Within These Walls by Ania Ahlborn Read Free Book Online Page A

talk.
    Caroline blinked a few times, as if the swing of the door had blown something into her eye. “Well,” she said after a long pause, unable to disguise the slight tremble in her voice. “That was nice.”
    Lucas wished he could hate Caroline as much as it seemed their kid already did. It would have made everything easier, black andwhite. But he reached out to touch her arm instead, his gut telling him to comfort his wife. “It isn’t personal; you know that.”
    Caroline nodded faintly, then cleared her throat, as if doing so would somehow help her regain some composure. “That angst is going to be fun for you,” she said. Her smile was cold, challenging. “Hope you’re up for it.”
    He twisted up his face at the thought of Jeanie throwing herself around the new house. Emotional. Blasting her whiney, screamy music at all hours. Music that made him feel suicidal, homicidal, and painfully old, five years before hitting forty. He remembered his own father griping about the music that came flooding out of his room. There were a couple of afternoons where he and his pop had waged war—Depeche Mode and New Order vibrated Lucas’s walls while his old man tried to drown out “that electro-synthesizer crap” with Johnny Cash and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
    Lucas decided then and there that, if he only had Jeanie for eight weeks, he’d school her in how to be properly dark: Nine Inch Nails, the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees. He had traded in the band shirts and Doc Martens for button-downs and casual oxfords long ago, but he’d never fully outgrown the sexy, sullen pull of despondent musing. He’d simply disguised it as a career.
    “It’ll be okay,” Lucas said, trying to convince himself far more than he was attempting to lend Caroline assurance. “She’s a good kid.” And when he was done with her, she’d also be a good kid with a further-reaching penchant for the darkness that Caroline had rejected long ago. It was a cheap jab, one that used his and Jeanie’s common interest to his advantage. He’d break out those old boots and his vintage T-shirts all in the name of being “the cool dad.” If it meant keeping his kid close, he’d do whatever it took.
    “Yeah, well, she’s also a hormonal tween.” Caroline fumbled withthe pop-up handle on her rolling bag, avoiding eye contact by keeping herself distracted. “But what am I saying? You love angst.”
    He stared at her hand, at the way her fingers held the luggage pull in a tense fist. Maybe she’d miss him. Now that it was time to part ways, she’d possibly realize that not being with him and Jeanie would be tough—much harder than she had expected. It could be that age-old adage was right: absence makes the heart grow fonder. This was, perhaps, the very therapy they needed to reconnect.
    “Just don’t go all Salinger and lock yourself up,” she warned. “Take her into town, to the mall and the movies. Do normal things. I don’t need her any weirder than she already is.”
    Lucas bit back a comment, on the verge of blaming their daughter’s strangeness on both Caroline and himself. They hadn’t been able to get their shit together with each other and now their kid was perpetually pissed off. Whatever weirdness Jeanie had wasn’t his fault, it was their fault. But his thoughts were derailed, his defensiveness thrown off-kilter. Kurt Murphy hovered just inside the terminal, watching them part ways through the sliding glass door.
    Caroline noticed Lucas staring into the terminal. She looked over her shoulder, lifted a hand and gave Kurt a wave, then turned back to Lucas. “I need to go. I should have checked in twenty minutes ago.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “International.”
    Her eyes dropped down to the space between them, as if inspecting the tips of her ballerina flats. He had watched her pack a pair of heels into her carry-on. She’d change out of those flats as soon as she stepped off the plane. Overwhelmed by the urge to grab