All the Secrets We Keep (Quarry Book 2) Read online

  Babulya smiled, showing the gaps between her teeth. “Someday you will make for your own family.”

  “Oh . . . I don’t think I’ll ever have a family.” This was something Theresa had thought about a lot over the past few years. “I don’t want kids. They’re a huge pain and hard to take care of.”

  Babulya looked surprised. “What is this? No children? You’re young. You should wait. But to say you want none, ever?”

  “I don’t really want to have to take care of anyone else.” Theresa snapped down a king, confident she was going to take this round, but Babulya had a matching king. They had to go again at war.

  The old woman held her cards close to her chest, not putting down the next. “Children are a blessing, Theresa. You’ll change your mind when you have good husband who takes care of you.”

  “Oh,” Theresa said as she carefully laid her next card. A jack this time. Good, but beatable. “I don’t want one of those, either.”

  Babulya snorted laughter. “You will change your mind.”

  “You don’t have a husband,” Theresa said.

  “I had one,” Babulya said. “One was enough.”

  “I don’t really even want one.” She watched as the grandmother placed a three, and then she scooped up the pile of cards, adding them to her deck underneath. She looked up to see Babulya frowning. “Well, I don’t.”

  “Without husband, how will you have children?”

  “I guess I could have kids without a husband, you know.” It was a little edgy, talking to Babulya like this, like admitting it was okay to have sex without being married. Theresa wasn’t sure she’d ever have sex, either. It seemed like a lot of work and effort for very little payout and a whole lot of problems.

  “But . . . without children or husband, Titi, who will you make the challah for?”

  It was the first time Babulya had ever called Theresa by a Russian nickname the way she sometimes did with Ilya and Nikolai. Unexpectedly, Theresa’s throat closed and her eyes stung. This was the first time she felt as though the old woman might truly consider her to be a granddaughter and not some interloper hanging on the outside.

  “I could make challah for you,” Theresa said.

  Babulya smiled. “What a good girl you are. I will not be here forever. And then what will you do?”

  “I’ll make it for myself,” Theresa said with a shrug. “That’ll be okay.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  His whole life was crumbling all around him, and what was Ilya wasting his time doing? Sitting in Alicia’s old desk chair, looking up tanks on the Internet. It was easy enough, relatively speaking, to get one. If you had the money to pay for it.

  He’d have to settle for a school bus, he thought as he scrolled through several pages on a website. Take off the front and back doors to make it safe. Remove the seats so that divers could swim all the way through it. He’d sink it far enough away from the helicopter to keep it interesting, although the bus itself wasn’t going to attract anyone. Most every dive site around had one.

  A tank would bring people in.

  He wasn’t idiotic enough to put any money down on one, though. Not because of the expense—in the past he’d taken out loans and lived on hard-boiled eggs and tuna for nearly a year to make upgrades to the Go Deep dive site. But why would he waste his time and money acquiring, hauling, and sinking a tank when it didn’t look likely he was going to have any kind of summer business this year at all?

  The number of divers who used Go Deep, even during its best years, had never been impressive. There were several abandoned quarries with dive sites in the tristate area. He and Alicia had put a lot of effort into providing clean, economical facilities for divers here in central Pennsylvania, but Go Deep had always survived more on providing lessons and trips to exotic dive locations than on-site competition with the fancier, better-equipped dive sites.

  The ones with water parks, for example, Ilya thought somewhat bitterly as he closed out of the website and brought up his e-mail instead. The ones with higher-end camping facilities and RV hookups instead of splintery picnic pavilions and outdated jungle-gym equipment. Easier access to highways instead of a tangled set of country roads winding through a small, rural town. None of those other places had a tank, he thought. He could be the first.

  It wouldn’t matter, would it? He opened a string of e-mails from the new majority owners of Go Deep and immediately closed them. They’d only included him as a courtesy. Owning 40 percent of the property entitled him to that, he guessed. But not much else.

  The clock was ticking down on his chances to take the deal they’d offered. Two more weeks. After that, Diamond Development was going to come in with their ’dozers and raze the campgrounds to build time-share condos. Hell, after that, they were going to do it whether he signed or not.

  He’d seen the plans. They intended to build economy units just down from the luxury resort hotel that was going in higher on the hill. The whole shebang was going to have fully equipped recreational facilities and tended grounds and activities planned year-round. Boating, water skiing, with sleigh rides and ice skating in the winter. Stuff like that. It was going to do really well in this area, which did not boast any other family-oriented, classy resorts of the sort. There were even optional plans for a water park.

  Go Deep was going to be one minuscule part of all that, and if he could get even the tiniest portion of that business, it would be worth putting up with this other bullshit. Yet Ilya knew he wasn’t going to gain anything but headaches. Sure, he still owned the shop, the parking lot, and everything he’d sunk into the water, along with his docks and water access, but the construction plans called for an almost complete blocking of his access road. Not to mention that once they put up all the new construction, his already shabby shop was going to look so much worse in comparison.

  He wanted to blame Alicia for all this. When it came right down to it, if she hadn’t caved, he wouldn’t be where he was now, ready to lose what he’d spent his entire adult life building. Of course, without Alicia and her money, he would never have had anything to lose in the first place.

  “Hey, man.” Niko rapped his knuckles on the edge of the door frame. “Quitting time.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  His brother rolled his eyes. “Like you’re really working, anyway? C’mon. I thought we could grab some dinner.”

  “You buying?” Ilya grinned, incapable of really hating his brother any more than he could harbor an unending fury against Alicia.

  Well, at least not until he remembered the two of them were together. Romantically. The idea of it unsettled him and pissed him off, maybe because it didn’t make him jealous, and he felt like it should.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, leaning back in the desk chair that Alicia had picked out, the way she’d chosen everything in this office because it had been her space. She’d been the one to decide what items to carry in the shop, to make the class schedules, to order the coffee filters. She’d even designed the logo with the giant goldfish on it, a tribute to the fish her sister had won at the carnival so long ago, the one that supposedly had survived and grown to monstrous size. Alicia had been the one to keep Go Deep running, much the way she’d been the one to keep their marriage from dissolving . . . at least for a while. And what had he done? He’d been flash and fantasy, the idea guy with the big dreams she’d ended up doing the work for to make a reality. She’d given up on him, and now she’d given up on the business.

  He couldn’t blame her.

  He was a mess and probably always had been. Why anyone had ever given him the time of day, Ilya would never understand, but it seemed that women were drawn to the damage in him like bees to nectar. First Jennilynn . . . and with that thought, he stopped thinking. Put the idea of her out of his head. That, and that of her sister, the woman he’d married for better or worse. It had all been worse, in the end.

  “I wouldn’t have to, if you’d take the deal,” Niko said. “You’d