AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I fork a fry or achip, since this is a British-themed restaurant, and tell him. “You need more qualifications to be a therapist, and they often work with people longer. A counselor can be a short-term deal. Like with Never Alone, I looked at the website. They’re all about helping people move on and start life fresh.”
“Yes,” Logan says, with a deep sense of pride in his voice. “We help people implement strategies that make it so….”
“So?” I prompt when he trails off.
He looks over my head, but really he’s staring into nothing or something only he can see.
I wonder if he sees Anna, his daughter, or…orRachael. Everybody knows that’s why he gallivants around town so much. People comment about it online, and it’s often mentioned in the tabloids.
He was once called a ‘heartbroken heartbreaker,’ though the description didn’t seem fair to me.
Where are all the broken hearts?
Nobody’s ever said a bad word about him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says.
“It does.”
My tone is firm, which is freaking difficult with Logan. It’s like I keep expecting him to laugh at me, to call me a faker for trying to behave confidently. But he’s not a bad person, and he seems to accept me every time I make an effort to push the conversation into new territory.
He sighs. “A counselor’s main job is to stop people from becoming the way I was after Anna.”
I wonder why he doesn’t mention Rachael. The instincts driving this need – the ones telling me to lean across the table and kiss him now – scream that it’s because he can’t mention another woman around me.
He’s incapable of doing that or eventhinkingabout doing it.
Because he only wants me.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
He stares at me darkly. His eyes have more emotion than I’ve ever seen in his photos. Suddenly calling himhauntedin those pictures seems unfair.
This is what a truly haunted Logan looks like as he pins me in place with his gaze.
“Losing a child, it’s…it’s difficult to explain. It’s like a piece of you is just gone.”
He looks down at his food, then shovels a large piece of fish into his mouth as though anything is preferable to talking. I munch on a few fries.
It’s confusing as heck to listen to the love in his voice for his daughter, to listen to the pain.
It makes me think of silly things like maybe he could have the same love for our children… or maybe not the same, since Anna will always hold a special place in his heart, but a love that is just as strong and supportive, but this time without the darkness.
Just the light. Just us.
“What was she like?” I ask.
Logan comes the closest to a real smile I’ve seen yet.
“She was an amazing little girl. She was six when she…. Anyway, she was so smart for her age, so quick. She used to love it when I held her above my head and ran around the yard with her. She even sewed this cape made from old bed sheets. She’d pretend she was a superhero….”
I blink, shocked at the tears in my eyes, as I imagine the scene…and the scene becomes the future, Logan smiling up at our child, a cape flapping in the breeze as they spin around and around together.
“You sound like you were a great dad,” I say.
He nods slowly. “I think I was. I tried to be. Lucy, when a man has a child, he has a duty, an obligation, a privilege…whatever you want to call it, or however you want to describe it….”
His hands are shaking. With a dark growling huffing breath – as though all his pain is trying to burst out, but he’s stopping it – he loudly places his fork down. It clatters against his plate.
