that they had shared had snapped in two, and they had stood by helplessly, with no paddles, drifting farther and farther away, not able to stop it.
“Why babies?” he asked softly.
“What?”
She actually looked frightened by the question.
“Why Baby Boomer? Why is your business about all things baby when that caused us so much heartache?”
“Oh.” She relaxed visibly. “I’m not sure it was even intentional. You know some of my friends had seen the nursery you and I—” Her voice drifted away and she squinted, as if looking at something in the distance. Then she cleared her throat. “Nicole Reynolds asked me if I could do something for her. A mural on the wall of her nursery. It was a forest scene, with rabbits and birds and a deer. It was an immersion and it kind of snatched me back from the brink. Gave me purpose and a reason to get up in the morning. I liked being part of what was happening in their family, that circle of joy and expectation. It just kind of snowballed.”
He was so aware he had caused her that pain. Well, not all of it. The miscarriages had put her in a space he couldn’t reach. And then she’d wanted to try again. To plunge herself into that pool of misery he could not rescue her from again. He’d thought it was his job to make her happy. To make her world perfect. At some point, to his grave detriment, he had given up trying.
“I’m sorry, Jessie. I’m sorry it wasn’t me who snatched you back from the brink.”
Her eyes skittered to him and then away. For a moment it looked as if she would cross that abyss between them, throw herself into his embrace, come home.
But that moment passed even before he recognized completely what was blooming inside him.
Hope.
Shouldn’t he know by now that that was the worst trap of all? To hope?
She seemed to recognize it, because smiling way too brightly, she said, “How about if I go order that pizza now?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.”
She retreated to the kitchen; he looked at the floors. With the extra weight on the sander, wood had disappeared quickly. The wood was bare, but wavy. If he put a level on it, it would probably rock like the little horse in one of her nursery displays. He was fairly certain that the damage caused by her wild ride on the sander was something wood filler could not fix.
But he was aware of liking this kind of problem over the other kind. The baffling problems of the heart.
“What kind of pizza?” she called.
“The usual,” he said, before he remembered they really didn’t have a usual anymore, not since their lives had become unusual.
But she didn’t miss a beat, and he heard her talking into the phone, ordering a half pepperoni and mushroom and a half anchovies and pineapple and ham.
He went into the kitchen and watched her. The afternoon sunshine was painting her in gold. Even in that horrible dress, she looked beautiful. He remembered what it was to share a life with her and felt the pang of intense loss.
And suspected she was feeling it, too. Jessica had hung up the phone, but she had all the old take-out menus out of the kitchen drawer—she’d actually allowed them to have a junk drawer—and was studying them hard.
“You’re too heavy,” he said when she glanced up at him.
“Excuse me? Then maybe pizza isn’t the right choice!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Not like that.”
“Not like what?”
“You,” he said, and could hear the gruff sincerity in his voice, “are perfect. You are too heavy for the sander! We dug some pretty good ruts in the floor.”
“Oh.” She blushed and looked back at the menus. She was pleased that he thought she was perfect. And he was pleased that he had pleased her, even though the road they were on seemed fraught with danger. “You should have hired it out.”
“Very unmanly,” he said.
“You,” she said, and he could hear the sincerity in her voice, “couldn’t be unmanly if you were wearing this dress.”
He was pleased that she thought he was manly, though the sense of danger was hissing in the air between them now.
She was right, and not just about the manly part. He should have hired the floor job out. The truth, he wouldn’t have missed those moments of her laughter for the world. Even if the floor was completely wrecked, which seemed like a distinct possibility at the moment, that seemed a small price to pay.
“I just need something lighter than you to put on the sander.” He deliberately walked away from the building tension between them and went out the back door to their toolshed. He found an old cinder block. He didn’t miss the look on her face when he came back in hefting it, as her eyes found the bulge of his biceps and lingered there for a heated moment.
He slowed marginally, liking her admiration of his manliness more than he had a right to. Then he went into the living room and found and pitted himself against a nice comforting problem, one that he could solve. How did you get a cinder block to sit on a sander?
Kade finally had it attached, and restarted the machine. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as waltzing around the room with Jessica. And it wasn’t nearly as dangerous, either.
Or that was what he thought until the precise moment he smelled smoke. Frowning, he looked toward the kitchen. They were having pizza. What was she burning?
He shut off the sander, and went into the kitchen doorway, expecting crazily to find her pulling burned cookies from the oven. She had gone through a cookie phase when she had made her world all about him. Who had known there were so many kinds of cookies?
Once or twice, he had tried to distract her from her full-scaled descent into domestic divahood. He had crossed the kitchen, breathed on her neck, nibbled her ear...
He remembered them laughing when he’d lured her away and they’d come back to cookies burned black. She had taken them out of the oven and thrown the whole sheet out into the yard...
But now there were no cookies. In fact, Jessica was standing right where he had left her, still studying all the take-out menus as if each one represented something very special. Which it did, not that he wanted to go there now. Kade did not want to remember Chinese food on the front steps during a thunderstorm, or a memorable evening of naked pad thai, a real dish that they had eaten, well, in the spirit of the name.
“Don’t distract me,” he snapped at her, and that earned him a wide-eyed look of surprise.
“What are you burning?”
“I’m not burning anything.”
He turned away from her, sniffing the air. It wasn’t coming from in here, the kitchen. In fact, it seemed to be coming from the living room. He turned back in and the sanding machine caught his attention. A wisp of something curled out of the bag that caught the sawdust coming off the floor.
And
