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She stopped, her shoulders sagging. “Were you in my house?”
“No. I brought some coffee with me.”
She looked at Chase, and she suddenly felt tired. And he looked strong. Tall and broad shouldered, with pale blue eyes and blond hair. When she’d first gotten to know him, at thirteen, he’d been cute, and then he’d transitioned into a boyish handsomeness, his looks appealing to large swaths of Pear Blossom’s female population.
It had been truly irritating to be around. But in Mac’s eyes Chase could do no wrong. His foster brotherknew about the world. And had all the women he could possibly want—not that Mac wanted that. He was perfectly happy with her! He always hurried to say—in an endless source of streetwise confidence.
He was that bad boy most girls couldn’t get enough of and all Lydia had wanted was safe. When Lydia was twelve, Caitlin Groves had disappeared. Presumably killed by her boyfriend. And then she’d found a baby on a bridge when she was thirteen, and that had only confirmed to her that the world had seemed vast and scary.
Bad boys were the last thing she could imagine wanting.
And yet, she seemed to be stuck with one.
And now there were lines around those eyes and grooves around his mouth, representative of the years that had passed and all they had cost him. His face holding ghosts of emotions that had come before, and now a permanent sort of grimness that had come about with Mac’s death.
She directed her focus past his shoulder, at the mountains beyond that had the audacity to look the same.
“Yeah, I’ll take some coffee.”
He took out his thermos, unscrewed the lid and poured a bit of coffee into it. He took a step toward her when she didn’t move toward him, handing it to her.
She sighed and leaned back against the passenger side of her car, and he mirrored her stance, leaning against the side of his truck.
“It’s been six months,” he said. “Do you think you’re ever going to accept that I’m helping you here?”
“It’s been six months,” she countered. “Do you think you’re ever going to accept that I’m not comfortable with it?”
“Why?”
She didn’t have words for that. Rather, it was a whole cascade of feeling. Bound up in her own secrets, her feelings about Mac and her feelings about Chase.
The resentment that she had felt early on at Mac’s closeness with him and the strange sort of resentment that she had decided was because it seemed like Mac could be more open with Chase than he ever was with her. And in the years that she was married, she had come to realize that Chase wasn’t the issue at all. But she had never really shaken the resentment of him.
Maybe because the promise of Mac seemed to be what Chase had gotten, and she hadn’t felt like that was the case for her. And that lie, the lie of who she and Mac had been, the lie of what had been between them and how she grieved... It stood as a pillar between her and her entire family. And it was even worse with Chase, because she didn’t care about him. But he cared about Mac, and she...
Well, it didn’t bear thinking about. But that was the problem—when he was around, she thought about it. She thought about it obsessively and endlessly.
“Because I’m not.” She cleared her throat. “I was unaware that as a grieving widow I needed to give a dissertation on my feelings.”
“I loved him too,” Chase said.
She tightened her arms around herself. “I know you did.”
“He was like a brother to me. I might have been back and forth between my house and theirs, but his mother is more a mother to me than my own has ever been...”
“You don’t know what bothers me, Chase,” she said.
Because how could she ever say. How could she ever say that she had been on the verge of asking for a divorce when he was diagnosed with ALS. How could she ever untangle the impossibility of all that grief? Of the role she was stuck playing. And that she didgenuinelygrieve him as the father of her children. A man who had died too young.
As the man she hadwantedto love.
But she just hadn’t. Not anymore. Not like that.
But you couldn’t be the woman who left a dying man.
At least,shecouldn’t have done it.
Because shehadloved him, loved his family, and hers loved him. Because she hadmarriedhim. Because she had vowed she would be there in sickness, and they’d had years of health before, so didn’t she have to do that part?
