“Holy shit, Rachel wasn’t kidding. You are a mess.” Audrey sat down next to Victoria on the couch by the dressing rooms. “What happened?”
Victoria went for a joke. “Well, for starters, apparently I do like Ford.”
“Oh.” Audrey smiled. “I hate to break it to you, sweetie, but Rachel and I figured that out at the barbecue.”
Rachel came out of the back room with three coffee cups and set them down on the table in front of the couch. “He brought home another woman tonight.”
Shocked, Audrey turned to Victoria. “What?”
“I ran into them at the elevator,” Victoria said.
“And then she puked in the alley,” Rachel added.
Audrey’s head spun. “You puked in the alley? Wow. You must really like him.”
“Oh, God. Don’t say that.” Victoria bent her head over her knees and took slow, deep breaths.
“The vomiting seems to be her way of expressing her feelings toward Ford,” Rachel told Audrey.
“Aw. And they say romance is dead.”
Her head against her knees, Victoria groaned. “Don’t make me laugh—my stomach already hurts enough.” She sat up. “I keep picturing him with that other woman, and thinking about what they might be doing right now.” She looked at her friends. “I did this.”
“You? Um, no, he did this,” Audrey emphasized. “He’s the asshole, bringing home another woman while you two are seeing each other.”
“We’re not seeing each other anymore. I ended it almost two weeks ago,” Victoria said.
Now it was Rachel’s turn to look surprised. “You did? Why?”
“Well . . . that’s kind of a long story.”
Rachel reached out and squeezed her hand. “We have all night.”
Audrey held up the bottle. “And we have bourbon.”
That got a smile out of Victoria. “Okay.” As the three of them sat there, drinking bourbon out of coffee cups in the middle of the store, she proceeded to tell Audrey and Rachel everything: the flashback she’d had during the break-in, her mom’s attempted suicide, her panic attacks, the therapy with Dr. Metzel, and, ultimately, her breakup with Ford.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know,” Victoria said.
“Why didn’t you tell us about all this earlier?” Audrey asked gently. “Vic, we’re your best friends. My God, after my divorce you moved me into your place and let me stay there for almost a month.”
Victoria smiled sheepishly. “I’m good at handling other people’s problems. Just . . . not so much my own.”
Rachel put a hand to her heart. “I’m still stuck on the part when Ford carried you off the train.”
“It was either that or leave me there, clogging up the aisle at his stop,” Victoria joked. When Rachel gave her a look, she turned more serious. “I know. He was really sweet and I . . . freaked out and pushed him away.”
“So? What are you going to do about it?” Audrey asked.
Victoria pulled back. “Do about it? There’s nothing I can do. Whatever we had between us, he’s obviously moved on to some other woman.”
“You don’t know what that was,” Rachel said. “You were wrong that other time, when you saw him with the woman who turned out to be his friend.”
“Even if that were true, he’s not looking for a serious relationship,” she pointed out.
“That’s what you said, too, once,” Audrey said.
“And I’m still saying that.” Victoria paused for a moment. “Maybe.” When her friends smiled, she pointed, quick to cut them off at the pass. “No. Whatever you’re thinking, just . . . no.”
“I’m thinking you have to tell Ford how you feel,” Audrey said.
Oh, God.
Feeling her stomach clench, Victoria bent over, her head between her legs. “Yep. Here I go again.” Breathing deep for several moments, she turned her head to the side and peeked at her two friends. “You can’t be serious. Look at me.” She sat up. “I’m supposed to ignore the fact that Ford says he doesn’t want anything serious, and the fact that he may have already moved on to someone else, and just walk up to him and lay my feelings on the line, without having the faintest idea whether he feels the same way? Do you honestly think—even on my best day—that I’m capable of putting myself out there like that?”
Audrey and Rachel both looked her dead in the eyes. “Yes.”
Victoria blinked, not having expected them to be so unequivocal.
Then Rachel grinned. “Although on your worst day, you might end up puking on his shoes. So choose your moment wisely.”
Right. Helpful.
* * *
SEATED AT HIS dining table, Ford looked over when he heard a front door close in the hallway.
He went momentarily still, and then realized that the sound was too muted to be coming from Victoria’s place.
Turning back to his laptop, he tried to focus on his research. He was working on yet another follow-up piece in his probation department series, cross-checking arrest records against the list of nearly one thousand convicted felons who hadn’t been seen by their probation officers for two or more months. It was turning out to be a massive investigation, although at least now he had someone to share the workload.
He and Samantha, his co-worker on the Watchdog Team, had planned to meet that afternoon to divvy up the names of lost convicts. But then her one year-old son’s nanny had called in sick and Samantha had taken the day off. Eager to nevertheless get a jump on things over the weekend, and seeing how she lived only five minutes away in Bucktown, she’d offered to drop by Ford’s place that evening, after her husband got home from work, so that Ford could bring her up to speed on the investigation and give her copies of his files.
It was a wholly platonic meeting—obviously—but he knew what Victoria must have been thinking when she saw him and Samantha heading to his place. And he couldn’t decide what bothered him more: that Victoria would assume he was already hooking up with someone else, or that he found it so incredible that she might actually think that. Because he and Victoria were done. Finished. And they’d never had any kind of commitment between them even when they were together. So if he wanted to go on a date, or meet a woman for drinks, or bring a whole goddamn bachelorette party back to his place for a wild orgy, he was perfectly free to do so.