They’d been planning to spend a year in Europe between high school and college, using a couple of different exchange programs to see places in more depth. They’d both been excited about it.
Imagine. Three months digging up Roman ruins in Italy, as volunteer interns on an archeological site. Six weeks of intensive language lessons in Spain. Picking grapes, staying in cheap hotels, eating where the locals ate, making new friends. They’d gotten the passport pictures, then gone back into the booth to take some more, just for fun. They’d made faces into the camera, standing with heads close together, arms around each other, big, wide smiles.
Oh, lord, it seemed like so long ago!
Was Stacey Handley in any way the same person now?
Was he?
When she’d gotten pregnant with Anna she’d abandoned all those plans and dreams as if they’d never existed, and had revealed a hometown-girl side to her personality that had stifled and frightened him.
He’d wanted Stacey.
He wanted to go off into the sunset with her, hand in hand forever.
But the going off part was important. He didn’t want to settle into marriage and a baby and spend the rest of their dull, suburban lives in Portland. They planned their wedding, but he had to hide how trapped he felt.
And then they’d lost Anna at twenty weeks’ gestation. The doctors had called it a miscarriage, although having gone through labor and delivery on the maternity floor right here at this hospital, both he and Stacey had felt it was a stillbirth. No baby could live when it was born at twenty weeks. They didn’t know why it had happened. Sometimes, things like this just did.
Distraught, Stacey had wanted to name the tiny baby and he had agreed. It was important. It was necessary.
To this day, he thought of her as Anna. Little Anna. He never helped a patient through the loss of a baby without remembering. Anna Handley Logan. Their lost daughter.
She would have been almost seventeen by now if she’d lived.
But she hadn’t.
So Jake had gotten what he wanted. The burden of a settled, responsible future in his hometown had suddenly lifted from his shoulders, but the mix of guilt and grief had been terrible. He’d known he didn’t deserve Stacey after this. He’d definitely known he didn’t want kids. Not ever. It was too hard. Too frightening. Too horrible. How could she already have begun to talk about “trying again”? He’d started to pick fights with her and push her away and…
Yeah.
Hardly a surprise that their relationship hadn’t survived, despite the chemistry and the sense of two souls entwined. “If you could stand in front of the wall…?” Stacey said.
He stood in front of the wall.
“And smile…?”
He stretched his lips. She took the shot and showed it to him on the little screen.
“Oh, hell!” he muttered. He looked like a rabbit trapped in the headlights of a car. “Could we try that again? I mean, I don’t want to scare my patients.”
She laughed unsteadily. “I think it was my fault. I’ll give you more time.”
He shouldn’t need more time. It was an ID card photo, for heaven’s sake, not the front cover of People magazine. “It’s fine. I’m ready.”
“Um, I’m not. This little green light has to come on. Just a sec.” She fiddled again and he watched her while she was unaware.
She looked incredible. Older, of course, but better. Way better. He’d never understood men who couldn’t see the beauty in a woman once she passed thirty. Stacey’s beauty had a ripeness to it now, an emotional depth behind it that couldn’t have been there at eighteen, even though she’d already been mature and grounded back then.
Her figure had grown a little more womanly, with soft curves in all the right places and a grace to her movements that said she knew who she was and was happy with herself. Above her deep blue eyes, her eyelids had tiny, curved creases at their outer corners, as if she had plenty of reasons to laugh and smile. She wore a pleated silk skirt with a pattern like watercolor painting and he could hear the faintest swish of fabric when she moved.
As she examined the uncooperative camera, her honey blond hair fell forward to brush and then mask her face and out of the blue he had another flash of memory, this time about the night they’d conceived Anna, in the backseat of his car after the senior prom. Stacey had had her hair professionally piled on top of her head…it had fallen down as they’d made love…longer back then…tumbling in the dark…glinting with gold…brushing his chest…brushing his—
“Okay, one more time,” she said. “Smile!”
He did, and this time when she showed him the photo he thought the whole world would be able to track the erotic direction of his thoughts. “This one shouldn’t scare them,” he blurted out.
“No.” She took a quizzical look at it. “They might want your phone number.” She grinned suddenly, making her eyes widen and her arched eyebrows lift higher. Again he remembered. Her smile had always shone at a million watts. The grin didn’t last. “Sorry, that was inappropriate.” She raked her lower teeth across her top lip.
“It’s fine. Forget it.” He watched her go to the computer to enter his name and set the machine up for printing and laminating the card. He found the sudden silence unbearable, because it gave him too much time to feel astonished at the fact that all the chemistry was still there. “Back at the day-care center, those were your kids?”
Something to say.
Small talk, in any other situation.
Between the two of them it was anything but.
She nodded, still looking at the screen. “Max and Ella. Uh, the marriage didn’t make the grade, though. You probably worked that out.”
“Mmm, yes. I was sorry to hear it.”
More than sorry, but he couldn’t identify the feeling at first.
When he did identify it, he was shocked at himself yet again. At some primal male level, he was basically ready to find out if Stacey needed the man killed—preferably by burying him in the fresh concrete foundations of a large building. Sleeping with the fishes had a certain ring to it, also. How come he’d never thought to cultivate a few useful mob connections for exactly this kind of occasion?
“John has them this weekend,” she said. “John Deroy. My ex. He’s good. He wants to stay involved. He lives in Olympia, now.”
He could see how much she struggled with this, and it didn’t surprise him. She would be the kind of mother who found it difficult to spend any time away from her children, especially since they were so little. He wondered what had gone wrong with the marriage, so soon after what presumably had been a joyful birth.
“So at least when they’re with your ex, you get some time to yourself,” he said. Too gently. She probably wouldn’t be happy to know how easily he’d read her emotions.
She
