This kid was too smart for Frannie’s own good. “I don’t know how good most people would say I am, but what I did—I stole some money—I did for a good reason. Someone really needed my help, and it was the only thing I could think of to do. But I got caught, so I had to go to jail and pay my debt to society.”

  Max shifted and lay down on the grass, pushing his side against Frannie’s leg. She scratched his ears. Bettina watched the interaction closely then focused her unwavering gaze back on Frannie.

  “Did it work? Did it help the person who really needed help?” the girl asked.

  Frannie looked around the big backyard and the sizeable two-story brick house, which had a wide porch with a swing on the front, plain but sturdy furniture inside, and a kitchen full of bright-white cabinets and sleek gray granite counters. When she had first arrived here, Frannie had considered whether Lexi would have the money hidden here. For about thirty seconds. Lexi believed more in dreams than in logic, but even dreamers know how to protect their loved ones. Lexi loved her new family. She would never put them at risk with a stash of stolen money hidden under their noses.

  Frannie taking the rap for their crime had given Lexi a chance. Lexi had taken that chance and made a new life for herself, just like Frannie had intended.

  “It worked.” She rubbed the coarse fur between Max’s ears, and he settled his head in her lap. “Better than I imagined it would.”

  Bettina watched Frannie petting Max then plucked a blade of grass the way Frannie had. “I sometimes do something bad.” She kept her head lowered but raised her gaze to look at Frannie. “There’s a box under Daddy and Lexi’s bed. It’s mine, kind of. There’s an old dress in there and a bracelet I’ll get when I graduate high school. And pictures.”

  A hard, tight lump gathered in Frannie’s throat. “Pictures of your mom.”

  Frannie’s mother had told her Lexi had married a widower with a little girl. But the reality of a motherless daughter was so much harder to bear than an abstract idea of a widower’s child.

  “Daddy and me look at them together sometimes, but I’m not supposed to go into the box by myself,” Bettina said. “Sometimes I do though.”

  That seemed odd, out of character for Lexi. At least the Lexi she used to know. That Lexi would want a child to know about her own mother.

  Frannie forced a smile that she hoped was encouraging. “Maybe if you asked them to take out the pictures more often—”

  “No.” Bettina threw her blade of grass. “I want to look at them by myself.”

  Frannie rubbed an imaginary knot under her rib cage. Something about the kid’s puckered frown and Cindy Lou Who eyes made her want to tell her about a fatherless child who had never even known the man who had spawned her. But like so many other things, that was in the past and was better off staying buried there.

  “It’s okay if you want some time by yourself to remember your mom,” Frannie said.

  Bettina wiped her cheek and leaned against Max. “It’s not that I’m remembering her. It’s that I don’t remember her.”

  Frannie didn’t realize how tightly she had been gripping Max until he pulled his head away and shook it, sending his ears flopping wildly. Then he settled his nose back on her leg. “Sorry about that, buddy. He’s a very good dog, you know.”

  “I know,” Bettina said. “That’s why I picked him. I knew right away he’d be my best friend. I’m going to take him to show-and-tell someday, and Jenny and Bella will love him.”

  “Are those your friends?”

  Bettina focused very hard on a small clover she had picked out of the lawn. “Not yet.”

  Well, hell. To anyone else, those two words would have sounded innocent. But Frannie recognized the song of an outsider when she heard one. She took deep gulps of air to keep breathing because her throat kept trying to close. First, she had made the kid talk about her mother then about not having friends. Lexi would kill her if she returned her stepdaughter to her in a puddle of tears.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Frannie wasn’t sure of that at all. She hadn’t made a friend until third grade when Lexi had moved to town. Lexi had told her Bettina was only in the latter half of kindergarten.

  “I think it’ll be better when they stop calling me Teeny. Short for Bettina.”

  The name Pantsless flashed in Frannie’s memory. “Nicknames can suck. Frannie’s a nickname, you know.”

  “It is? Short for what?”

  “Francesca.”

