grabbed for a purchase, hooking onto the eaves. The old metal tore away. He tumbled to the edge and dropped like a sack of mail, crashing down on an old rhododendron bush.
Daisy leapt out of the car and rushed over to him. He lay by the broken bush, motionless. His eyes were closed, his face chalk-white.
A sense of unreality fell over her. No. These things didn’t happen. They weren’t supposed to happen. He looked dead. He was dead. Just like that.
She couldn’t catch her breath. She sank to her knees beside him. “Logan, no,” she said. “Please.”
A terrible sound came from him as he sucked in a breath. “Please … what?” His eyes fluttered open, and he groaned.
She cried harder, from joy now. “Are you all right? I thought you were dead.”
“Hey, I thought I was dead. Completely knocked the wind out of me.”
“Should I call 911?”
He pushed himself up, plucked a rhody branch from his hair. “Sorry to disappoint you, but the emergency is over.” He moved his head from side to side. “No broken neck. Extremities all intact.”
A thin, livid scrape slashed across his cheek, and his hand was bleeding.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Okay enough, I swear.” He wiped his hand on his shirt.
“You shouldn’t have been up on the roof all by yourself. Couldn’t you have called someone?”
“Now you’re sounding like my mother.”
“Sorry.”
He offered a lopsided grin. “Maybe the fall knocked the silver spoon from my mouth. Here, give me a hand.”
She pulled him to his feet and looked into his eyes, making sure the pupils matched. “Did you hit your head?”
“Nope. Fell on my ass.” He laid his arm around her shoulders. He smelled of sweat and broken greenery. “I should lean on you, though. You know, just in case. Where’s my boy?”
“Asleep in the car.”
“I got plans for us this weekend,” said Logan. “My soccer team’s got a big match.”
She cast another worried look at him. “You might be really hurt.”
He stepped away from her, spread his arms wide. “Look, I’m fine, okay? I took a spill—”
“From a two-story roof.”
“And lived to tell the tale,” he said. “Quit worrying. Charlie and I’ll be fine. Perfectly fine.”
“What were you doing up there, anyway?”
“Fixing some loose shingles. A regular home handyman.”
“Do me a favor. No ladders, no roof repairs while you’re in charge of Charlie.”
He raised his right hand. “Scout’s honor.” He unbuckled Charlie’s seat and pulled it out. Charlie stirred but didn’t wake up, so Logan carried the whole rig into the house. Daisy followed with the Clifford bag and Charlie’s weekender.
“I could call Sonnet,” she suggested. Her stepsister was Charlie’s favorite babysitter. After finishing her studies and internships in Germany, Sonnet was back in Avalon for a few months. In the fall, she would start work at the U.N.
“Or either of my parents could help out—”
“Enough, okay? I didn’t get hurt. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of my own kid.” He spoke quietly, but his voice had an edge. Because of his past as an addict and drunk, people tended to tiptoe around him or assume he was inadequate. Just the suggestion of help brought out his defensiveness.
“I know you’re capable. But you just fell off a roof. You’re not Superman.”
He grabbed a Nehi soda from the fridge. “Sure, I am.” He offered her a sip.
She shook her head. “All right. Instead of getting another sitter, I could cancel.” Thus proving once again how easily life interfered with her and Julian.
“Nope,” he said quickly. “No way.”
This startled her. Logan knew she was going to the commissioning ceremony, and he couldn’t stand Julian. In Logan’s mind, Julian was the one thing that stood between them, preventing them from having a deeper relationship. Which was so wrong, but that was a different conversation. Still, she didn’t get why Logan seemed to want her to go to Ithaca.
He must have read her mind. “You need to see him get his commission. Maybe it’ll be, I don’t know, closure for you.”
“Closure?” She hated the sound of that word.
“You need to see that the air force is his life.” Logan spoke kindly. “You’ll never be first with him. Maybe after this weekend, after he gets sent to Timbuktu, that’ll finally be clear to you.”
It irked her that Logan assumed that was the way things would play out. He spoke as if he had some kind of crystal ball.
“Great, now you’re my relationship analyst.” God, how did I get here? she wondered. Sometimes she looked around her life and asked herself that. How was it that she was getting relationship advice from the father of her child, a guy who had come into her life through an act of bad judgment, and stayed through sheer determination.
“Logan—”
“I want you to know, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere, not to Timbuktu or the Pentagon or North Dakota or Cape Town. Here, Daisy. You know what you mean to me.”
She did know. If she ever needed a reminder that this was true, all she had to do was remember what had happened the Christmas before last. The day had started out innocently enough. She and Charlie had been invited to spend the holiday with the O’Donnells, which meant taking the train with Logan from Avalon downstate to the city. She remembered feeling so torn that day, knowing Charlie deserved equal time with his paternal grandparents, yet realizing it would mean spending the holiday away from her own family. For Charlie’s sake, she’d put on a brave face, packed her bag and met Logan at the station.
At the last minute, Julian had come to town to surprise her. His train had arrived shortly before hers was scheduled to leave. He’d come bounding over to her platform with his usual exuberance, which deflated visibly the moment he’d spotted Logan. She hadn’t known they would both be there. It was never comfortable having the two of them in the same vicinity.
Predictably, and to her complete mortification, it had all gone wrong in a flurry of angry words and accusations. Like a couple of rutting animals, Julian and Logan had gotten into a fistfight right there on the train platform. A fistfight. Between two men who both claimed they cared about her—Logan, the passionate family man she’d known all her life and the father of her child, and Julian, the guy she hadn’t been able to get out of her heart since
