LITMIR.BIZ

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for Francesca.

      Clara sensed more than saw Grant move to stand beside her. He, too, was watching the scene play out, but Clara could no more guess his thoughts than she could stop the sun from rising. She couldn’t imagine losing a sibling, either. Although she’d had “brothers” and “sisters” in a couple of her foster homes, sometimes sharing a situation with them for years, all of them had maintained a distance. No one ever knew when they would be jerked up and moved someplace new, so it was always best not to get too attached to anyone. And none of the kids ever shared the same memories or histories as the others. Everyone came with his or her own—and left with them, too. Sometimes that was all a kid left with. There was certainly never anything like this.

      “I can’t believe y’all still have this much of Brent’s stuff,” she said.

      Grant shrugged. “My mother was always sure Brent would eventually get tired of his wandering and come home, and she didn’t want to get rid of anything he might want to keep. And Brent never threw away anything. Well, no material possessions, anyway,” he hastened to clarify.

      When his gaze met hers, Clara knew he was backtracking in an effort to not hurt her feelings by suggesting that Brent had thrown away whatever he shared with her.

      “It’s okay,” she said. “Brent and I were never... I mean, there was nothing between us that was...” She stopped, gathered her thoughts and tried again, lowering her voice this time so that Francesca and Hank couldn’t hear. “Neither of us wanted or expected anything permanent. There was an immediate attraction, and we could talk for hours, right off the bat, about anything and everything—as long as it didn’t go any deeper than the surface. It was one of those things that happens sometimes, where two people just feel comfortable around each other as soon as they meet. Like they were old friends in a previous life or something, picking up where they left off, you know?”

      He studied her in silence for a moment, and then shook his head. “No. Nothing like that has ever happened to me.”

      Clara sobered. “Oh. Well. It was like that for me and Brent. He really was a wonderful person when I knew him. We had a lot of fun together for a few weeks. But neither of us wanted anything more than that. It could have just as easily been me who walked away. He just finished first.”

      She tried not to chuckle at her wording. Brent finishing first was pretty much par for the course. Not just with their time together, but with their meals together. With their walks together. With their sex together. Yes, that part had been great, too. But he was never able to quite...satisfy her.

      “He was always in a hurry,” Grant said.

      Clara smiled. “Yes, he was.”

      “He was like a hummingbird when we were kids. The minute his feet hit the ground in the morning, he was unstoppable. There were so many things he wanted to do. Every day, there were so many things. And he never knew where to start, so he just...went. Everywhere. Constantly.”

      Brent hadn’t been as hyper as that when she met him, but he’d never quite seemed satisfied with anything, either, as if there was something else, something better, somewhere else. He told her he left home at eighteen and had been tracing the coastline of North America ever since, starting in Nome, Alaska, heading south, and then skipping from San Diego to Corpus Christi for the Gulf of Mexico. When she asked him where he would go next, he said he figured he’d keep going as far north into Newfoundland as he could, and then hop over to Scandinavia and start following Europe’s shoreline. Then he’d do Asia’s. Then Africa’s. Then South America’s. Then, who knew?

      “He was still restless when I met him,” she told Grant. “But I always thought his restlessness was like mine.”

      He eyed her curiously, and her heart very nearly stopped beating. His expression was again identical to Brent’s, whenever he puzzled over something. She wondered if she would ever be able to look at Grant and not see Hank’s father. Then again, it wasn’t as if she’d be looking at him forever. Yes, she was sure to see Grant again after she and Hank left New York, since Francesca would want regular visits, but Clara’s interaction with him would be minimal. Still, she hoped at some point her heart would stop skipping a beat whenever she looked at him. Odd, since she couldn’t remember it skipping this much when she looked at Brent.

      “What do you mean?” he asked.

      “I thought his restlessness was because he came from the same kind of situation I did, where he never stayed in one place for very long so couldn’t get rooted for any length of time. Like maybe he was an army brat or his parents were itinerant farmers or something.”

      Now Grant’s expression turned to one of surprise. And damned if it didn’t look just like Brent’s would have, too. “He never told you anything about his past? About his family?”

      “Neither of us talked about anything like that. There was some unspoken rule where we both recognized that it was off-limits to talk about anything too personal. I knew why I didn’t want to talk about my past. I figured his reasons must have been the same.”

      “Because of the foster homes and children’s institutions,” Grant said. “That couldn’t have been a happy experience for you.”

      She told herself she shouldn’t be surprised he knew about that, too. Of course his background check would have been thorough. In spite of that, she said, “You really did do your homework.”

      He said nothing, only treated her to an unapologetic shrug.

      “What else did you find out?” she asked.

      He started to say something, then hesitated. But somehow, the look on his face told Clara he knew a lot more than she wanted him to know. And since he had the finances and, doubtless, contacts to uncover everything he could, he’d probably uncovered the one thing she’d never told anyone about herself.

      Still keeping her voice low, so that Francesca and Hank couldn’t hear, she asked, “You know where I was born, don’t you? And the circumstances of why I was born in that particular location.”

      He nodded. “Yeah. I do.”

      Which meant he knew she was born in the Bibb County jail to a nineteen-year-old girl who was awaiting trial for her involvement in an armed robbery she had committed with Clara’s father. He might even know—

      “Do you know the part about who chose my name?” she asked further, still in the low tone that ensured only Grant would hear her.

      He nodded. “One of the guards named you after the warden’s mother because your own mother didn’t name you at all.” Wow. She’d had no idea he would dig that deep. All he’d had to do was make sure she was gainfully employed, reasonably well educated and didn’t have a criminal record herself. He hadn’t needed to bring her— She stopped herself before thinking the word family, since the people who had donated her genetic material might be related to her, but they would never be family. Anyway, he hadn’t needed to learn about them, too. They’d had nothing to do with her life after generating it.

      “And I know that after she and your father were convicted,” he continued in a low tone of his own, “there was no one else in the family able to care for you.”

      Thankfully, he left out the part about how that was because the rest of her relatives were either addicted, incarcerated or missing. Though she didn’t doubt he knew all that, too. She listened for traces of contempt or revulsion in his voice but heard neither. He was as matter-of-fact about the unpleasant circumstances of her birth and parentage as he would have been were he reading a how-to manual for replacing a carburetor. As matter-of-fact about those things as she was herself, really. She should probably give him kudos for that. It bothered Clara, though—a lot—that he knew so many details about her origins.

      Which was something else to add to the That’s Weird list, because she had never really cared about anyone knowing those details before. She would have even told Brent, if he’d asked. She knew it wasn’t her fault that her parents weren’t the cream of society. And she didn’t ask to be born,

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