True’s other option—his only other option—was to have Diaz eliminated. Problem was, that was easier said than done. And if Diaz truly was government-sanctioned, that would bring down more heat than True was prepared to handle. You could hide only so much, and that was as long as no one was looking very closely. The Feds tended to look closely. He had to be very, very careful in how he arranged things.
So—buy some time by leaking bogus rumors and names, and keep Diaz occupied. Find Pavón and get rid of that problem, which would buy him even more time and allow him to finish covering his tracks. This was probably the end of a very lucrative business, which was a shame, because he had only about half as much as he’d wanted to accumulate before he got out.
But he would find some other moneymaking deal. He always did. And if the price was right, he could always do some special collections.
He smiled, thinking of all the people whose names he could drop into the rumor mill and get Diaz pointed in their direction. He could have some fun with this. Payback was always hell, wasn’t it?
August slipped into September, bringing a slight lessening of the heat, noticeably shorter days, and a tantalizing hint of crispness in the air. School had started, and it seemed as if kids were swarming everywhere. Though it was painful, she had always compulsively watched the kids in Justin’s age group, from kindergarten on up. He would be in fifth grade this year, she thought. Somewhere, he was starting school just like all these youngsters, yelling and running, full of energy and devilment. Were his eyes still blue, or had they darkened to the brown of her eyes? She thought they would be blue, because they had been the exact shade of David’s eyes.
Diaz seemed to have disappeared—again. That day they’d gone to Juarez she’d felt such a connection with him, but she hadn’t heard from him since. Of course, just because she’d felt a connection didn’t mean he had, and no matter what she felt the truth remained that she knew very little about him. She wasn’t even certain what his first name was, if he’d pulled “James” out of thin air that day or if it really was his name. She’d never thought to ask him, because in her mind he was “Diaz,” not “James.”
She didn’t know where he lived, how old he was, if he’d ever been married—my God, what if he was married now? The thought of Diaz being married made her sick to her stomach. What if he had children? He’d been at ease with little Max that day, so it was possible he had a child somewhere. Perhaps that was where he was, at home with his family.
Milla knew she was being ridiculous. She’d never seen anyone less likely to be a family man than Diaz. He was so clamped down and solitary that she couldn’t imagine him living with anyone, which in turn told her how foolish she was to be attracted to him in the first place. But chemistry was what it was, and it seemed she could no more stop thinking about him than she could flap her arms and fly.
Diaz wasn’t the only one who seemed to have disappeared. To her relief, she hadn’t seen True at all. Not that she’d seen him all that regularly before, but after the last time, she’d been afraid he would become even more persistent. He’d said he would back off, but she doubted he knew how. But relieved as she was, she’d still expected to run into him at some of the city’s society functions she had to attend. He was either out of town, or he’d found a Miss September who was unusually engrossing. She hoped it was the latter, to deflect his attention elsewhere.
The second week of September, her mother called and asked her to come for a visit. Milla hadn’t seen her parents since spring break, when both Ross and Julia had gone on vacation with their respective families and there hadn’t been any chance of running into them at her parents’ house. Right now, with school just starting and all the extracurricular activities, they would be busy and weren’t likely to pop over to their parents’ house. In addition, her mom would call and warn them that Milla was visiting.
Glad for the chance to get away and have something besides Diaz to think about, she took a few days off and flew to Louisville, Kentucky. There she rented a car and drove across the Ohio River to the small town in southern Indiana where they lived.
Her dad was sixty-five and newly retired from an accounting firm; her mother, at sixty-three, had retired from teaching grade school the year before. Already her dad was making grumbling noises about moving to Florida, where he wouldn’t have to deal with shoveling snow ever again, but her mother was firmly planted in the house where she had lived for over forty years and where she had raised her three children.
The house was synonymous with “home” in Milla’s mind. It wasn’t fancy, just a fifty-year-old two-story frame house, with a deep porch, steep roof, and memories in every room. There were three bedrooms upstairs, and during a remodeling in the seventies, a large downstairs parlor had been turned into a master bedroom with connecting bath. The eat-in kitchen was large enough that they’d all been able to sit at the table, and they’d had many wonderful, exciting Christmases tearing into a mountain of wrapped gifts under the decorated tree in the living room. In the future they might hire someone to shovel the snow from their driveway, but Milla couldn’t imagine her parents ever moving from this spot.
Milla had once thought her life would be a lot like her mother’s: teaching and raising a family. Now she couldn’t even imagine so peaceful a life. Hers had been torn apart so completely that the After bore no resemblance to the Before. She hated that there was a rift between her and her siblings, but they couldn’t seem to grasp how deeply she had been changed. They wanted her to go with the flow, and it simply wasn’t possible. She couldn’t imagine giving up on Justin, and she couldn’t forgive them for thinking she should.