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She couldn’t force him to see that she hadn’t done a damn thing to ruin Jamie’s image in Erin’s eyes. His father had done that for himself. Something that Frank and Janice just couldn’t seem to understand.
Josh would either support her, help her, or he wouldn’t. It was down to him, and though before, she’d have begged him for his aid, not now. Not after she’d just revealed how big a bastard her husband and his best friend had been to her.
She wanted to explore this feeling, needed to enjoy the self-righteous satisfaction in having tarnished Jamie’s image, when it deserved more than a simple tarnish. But completely obliterating.
Chapter 4
Josh
He believed her.
Dammit, he didn’t want to. Ever since she’d made the revelation back in his office, he’d been trying to reason what she was telling him, trying to justify and to make sense of it. But there was no sense, and no justification.
The man who had been like a brother to him, had been a wife beater.
Almost five years’ worth of memories swirled through his mind. Knowing what he did now, he wondered if he’d misjudged Samantha in other things, if he’d been unfair in his treatment of her. He’d always thought she was a gold digger. Yet here he was in her new house.
It wasn’t big and brash, shiny and sparkly as he’d imagined.
Jamie had told him that he himself had hated Tribeca, but because Sam loved it, he lived there to make her happy. Jamie had also said that her love of expensive cars and expensive decorations was almost bankrupting the family and yet here they were, in a dowdy house.
The only thing he could say about it, was that it was in a decent, safe neighborhood. But that was it. It was old and worn, and in need of a hell of a lot of repair work. Most of it, well, to be kind, looked like it belonged on the set of the Goldbergs!
As far as Josh was aware, and he was no follower of interior decoration trends, the 80s were not back in fashion.
Taking a heavy seat at the kitchen table, he watched as Samantha bustled around.
She moved with a grace, and an ease, that spoke of somebody who liked being in the kitchen. Yet another lie Josh had been fed by his best friend.
Before his very eyes, Samantha seemed to have transformed herself. And it wasn’t for his benefit. Not even at his most cynical could Josh believe that.
She was humming, for crying out loud. Humming! Gently, softly, under her breath. He doubted she knew he could even hear that much.
Then, there was the fact that she was more relaxed than he’d ever seen her in his presence. Considering the reason for her visit to him, he knew she was dealing with the kind of stress he’d never be able to understand, that of a mother’s love for her child.
And yet, there was a lightness to her, an ease that had never been there before. It was like being without Jamie had taken the weight of the world off her shoulders.
Erin was different too. Almost like a different child from the one Josh had known for years. Sure, he never hung around the kid that much. Where Erin was, Samantha was always nearby, and Josh had always made it a point to avoid her. She’d always irritated him in ways he’d found hard to explain.
But the truth was, Josh had always been sensitive to the tensions in the air.
It was one of the reasons why he was so damn successful. He could read a situation really well and know which steps to take. That was damn useful in a business meeting, where he could use that talent to ascertain if the company he was in the middle of buying out, were bullshitting about how low the bottom line was.
If, for all the time he’d known her, Samantha had been on edge, was it any wonder he’d judged her, and had found her wanting every single time?
Had he misread her unease around him? Had believed it was a kind of guilt when it had actually been fear?
Terror?
Trying to acclimate to a world where Jamie wasn’t who the man Josh had always believed him to be was harder than he could ever have imagined. And though he wished he could deny it, he couldn’t. Not when the transformation in his best friend’s widow and son was so gigantic.
Jamie was dead yet his family was happy without him.
What did that say about the man?
What did that say about Josh who had believed the lies, had only seen the mask Jamie wanted him to see?
He sat there, still shell-shocked, watching as she did something with the sweet potatoes, roasting them in a contraption that made a whooshing sound when she turned it on. Then, came the patties and salad fixings. She further astonished hi
