her paranoia reading shades of gray into a casual question?
“Yep. Two more weeks.”
She heard a muffled voice.
“Listen. Got to go. We’ll talk again?”
“Next week,” Laurel promised.
Disquiet made her chest feel hollow. Had she ruined a friendship she valued by asking this of Matt? Or would everything be fine, once it was done?
She turned back to her computer and made herself concentrate on the will she was writing. She worked as a paralegal for a firm of attorneys, but most often with Malcolm Hern, whose scrawled notes about the clients’ wishes she peered at frequently.
Nonetheless, she was relieved when five o’clock came and she could shut down her computer, don her raincoat, grab her purse and join the other flunkies leaving. This was one of the few times a day she was glad not to have her law degree. If she was working here as an attorney, there’d be no five o’clock departures for her. Nope, she’d be putting in sixty- or seventy-hour workweeks. She couldn’t be a single parent.
The elevator moved slowly, even after it was full, stopping at nearly every floor between the thirty-fifth, where her firm was located, and the ground floor. She hated being pressed against strangers this way, and always chose a corner if she could get into one. Even so, the man behind her had nearly full-body contact with her and his breath stirred the hair at her nape. Her relief when the light flashed on L and the elevator dinged and the doors slid open was profound. Still, she had to wait for others to exit ahead of her, had to suffer more jostling.
Laurel joined the exodus into the marble lobby, heading for the rotating glass doors. She hadn’t gone more than a few steps when a man fell into step with her.
“Can I offer the lady a ride home?”
“Caleb!” she exclaimed in delight. “You’re back in town.”
He wrapped a long arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze even as they kept walking. “Yep. Good trip. How are you?”
Oh, planning to get myself impregnated two weeks from tomorrow. Having daily panic attacks.
“I’m good. Can I offer you dinner?”
“I was planning to take you out.”
“I have beef stroganoff simmering in my Crock-Pot as we speak.”
“Deal.”
His smile was as amazing as ever although the effect was somewhat different now that he was a man rather than a boy. Most of his travels took him to Central and South America, which meant he was perpetually tanned, paler laugh lines fanning out from his blue, blue eyes. But the dimple still deepened in one cheek whenever he offered his beguiling, lopsided grin.
Caleb wore his hair longer than did most of the attorneys and businessmen in the lobby, not ponytail length, just a little shaggy, the curls making it constantly disheveled. He’d filled out a little in the years since college, but was still lean, and at a couple of inches over six feet he towered over her five foot four or so. Laurel was always aware of women’s heads turning when she was with him, not just because he was handsome, although he was. He had that indefinable quality that in an actor or public speaker would be labeled charisma. He exuded some kind of life force, perhaps a belief in himself that drew the stares.
And she was in trouble, she realized suddenly. Was she going to try to get through the evening without telling him what she was up to?
If she kept silent, he’d be hurt later, and for good reason. They’d always told each other everything important.
Everything but what she’d thought and felt when she’d been brutally raped during her first and only year of law school. That single subject was taboo. Only in her rape support group could she talk about that day, because every woman there understood in a way no man ever would.
Okay, this she’d tell him. She didn’t like explaining herself, hated the idea of having to tell him to butt out, it was none of his business. But secrecy would bother him more, she knew it would.
Typical Caleb, he’d found a parking spot on the street not half a block from the Drohman Tower where she worked. Nobody found street parking at this time of day downtown.
Nobody but Caleb, charmed as always.
“How was your trip?” she asked, once he’d pulled out into traffic.
“Really good. Haiti is always depressing. The poverty.” He shook his head. “But I’m excited about the cooperative we’ve got going there. Not just drum art, although the artisans in the group are making some wall sculptures that are different from the more common ones. But we’ve added a guy who makes the most extraordinary stone sculptures. Wait’ll you see them.”
In college, Caleb had been determined to work for a humanitarian organization like Save the Children. But during his time in Ecuador with the Peace Corps, he’d had what he’d described as a revelation. Outside aid wasn’t the key, self-sufficiency was. Every country in Latin and South America had unique, beautiful crafts that would bring high prices from Americans if they were made accessible to them. Instead of just buying from artists, he helped organize cooperatives, often village- and even region-wide with profit sharing. Some were comprised only of women, many of whom had lost their husbands to war.
Caleb had started with a tiny store on University Avenue in Seattle, expanding it within a year and adding a second two years later in Portland. Now he had another in upscale Bellevue and a fourth in Tacoma, with a fifth planned for San Francisco. He also put out a catalog and sold through a Web site. He made a good living but passed on profits to the artisans in the cooperatives on a scale that stunned Haitians and Guatemalans who were accustomed to getting pennies for work that sold for a hundred dollars in the United States.
Caleb loved what he did and what he’d accomplished. Every time she saw him, Laurel felt an ache of regret and disappointment in herself. Her dreams had been as vivid as his, and now where was she? Working a nine-to-five job, getting through each day as well as she could.
Choosing to become a mother was the first decision she’d made in a long time that looked ahead, that said, I have hope. Maybe, just maybe, Caleb would be glad for her.
Traffic on I-5 was stop-and-go. Laurel could have gotten home nearly as fast on the bus that ambled down Eastlake and through the University District. But she didn’t care if the traffic ever opened up. It was wonderful just to be sitting next to Caleb, hearing him talk about the wretchedness he’d seen side by side with the need to create something beautiful. He spoke with admiration of the warmth of community he saw down there and felt Americans had lost, but he also told her about glorious Caribbean beaches littered with bits of Styrofoam and hypodermic needles, about the children and the politics and the disease. He was passionate, angry, awed—and still able to believe he could make a difference.
A few times she’d imagined traveling with him, seeing with her own eyes everything he described. Once he’d tentatively suggested she join him on a trip to Honduras and Guatemala. He’d talked about monkeys leaping through branches above crumbling Mayan ruins, patient women weaving all day long to provide for their families, sunshine and darting fish in coral reefs.
But by then, all Laurel had to buttress herself from the world was her routine. The safety of eating the same cereal every morning, sitting in the same
