wrapped her hands around the mug he’d placed in front of her, not because she was going to take a drink, but because she needed something to hang on to, something to do.
She should have realized Kurt would show no quarter; he hadn’t last night, nor had he given up this morning. Up until three hours ago, she’d thought tenacity was a positive trait.
Time ticked, tension threading between each second.
“Would you have put my name there?” he repeated very, very quietly.
“No.”
Thunder clouded his eyes, darkening them to stormy forest green. His brow furrowed and a pulse thumped in his temple. She should have lied.
She should have lied.
“And you wanted me to keep quiet about it being my kid? You wanted me to sit back and live in the same town as you and watch you raise our child, my child, my child, and pretend nothing happened, that I had no part in it?”
The words were carefully cloaked in a quiet tone that scared her much more than his anger.
At that moment, she saw things clearly from Kurt’s point of view. She winced.
She’d always considered herself unselfish—until she was faced with the awful realization that in asking him to help her out, she had been anything but unselfish.
He shoved his untouched plate toward the middle of the table.
She shrunk back.
“Hadn’t thought of that, either?”
This time, his question landed with a squeeze around her midsection, like a lasso inexorably being tightened, cutting off her air.
“Why, Jessie?”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. Kurt wanted answers, deep answers, ones that threatened to bare her soul. And he deserved them.
She doubted she’d done anything more painful in her entire life.
“You were right earlier,” she admitted quietly, looking at him and accepting the full force of the hostility he directed toward her. “When you said I was trying to make up for what I didn’t have, you were right.” Until now, she hadn’t been honest with anyone, including herself.
Jessie hoped he’d acknowledge what she’d said and allow both of them to move on. Instead he remained silent, waiting while she exposed the secrets she’d rather keep buried.
“I’ve never told anyone else this, not even Mary.”
He nodded.
Realizing that was all the encouragement he intended to give her, she continued. “I grew up believing in ideals. I wish I still did. I was found on the steps of the church. The doctors thought I was about a week old.”
Kurt cursed.
“No one knew where I came from, or when I was born. I’ve never had a birthday celebration. I don’t even know when my real birthday is.”
Jessie stared into the inkiness of the cooling black coffee. “I never had my own room, my own clothes, my own family.” She paused, the past mingling with the present. “The only thing I ever truly had of my own was the teddy bear that they found me with.”
A newly forming tear prickled the corner of her eye. She wished more than anything, that she could blink it away. “Even that, one of my foster parents took away when I misbehaved.”
She looked at Kurt then. The furrow between his brows had eased, but not the anger. She wondered, though, if it was still directed at her. “I wouldn’t eat my peas,” she said, the distance of years not helping her to make sense of the incident. “And for that, they took away my teddy bear. I cried myself to sleep for three nights. No one cared.”
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