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Why hadn’t she deleted his number? He didn’t add anything to her life except stress. She didn’t want him in her life.
“Perhaps you’re right.” Martha paused in the doorway of the diner. She could see the back of Josh’s head in a booth by the window.
“Go.” Kathleen patted her arm. “You, Martha, are smarter than you think you are.” She headed to the restrooms while Martha joined Josh at the booth.
He passed the menu across to her.
“Thanks.” She took it and then put it down again. If she was going to do this, then she had to do it right away before Kathleen joined them. “I know I upset you in some way, and I’m sorry. If you’d like to talk about it, then I’d like to listen.” She stopped as the waitress arrived with coffee and iced waters. “You’re not crossing Route 66 for the fun of it, are you?” Presumably he could take a private jet if he wanted to. Or hire his own chauffeur. There had to be a reason that someone like him would want to hitchhike.
Josh picked up his glass of water. Condensation misted the side of the glass. “I was supposed to do this trip with my brother.”
It was the first personal thing he’d told her. “And he couldn’t make it?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh Josh—” She reached out and covered his hand with hers. She remembered how she’d felt when her grandmother had died. How empty, and alone. She felt him tense and waited for him to pull away from her, but after a pause his fingers closed over hers.
“It’s been—hard. The toughest time of my life.”
When her grandmother died many people had said clumsy things. Some hadn’t been in contact at all because they hadn’t known what to say, and that had been bad too. All of it had added to her sense of isolation.
She knew it was important to say something, but she also knew that the words she chose mattered.
“Grief is a horrible, cruel thing. People talk about going through stages, but honestly it wasn’t like that for me. I think of it like being on the ocean. One moment things are calm and you start to relax, and you feel almost confident and think ‘I’ve got this’, and then the next minute you’re swamped by a wave and you’re gasping for air and drowning.”
“You’ve lost someone close to you?”
“My Nanna. It’s different, I know, because she’d lived a full life, but she was the person I loved most in the world. She understood me. When she died it was as if I’d lost a layer of protection. I felt raw. My whole world changed shape. Losing her was the biggest thing I’ve had to handle—worse than my divorce to be honest—and she wasn’t there to help me through it.”
“But you coped.”
Martha stared down at their hands, still locked together. “Not really. Not in a way that makes me proud. I was lonely, vulnerable, desperate to connect with someone and feel close and understood, the way I had been with Nanna. When Steven suggested marriage, I said yes. I thought it would fix everything. It didn’t. It made everything worse. Feeling lonely inside a marriage is a thousand times worse than feeling lonely outside. The whole thing was a mistake really. I guess he thought so too.”
Why had she been so hard on herself? She’d been beating herself up about making bad decisions, but when she laid the facts out like that her decisions made more sense.
He nodded. “Your grandmother sounds like a special person.”
“She really was.” She paused. “Had you been planning this trip with your brother for a long time?”
He put the glass down. “He’d been threatening me with it for two years, but I was always too busy.”
“Threatening?”
He gave a faint smile. “Red and I were very—different.”
“Red?”
“His name was Lance, but everyone called him Red because if there was danger to be found, that’s where you’d
find my brother. I was the serious one. Tech addicted, focused, driven. He was a laid-back cool surfer dude. He loved water. I hate water. When we were teenagers, I built a surfing game that I could play from my bedroom so that we could connect—it was our joke. That I managed to find a way to surf on dry land, while he was out there doing the real thing.” He stared into the glass of water. “I used to ask him when he was going to do something serious with his life, and he always told me that serious was overrated and that looking at me made him realize he’d made all the right choices. He thought my life was insane. I felt the same way about his. Despite that, we were close. That probably sounds unlikely to you.”
“No. One life does not fit all, a bit like clothes. Just because you’re wearing something I wouldn’t wear, doesn’t mean I don’t think you look good.”
He smiled. “That’s an interesting way of looking at it.”
Why hadn’t it occurred to her before? Just because her decisions seemed bad to her family, didn’t mean they were bad. For some reason she didn’t understand she was programmed to believe her family were right in all things.
She forced her attention back to Josh. “Is that why you’re hitchhiking? You’re wearing his clothes? Doing it his way?”