  “That’s prettier than Frannie. Why don’t you go by Francesca?”

  No one had ever asked her that. “I don’t know, really. I’ve just been Frannie for so long, it’s hard to think of myself as anything else. You, on the other hand, have only been Teeny for what, the school year?”

  Bettina shook her head. “My whole life. I think my daddy gave me the nickname.”

  “Is that why the kids call you that? They heard your dad and Lexi call you Teeny?”

  “I guess so.” The girl patted Max’s head as she spoke. “It wasn’t so bad in preschool, but now that we’re in real school, I want the other kids to call me by my real name.”

  “You’ll always be Bettina to me,” Frannie promised. “And while I’m here—visiting—I’ll do what I can to remind everyone else of that too.”

  It was something, a very small something, but still something Frannie could do to make herself useful. She was pretty sure she should hug the kid but could only bring herself to pat her on the shoulder.

  Bettina’s mouth twisted into something that might have been a smile. “You must be a good person after all. Max likes you, and he barely likes anyone, Francesca.”

  Frannie gave the dog’s ears another scratch. “Why, thank you, Max. And thank you for pointing it out, Bettina.”

  “You’re welcome, Francesca.” She frowned as the dog walked over to an empty steel bowl on the patio. “He’s out of water, but I’m supposed to stay with him when he’s outside.”

  Frannie could take a hint. “I’ll go inside and fill his bowl. Maybe I can even talk Lexi into sending out some biscuits for him.”

  Bettina grinned, jumped to her feet, and raced to the far end of the yard, prompting Max to spring up and lope behind her. So much energy. If she didn’t know better, Frannie would say she had actually made the kid happy, a kid who, despite having a dad, a new stepmom, and a mutt who all loved her, was still missing enough in life to be lonely.

  With a sigh, she pushed to her feet and grabbed Max’s bowl on the way to the screen door. She paused when she heard a man’s voice.

  “Do you think it’s okay for them to spend so much time alone together?” That
must be Rob Martin, the widower-turned-new-husband.

  “You don’t trust Frannie with Teeny, after all she did for me?” Lexi asked. “Four years of her life, Rob, for me.”

  Frannie wondered if Lexi had told Rob everything about the burglary. Probably. Lexi hated to lie.

  “I know. I just worry about my girls,” he said.

  Frannie’s first reaction was to hate Rob and his implicit accusations. But he wasn’t wrong, and that made it tough to hold a grudge, even for Frannie, who still carried around hard feelings about things that had happened to her in elementary school. Maybe some small part of her was still a good person, but she was also a danger to Lexi, and now her family. Lexi was someone’s mom, or at least the closest thing that pale wisp of a thing had to it. Leaving Frannie only one option.

  Tonight, she would make her excuses to skip dinner, which would be easy enough. She had a three-hour round-trip drive to collect her few belongings from the halfway house and had to get up at a god-awful hour for her first shift at the diner. After that, she would live up to the letter of the promise she had made to Lexi. She would stay here, but she would spend as little time as possible with her ex-friend. Frannie and Rob were of the same mind on that point, and they would probably both be counting the days until she could disappear.

  CHAPTER THREE

  September 2011

  Everyone had told Lexi not to get her hopes up. At least everyone who knew she was keeping an eye on Frannie’s case, which meant her parents and Frannie’s mom. She couldn’t give up hope though. It was the least she could do for Frannie—to keep the faith.

  She sat in a booth by the window in the small family restaurant across from the county courthouse. She stared at the wide, automatic front doors, waiting to see Frannie emerge, her lawyer on one side of her and her mother on the other—triumphant, paroled. Free. Every time the doors slid open, Lexi held her breath and whispered her mantra. She’s going to be fine. She’s going to be fine. She’s going to be fine. Lexi hadn’t decided yet whether she was asking the universe or telling it. But after two hours of waiting, watching strangers emerge and disappear into vehicles and drive away, her whispered words sounded desperate even in her own head.