Page 47
No. She didn’t. Because he had pushed away the best thing that ever happened to him.
He didn’t say the words. He’d learned the hard way that explanations didn’t help. They only upset his mother.
In the months after the shooting, he and Kelsey had tried to tell her the truth, to make her understand that her husband was gone, that everything had changed.
Each time, she would spiral into panic, sobbing, agitated, her fragile progress slipping backward as if someone had yanked her off a ladder.
Now they did the opposite. Each day, they met her where she lived in her head. It was, he imagined, not unlike loving someone with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia. The difference was that his mother didn’t get steadily worse. She was frozen here. Sometimes that felt like a mercy.
Sometimes not.
“You were just teasing, weren’t you?” he said now to Hannah, forcing a smile, praying she’d understand. “About not being my sweetheart.”
He saw the moment of understanding flicker in her eyes. Her shoulders relaxed a fraction.
“Yes,” she said, giving his mother a bright, almost theatrical smile. “Just teasing. We’re still in love.”
The words landed between them like a boulder dropped into Lake Haven. His heart gave a hard, painful jolt, absurdly reacting to a line delivered for his mother’s sake.
He didn’t want Hannah Goodwin, he reminded himself fiercely. Hadn’t he done everything in his power to push her away all those years ago, convinced she’d be better off without him?
He had made his choices. He lived with them.
“When are you getting married?” Susie asked happily. “I have a beautiful dress.”
Hannah’s eyes flicked to his, startled, uncertain.
“We don’t know yet, Mom,” Wes said smoothly, stepping in with the ease of long practice. “We haven’t decided. Hey, Ellen told me you worked on a craft today. You made a snowman, right? I’d love to see it.”
Just like that, her attention shifted. “Oh, yes. He has a hat,” she said, already turning toward the bulletin board. “Come see. He’s very handsome.”
They spent a few more minutes admiring cotton-ball snowmen and listening to his mother talk about the hydroponic lettuce she apparently loved, then Hannah checked the time again.
“I really do need to go take my supplies back to my car and then pick up the children,” she said gently. “Thank you so much for showing me your room, Susie.”
Hannah slipped her hand from Susie’s arm with a final squeeze and moved toward the door. Wes bent to hug his mother, promising to come back soon.
Outside the room, the hallway felt oddly quiet. Hannah waited a few steps down the hall, her music cart already pointed toward the exit.
“Sorry about that,” Wes said, pulling the door gently closed behind him as he and Kodi walked out. “I should have realized my mother would confuse the past and the present if she saw us together again.”
For a heartbeat, something unguarded flickered in Hannah’s eyes. Pain, maybe, or wistfulness. Then she smoothed it away.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Really. It was actually nice to have a conversation with her, even if she was a bit mixed up about our, um, current relationship.”
Her lips curved faintly. “She was more engaged than I’ve seen her in a long time.”
“That’s good.” He shoved one hand into his pocket while the other tightened on Kodiak’s leash.
“Do her doctors give you any hope that anything will change in her condition?” she asked after a moment.
“After all these years,” he said, keeping his voice level, “they don’t think much will change. Not in a big way. She might make small improvements here and there, but what you see is what you get now.”
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said softly. “She’s happy, though, isn’t she? That has to mean something.”
“It means the world. She doesn’t understand everything that’s happened to her.” He shrugged. “But sometimes not understanding the world around her isn’t such a bad thing.”
She studied his face, and whatever she saw there seemed to move her. To his surprise, she rested a hand lightly on his forearm.
