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She tugged at the gold chain around her neck and pulled her gaze away from his. “I don’t know. You seem normal enough, but I could be wrong.”
“I wasn’t born with money. I worked hard for it. Istillwork hard for it and rarely have a chance to spend it on anything besides my parents.”
And bailing Kevin out of jail.
“Hell. I don’t have any hobbies beyond fishing and staring at ocean water.” He was surprised at how that note of exasperation had crept into his voice. The woman was seriously knocking him off his keel. “My ex-wife still buys half my clothes, so if you think I’m fashionable at all, you can thank her for it. I have no idea how to spend money. Tell me what to spend it on.”
“Tim…” Rubbing her eyes, Valerie let out a breath.
“I mean it.”
“Real estate and gold,” she said weakly. “I guess is what’s commonly suggested. I’m sorry. I’m not generally so sensitive, but I think as a kid, I got kind of angry about being broke all the time. My mother and my grandmother worked so hard, and…”
“I know. That’s how my parents were.Trustme, I know.”
She let the necklace fall back into place and fixed her gaze out the window behind him. “So, what are you running away from when you bring your boat out here, Tim?”
“Not really running, just claiming some room to think. You wouldn’t think you’d feel so boxed up inside a house you live in alone, but sometimes, I do.”
“I think I understand.”
“Yeah?” He rested his elbows on the table and twined his fingers together.
Her brow furrowed in that charmingly serious way he was coming to recognize as part of her “thinking” expression.
She thought a lot.
She turned her sandwich around in her hands and chewed for a while. “I think…sometimes structures become receptacles for memories. In our minds, they become attached to certain events and we just can’t untangle the places and the events from each other. And it doesn’t even have to be bad memories, necessarily, that are taking up all that space. Sometimes too many neutral ones can do the same thing.”
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
She raised one shoulder and let it fall. “I guess so. As much as I hated leaving my grandmother on her own with Leah when it was time for me to move out for college, there was a lot of relief that came when I did. It was just the three of us in that little house, and I guess the emotional baggage takes up a lot of space. You can’t see it, but it’s definitely there.”
He wanted to know more about that emotional weight—to try it on for size and see if it were anywhere near as heavy as his. He wanted to relieve her of some of it if it’d make her happy.
“Do you think there’s a way to clean out some of that clutter?” he asked.
She gave that half-shrug again. “I don’t think so. But, don’t take my word for it. I’m not a shrink. I’m just a pathetic sob story with a dead mother and an absentee father.”
“There’s nothing pathetic about you. Don’t you dare eventhinkit.”
Her eyes went wide at the tenacity in his tone, and on that one thing, he wasn’t going to try to soften it.
Self-pity wasn’t worth her time. She needed to leave that to people who didn’t have anything—or anyone—else.
“Don’t shortchange yourself, Valerie. Just because you’ve survived some things doesn’t mean those experience comprise all you are.”
“But those things shape us, don’t they? They make us decide how we want to live our lives going forward and what mistakes we don’t want to repeat. I’m very careful not to repeat other people’s mistakes.”
He leaned back against the bench. “Are you saying I was someone’s mistake?”
“No! I’m not talking about me—or—” She closed her eyes and pushed a quiet growl through clenched teeth. “The way I am doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s about me and my own high expectations. Nobody put those on me butme, but I can’t back away from them.”
“What is it that you want?”
“It doesn’t matter. I can’t have what I want, Tim.”
“Tell me anyway. Humor me.”
