LITMIR.BIZ

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do you think I’m thinking?”

      “I haven’t loved anybody else since I left you.”

      Delaney had to blink back the tears that suddenly blurred her vision. “I tried to replace you. It didn’t work.”

      “Good. That would make us sitting here together a lot more awkward.”

      She laughed softly and turned her head to see Noah looking at her with his solemn baby eyes. “He looks like you.”

      “He definitely has a lot of Rollins in him. Mike and Sandy should probably start bracing themselves for his teen years.”

      At the sound of his uncle’s voice, Noah shifted his intense gaze to him. He seemed fascinated by Brody’s face, not that Delaney could blame him. Brody was looking a little scruffy, like the other men at the school, but it only added a little edge to his good looks.

      Watching man and infant gaze into each other’s eyes was too much for Delaney, and she looked away. She couldn’t push back the resentment. Brody had taken her dreams for a family with him when he ran, and that was a hard thing to forgive.

      “He’s such a cute little bugger,” Brody said in a painfully soft voice.

      “How long do you think it’ll be before he starts wailing?” she asked, looking around to see if Sandy was in sight.

      Of course she was. And she must have been feeling the need to nurse because all Delaney had to do was look at her and the new mom was moving toward them. Once she’d taken Noah and gone back toward their cots, Brody slipped his arm around Delaney’s shoulders and pulled her close.

      When he kissed the top of her head, she sighed and tried to relax in his arms. There was no sense in holding on to past hurts. Life hadn’t turned out the way she’d thought it would, but she could embrace this moment for the short time it would last.

      * * *

      BRODY HELPED PREPARE the evening meal and serve it, so Delaney refused to let him help clean up after.

      “I like spending time with you,” he argued. “Even if it’s dish duty.”

      She laughed. “That’s really sweet, but there’s a rotation and some people have been getting lazy because you’re doing their share.”

      He caught her pointed look toward Alice. “Fine. I’ll go hang with Pop for a while. The more entertained we keep him, the fewer times he goes out in the cold for a smoke.”

      He found his old man stretched out on a cot, reading a hunting magazine. As far as Brody knew, his dad had never hunted a day in his life, so he assumed the magazine was borrowed from one of the other guys.

      “Learning anything?”

      “Yeah.” His dad closed the magazine and sat up on the cot. “Learning you can buy pretty much anything in camo.”

      Brody sat on the cot next to his dad’s, breathing a sigh of relief. He’d been on his feet a long time, and he couldn’t imagine how Delaney felt. “I think I saw a camo teddy bear at Sandy’s before the power went out.”

      His dad nodded, then fell silent for a few minutes. Brody got the impression he had something on his mind, but talking emotions didn’t come naturally to John Rollins. Usually it was Brody’s mom who conveyed their feelings back and forth. “You know your father loves you, Brody” and the like.

      “You seem happy, son. You’ve done well for yourself.”

      “Thanks, Pop. It’s a lot of work, but I’m pretty happy with where I am in life.”

      “Wish you hadn’t broken your mother’s heart doing it, though.”

      Brody bowed his head, focusing all his attention on a fuzz on the cuff of his sweater just so he had a place to look. “I don’t know how to explain why I left the way I did without sounding like I’m putting you down.”

      “Son, you think I don’t know my work is hard and pretty thankless? Nobody knows more than me that my house ain’t grand and my wife doesn’t have a diamond ring and my truck don’t run half the time. But you and your sister never wanted for a meal, dammit.”

      “I wanted more. There was always food on the table and I appreciate that, but I wanted more for myself and if I talked about doing something else, you’d just shake your head and walk away. Fishing was good enough for you so, by God, it was good enough for me.”

      His dad was quiet until Brody finally looked up. The old man’s voice was as sad as his eyes when he did speak. “I didn’t know how to want more for you, Brody. I’m a fisherman, just like my father and my grandfather and two generations before him. Hell, your mom’s mother was a fisherman’s wife and so on before her. We don’t know any life but this.”

      Brody had to swallow past the lump in his throat. “Maybe it’s because Delaney came from a family that didn’t fish, but every time I’d try to picture our future, I saw her looking tired and older than her age, with worry lines from years of juggling bills.”

      “And you saw yourself being me.”

      He didn’t know what to say to his dad. The words were true, but admitting it out loud seemed like a cruel blow for a man who’d done his best. He hadn’t been running away from his parents. He was running to the man he wanted to be.

      “I went through the same thing,” his dad said. “I was maybe a little younger than you were when you left. Looked around and realized I was going to spend my whole life fishing like my old man and I’d end up just like him. The only difference between you and me at that age is that you had the guts to leave.”

      It had never occurred to Brody that his father might have felt that way. And maybe his father before him. “I love you and Mom. I hope you know that.”

      “We do. And even though we hated losing you, we’re both proud of what you’ve made of yourself.”

      Brody had to clear his throat twice before he could speak. “Thanks, Pop.”

      “Your big screw-up, though, was not taking your girl with you.”

      Yeah, he knew that now. But at the time... “I had two hundred bucks in my pocket and no plans. No safety net. No family. No nothing.”

      “Once you started making some money for yourself, why didn’t you call her?”

      Brody couldn’t meet his dad’s piercing gaze, so he focused on the sweater fuzz again. “I didn’t have the guts to tell anybody I was leaving. I didn’t say goodbye to her. I guess I didn’t have the guts to call her, either. I thought about it. A lot, actually. But I didn’t think I could take her hanging up on me.”

      “Kind of gutless for a young man who left everything he’d known to go off into the world with only two hundred bucks in his pocket.”

      “Being cold and hungry wouldn’t kill me, but Delaney turning a cold shoulder to me might have.”

      “And now you made the girl fall for you all over again and we all know you won’t stay. Guess that makes you a... What’s that word the young people use nowadays? Douche bag?”

      Brody almost choked. “Pop! What?”

      “Pretty sure that’s the word I’m looking for.” He gave Brody a sly look. “Unless you’re planning to stick it out this time.”

      He wasn’t sure yet what he was going to do, and he couldn’t come up with the words to explain that since his brain was busy trying to wrap itself around the fact his old man had called him a douche bag.

      “Sure is a pretty lady,” his dad continued, his eyes fixed on Delaney across the room. “Your mom told me this morning you guys would make pretty grandbabies.”

      Babies. Brody watched Delaney lean down to speak to one of the kids and his gut tightened. It was too easy to picture her with a smaller version of herself and maybe a

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