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Taylor’s heart hurt. She reached across the space between their chairs and took his hand. “Oh, Jack.”
He sucked in a breath. “It was the first I’d met him, but Duffy spent a lot of time with me that night. I think he thought I was going to hurt myself and was afraid no one else would keep a constant eye on me. He never let me out of his sight. Not even when I went to the john.”
He gave a humorless snort.
“I don’t think I would have done anything, but I wasn’t in my head that night. I was coming down off my own high and the light that lit my world had just gone out.”
He swallowed hard.
“I didn’t know who her family was, just her name. Duffy helped track them down, but no one came for her body. No one seemed to care that she was gone. Maybe that’s why she’d left to begin with.” He sighed. “Somehow, Duffy arranged for her to be cremated or maybe it was the State of California who did that. I don’t know, just that Duffy was there and helped get her ashes for me. He saved me.”
Fighting tears, Taylor squeezed his hand. “I’m glad he was there.”
“Me, too.” Jack swiped at his eyes, swallowed hard, then exhaled. “I’m not sure what would have happened to me had he not been working that night and taken a kid under his wing.”
“You’d have found your way.”
“Maybe, but I could have just as easily have slipped off that slippery slope that had claimed Courtney. Like I said, I was using myself.”
“Instead,” she reminded him, “you became a doctor.”
“Because I became a doctor,” he clarified. “I watched Duffy and that doctor work on Courtney, trying to save her life, and I knew that’s what I had to do. I wanted to save lives, to make a difference to someone someday, the way they’d tried to make a difference for her and did make a difference for me.”
Taylor’s heart swelled at what Jack had gone through, at how something so devastating had not pulled him down but had lifted him up to become the man before her.
“You’re a good person, Jack.”
He snorted. “I’ve done some things that weren’t so good during my life.”
“Most people have.”
* * *
Jack wondered if Taylor ever had. She was a good, decent person. He couldn’t imagine her ever having done anything truly bad.
“I’m glad you stayed in touch with Duffy.”
“Stayed in touch?” Jack scoffed. “He wouldn’t leave me alone. He made me his pet project or the son he never had or whatever he likes to call it. Regardless, he has been there at every major life event since. University graduation, and then med school. And—” she’d think him crazy “—a few years ago he went with me to scatter Courtney’s ashes.”
He could tell by her face that she wondered what he’d done with them. It had taken him years to let them go, years to figure out where.
“We flew to Hawaii, hired a guide, went to the top of a volcano, and tossed her in.”
Taylor’s eyes widened. “What?”
It probably did seem crazy, but he had no regrets. Not for that.
“For years I tried to figure out where she’d want to be scattered. Almost threw her over a ledge into the Grand Canyon once, but it didn’t feel right.” He shrugged, then half smiled. “Being thrown into a volcano, that she would not only have approved of but she’d have loved it.”
At Taylor’s look of uncertainty, he took a deep breath then tried to explain.
“When a volcano blows, bits of ash are scattered through the atmosphere, even thousands of miles away. She’d be everywhere.” A peace came over him. “Free, floating above the earth, seeing everything and slowly drifting down to become a part of everything.” His voice lowered as he said, “She’d be everywhere. The volcano blew a year or so ago. She is everywhere.”
When she spoke, Taylor would probably demand he take her home. He wouldn’t blame her. No way could she have anticipated his elaborate answer when she’d asked who Courtney was.
He didn’t talk about Courtney.
Never with anyone other than Duffy on the rare occasion. That he so freely spilled out the horrid details to Taylor shook him. Why had he? He could have stopped with his girlfriend from when he’d been seventeen and left it at that. Taylor probably thought him crazy.
