Jonah said, distracted by the sound of Patrick and the girl walking up the sidewalk outside his cottage.
Great. Visitors.
“Got it,” Gary answered and hung up as a knock sounded at the door.
Jonah opened the door and found the old man, his hand on the girl’s shoulder.
The little girl, wearing head to toe purple, looked tortured, but she still managed to give him the evil eye. He swallowed a crack of laughter.
“This is Josie,” Patrick said, his gaze flicking between them. “And she has something to say.”
Jonah wanted to roll his eyes, call out the old man for this useless display of what…manners? Honor? Jonah didn’t believe a moment of it. Patrick wouldn’t know honor if it had bitten him on the ass.
“I’ve been spying on you,” Josie said, gesturing limply to the window.
“And…?” Patrick prompted.
“And—” she rolled her eyes “—I’m sorry.”
Jonah nodded at her and her tortured expression changed slightly. She craned her neck to get a better look inside his cabin.
The girl was stubborn, and Jonah understood stubborn.
My kind of kid, he thought.
“You go see what Chef Tim has for you to do in the kitchen,” Patrick told the girl and she scowled.
“Again?”
“You got caught,” Patrick said, shaking his head, “again.”
“But—” She looked at Jonah then Patrick, and Jonah realized that she didn’t want to leave the old man alone with him, maybe suspecting Jonah would add Patrick to the pile of bodies in the river.
“I knew you were out there,” he told the little girl. “I made that up about the bodies.”
“Really?” she asked, eyeing him shrewdly and again he almost laughed.
“Really.”
He felt Patrick’s gaze on him, hopeful and surprised. Yes, Jonah wanted to snap at him, the Dirty Developer has a sense of humor.
But he didn’t want Patrick to know anything about him.
She hesitated as if to say she didn’t believe him but then she nodded. “Okay. But if Patrick goes missing, I’m an eyewitness. I’ll testify.”
Jonah blinked, stunned slightly by the legal vernacular.
“Get going,” Patrick said, bodily turning the girl around and giving her a push toward the lodge.
Josie sighed heavily and stomped off, leaving Patrick and Jonah alone. Jonah realized this was the moment Patrick had been waiting for since he’d arrived.
Josie hadn’t been the only one haunting the outside of his cabin.
“Josie and her mother were in a scrape with the law last winter,” Patrick explained. “She saw and heard some things she shouldn’t have and spent some time in court this spring testifying. She caught on to the lingo.”
Jonah watched the girl go until the door of the lodge shut behind her.
“Why don’t you come on out?” Patrick said. “I’ll give you a tour. Take you down to the river.” His tone seemed casual, but he couldn’t control the hope that rolled off him, nearly suffocating Jonah.
“I’m working.”
Patrick sucked in a quick breath but kept his smile intact. The man wasn’t going to budge.
“Your mother—”
“Don’t try to use my mother to get me to do what you want me to do,” he said. “It won’t work. In fact, it will make me like you less. Not that it’s possible.”
Jonah tried to shut the door but Patrick got his hand in there before he could. Jonah was stunned briefly by the sudden sharpness in the old man’s eyes, the sudden anger.
“I didn’t know about you,” Patrick said. “Your mother never told me. If I had known, I would have done anything to get you back.”
Jonah knew that, of course. His mother had made very sure that he understood that Patrick had not rejected Jonah. He’d only rejected his wife. Banished her from her own family.
“Is that supposed to make me forgive you?” Jonah asked.
“I don’t understand what you are angry with me for.” Patrick truly looked lost. Clueless and that told him even further what Iris meant to this man.
“I’m angry,” he said clearly, making sure nothing would get misunderstood or forgotten, “because you never signed those divorce papers. You kept her chained to you for thirty years like she didn’t matter. You broke my mother’s heart. I’m angry because I grew up with a mother who every day tried to hide the fact that she was unhappy.” Patrick’s face crumpled, his fire extinguished. “And, no, there is nothing you can do to make me forgive that.”
With that, before the old man could say anything more, Jonah shut the door in his face.
PATRICK STARED at the closed door.
Heartsick, he battled nausea and chest pains. Confusion and grief made his head fuzzy and light.
What am I supposed to do?
He watched Max walk out of the lodge into the woods and thought about calling out to him. Trying to talk to him about this mess with Jonah. But his boys weren’t invested. They wanted him to protect himself, not get involved. Gabe in particular wanted him to let it go.
Even Max, last night, had said if Jonah wasn’t interested in bridging the gaps then maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
Patrick couldn’t believe that this family wasn’t meant to be.
Against all odds, Jonah was here. In cabin five.
Patrick simply needed to figure out how to get Jonah out of cabin five.
He knew that if he asked Iris to help him, to force the boy’s hand since he’d do anything for his mother, some of this heartache would be avoided.
But Patrick didn’t want her help. He wanted to feed the small fire of his grudge against her.
What she’d done was unforgivable. Despite the fact that he understood the whys and the reasons, he couldn’t forgive her.
She’d left them, him and the boys. Walked away in the middle of the night thirty years ago and had stayed away for three months before writing Patrick a letter asking to come home. He’d told her no. He’d been angry. Spiteful and hurt and he had no way of knowing that she was pregnant and her terrifying erratic behavior before she left had been caused by depression brought on by the pregnancy.
She
