remembered, and he did, too, and it made something in her chest feel suddenly weightless.
But that wasn’t why she was here. Weightlessness wasn’t welcome. It only made her feel wobbly. This was supposed to be about Matthew.
“I already did that part,” she said. “I have a child.”
Evan touched her then, setting his hands on her waist lightly, but it gave her a little stability, a little strength. His eyes were really as blue as she’d remembered, a pure shade of blue that had left dozens of girls sighing in the bleachers at their college’s baseball stadium. She’d teased him for it, time and again.
Now those blue eyes were looking at her with something like...tenderness? Affection? Like he knew her. It had been so long since a man had looked at her so personally. Not as a subordinate or a superior. Not as a daughter or mother or commander or staff officer.
“I have—”
“A little boy named Matthew. I remember. Cute child.” The corners of Evan’s eyes crinkled just the slightest bit, a small smile at whatever he remembered about Matthew. “Did you have any more children after him?”
“No.” She supposed that was a reasonable question. It had been, gosh, seven years since that chance meeting in Afghanistan, when she’d mentioned going home to her son. But the question unnerved her, exposing how little Evan knew about her life. How could he have accepted her proposal as if he’d marry her no matter what, when he didn’t know anything about her? He hadn’t known she was divorced until two minutes ago. He didn’t know how many children she had. He hadn’t kept tabs on her.
She didn’t feel so weightless now. “Just Matthew. But I have full custody.”
“Rob never sees him?”
It was startling to hear her ex-husband’s name said so casually by someone else. For the past three years, if Rob had come up in conversation at all, it had been only as “Matthew’s father.” Polite, careful questions from new teachers: And will Matthew’s father be coming to the school play?
“He has visitation rights,” she told Evan. “He just doesn’t use them.”
Her polite smile was automatic. Matthew’s father lives out of state. However, my neighbor has agreed to be my designated caregiver if I’m unreachable in an emergency. For three years, her answers had been so polite, so practical.
“I’m sorry,” Evan said.
The teachers never said that. Sorry for her son? Sorry for her? For Rob? Evan didn’t explain himself further.
She explained herself instead, calmly—but her heart was pounding so hard, he ought to be able to hear it. “That means you’d be living with a child if we...if we went to the courthouse.”
“You still don’t scare me, Juliet.” He touched her face with the back of his hand, a light run of his knuckles from her cheek to just above her ear, before he leaned in again to speak softly into the ear he’d just barely caressed. “Children don’t scare me, either.”
“That’s because you’ve never lived with one.” But she couldn’t keep carrying off this calm conversation. She couldn’t pretend it was normal to be in Evan Stephens’s office on a Friday in February, discussing living together as a couple.
She moved away from his hand on her waist and paced a step or two before turning to face him. She let go of her dignity and her military bearing, threw her hands up and huffed out a sigh. “This is insanity. I can’t believe we’re even talking about following up on an old promise right now.”
At that, he half laughed as he half sat on the edge of his desk. “You can’t believe it?”
For the first time, she managed a smile and wrinkled her nose apologetically. “I guess you weren’t expecting me to pop in this afternoon. Sorry.”
“I hope you’re not sorry. That you’ll never be sorry.”
She didn’t laugh. He hadn’t been kidding. Again.
“You don’t have to honor an impulsive college promise,” she said, giving him chance after chance to take the easy way out. He could give her a smile, a friendly good to see you again, and tell her he had to get back to work.
“But you must have wondered if I would honor it,” he said. “You didn’t come find me after all these years to tell me to say no. Is ‘no’ what you wanted to hear me say, or just what you expected me to say?”
“I came to hear you say... I don’t know what I expected. I didn’t think you’d be...”
“A man of my word?”
“It was a silly pinkie promise, Evan. Nothing more.”
She said it, but she didn’t believe it. Their promise had meant something. In the back of her mind, this day had always been there. As long as Evan stayed single, there’d always been this alternate future on the horizon. She’d needed that fantasy future, some years more than others, so at every reunion, every get-together with anyone from their circle, she’d asked casual questions. Have you heard from Evan Stephens? What’s he up to these days? Not married, still?
The army was a small world. She and Evan had never been stationed together before, but on every post, she’d run into people who knew Captain Stephens or Major Stephens or Lieutenant Colonel Stephens. His rank progressed, but he was always single. Never married.
She hadn’t thought to ask about a child. He sounded so confident, saying children didn’t scare him, as if he knew what parenthood was all about. A man didn’t have to be married to have a child. Had there been an accidental pregnancy in his past?
Perhaps an intentional one. He could have been half of a couple who’d wanted to have a child but had no intention of ever marrying. He could have met a woman he thought would make a good mother for his child, and they might have decided to...to conceive a baby.
Her flash of jealousy was unjustified, considering the existence of Matthew, but she felt it all the same.
“Do you have a child?” she asked.
Evan shook his head. She couldn’t decipher the serious look in his eyes, but since he never took his gaze off her face, she had to mask her irrational relief.
“I knew you’d never married,” she said, “but I didn’t think to ask if you’d had any children.”
“You asked people about me?” The smile that was really just a crinkle at the corner of his eyes reappeared. That was easy enough to interpret: he was pleased.
“I had to. I couldn’t expect a married man to care if I’d been promoted to lieutenant colonel today.”
“No, of course not.” He pushed away from his desk and walked back into her personal space, still studying her. Then he raised his hand to touch her, and she held her breath, braced this time for that light brush along her cheek. After all, there was nowhere else he could touch her. Her jacket covered her arms to her wrists. Her black tab-tie held her white dress shirt closed at her throat. She was safe in her uniform.
She
