LITMIR.BIZ

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dimmed. Delivering babies had provided healing and joy beyond what she’d been able to imagine even when she was training in midwifery.

      “You’re right.” She felt as though she was speaking from the end of a tunnel, and she cleared her throat. “You need to be with him.” She smiled, thinking of the boy with the beautiful eyes and shiny dark brown hair. “He’s a sweet kid. Ornery. More like Tuck than you, I think.”

      “He is.” Jack sounded surprised. “He looks like his mother and biological father, and he definitely got his mother’s brain, but he does have a lot of Tuck in him.”

      Arlie frowned, not understanding. “Is he adopted?”

      “Not exactly.” He gestured with his spoon. “This is really good.”

      “Thank you.” Arlie was glad he liked the chili, but wouldn’t be diverted. “Would you want to explain ‘not exactly’? I don’t remember the term from my nursing or midwifery classes.”

      “Tracy was my study partner at Notre Dame from the beginning of freshman year. We dated some,” he said. “Kind of like you in high school, she was good at things I wasn’t and I needed all the help I could get. Her parents lived right there in South Bend—still do—but she lived in the dorm because she had an unbelievable course load. She also had an ex-boyfriend her parents hated. He drank, doped and gambled. When Tracy came up pregnant, she found out he had a wife at home.”

      “Oh, man.” Arlie shook her head and offered him a half smile. “Her folks were upset?”

      “She was afraid to tell them. Not that they were bad parents or mean or any of that, but they were older and very conservative. Bottom line was, she didn’t want to hurt them. An abortion wasn’t even a consideration. She was out of her mind with not knowing what to do. One night, it was really late and she still wasn’t in from the library, which wasn’t like her at all. I went looking and found her standing on the bridge over the St. Joe River. She swore she wasn’t going to jump or do anything stupid, but she was feeling pretty desperate.” He shrugged. “Scared the bejesus out of me.”

      It would have. His mother had taken her own life when he was a toddler. He had no memory of her, but Arlie knew Janice Taylor’s mental illness haunted him—it always had.

      “What did you do?”

      “We talked about it. She was just so scared, and, you know—” He stopped for a moment, taking a drink and looking past her into the kitchen. She wondered where he’d gone, what memory was adding to the sadness in his eyes.

      He set down his glass and took another bit of chili. “I felt like my life was a waste anyway. I’d survived the accident with no visible scars. I’d walked away from you. I’d even walked away from Tucker. I hated that my father went through life tossing other people’s pain around like so many dry leaves, and yet I’d done the same thing. I thought if I helped her, it wouldn’t cost me anything and maybe it would mean I wasn’t a complete waste of space. So I offered to marry her and take care of her until the baby came. She wouldn’t have to come clean with her parents and it wouldn’t be a shock if a marriage between an eighteen-year-old genius and a nineteen-year-old loser didn’t work out.”

      Arlie thought of Chris. If he asked her to marry him for the sake of convenience, she would probably do it, and she was thirty-three years old. It made the fact that two teenagers had done just that a very believable scenario.

      “Pregnancy and going to school was a bear for Tracy. She was sick the whole time. We talked about what she was going to do when the baby was born. She wanted to be a corporate lawyer, not a mother. Finally, we made the decision together to give him up for adoption and then have our marriage annulled. Neither of us wanted to be parents and had no emotional or physical investment in the baby. I was just trying to be a nice guy for a while and she was just trying to get through the pregnancy without her whole life imploding.”

      Arlie put down her fork. “Then what happened?”

      “Then he was born.” The look of torment left Jack’s eyes, replaced by the purest kind of joy. “Our marriage wasn’t a physical one, but I was still her delivery coach, so I was there. They handed him to me, and I was so scared of breaking him. I was amazed at how tiny his fingers were and that his feet were so disproportionately huge. When I touched his hand, he clutched my finger. We became an instant television commercial. I just told Tracy he wasn’t going anywhere. She said that was what she was thinking, too.”

      “But you’re not married anymore?”

      “No. We’re still good friends, but we stuck with that part of the life plan. We finally told her parents everything. They weren’t all that surprised, and they’ve been more than helpful with Charlie. Tracy travels even more than I do, so he sometimes spends months at a time with them.”

      “How did you end up in Vermont?”

      “Tracy’s home office is in Burlington. Llewellyn’s has a plant close to there, so it seemed a good place to base out of. And it has been until now. I have a house there, a business I no longer own but still consult for.”

      “Can’t you live and work in both places? Chris Granger spends half the year here and half in California.”

      “I probably could, and staying here wouldn’t be bad at all,” he admitted. “I like it. I’ve always liked it. But you know what kind of scars the Llewellyn family has left on the whole community. Like it or not, it’s my family. It’s me.”

      “It is your family, but you didn’t make the scars.” On anyone but me. She got up. “Do you want more? There’s dessert.”

      “Then I’ll wait for that.” Carrying his empty bowl, he followed her around the counter into the kitchen. “I did make scars, Arlie, when I walked away. You know that better than anyone.” The pain was on his face, as stark and deep as it had been the week of the accident. “Because of my father, everyone in that car was hurt except me. Everyone.”

      Arlie took lemon meringue pie—made by Libby Worth at the tearoom—out of the refrigerator while he loaded their supper dishes into the dishwasher. “Do you think they hurt less because you left?” Do you think I hurt less?

      “Maybe they did. Your mom didn’t have to be reminded every time she saw my face. Holly and Jesse, Linda’s folks—don’t you think seeing me was a reminder that I walked away from that wreck?” He closed the dishwasher door and met Arlie’s gaze, his eyes dark and tortured behind his glasses. “Holly lost a foot, Jesse his girlfriend, the Saylorses their only daughter. Libby and Tuck both had head injuries and I freaking walked away without a scratch. Yeah, I have to think my leaving was good for them.”

      Arlie didn’t know what to do. Her hurt had eased over the years until days would actually go by without her thinking of what she’d lost. Her father and the baby she’d carried were beloved memories, she didn’t notice Holly’s foot and even singing had been replaced by other things. Being in Miniagua had been her saving grace, a luxury the boy she’d loved hadn’t allowed himself.

      Watching his face as he talked, seeing the pain come and go, she realized his leaving may have been better for some of the victims of the accident. But not for him. Never for him.

      She set down the pie and lifted a hand to his lean face, feeling the soft brush of his beard against her palm. “You lost your father, Jack. I know you and he weren’t close, but as long as you were both alive, you believed someday you might be. You may have walked away, but it wasn’t unscathed. Everyone knows that.” She thought of the cold shoulder he’d received from the community since he’d been back. “No, I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say I know that. And I do.”

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