For some reason, it made him think of Jamila and his dad. Jamila and her prayers.
Of the way some people’s happiness could depend on other people’s loss.
Of the way some of those people had enough grace to acknowledge that. To honor it, even.
“How do I do this?” he said. He could feel Kerrie’s attention on him, and she probably had no idea what he was talking about, so he gestured up at her husband and daughter.
“What’s happened, Jake?”
“I accidentally fell in love, and she’s pregnant.”
Kerrie’s delighted laugh drew his attention. She stopped walking, so he did, too. Thought about what he’d just said. I accidentally fell in love.
He hadn’t articulated it that way before, even to himself. But as had been happening to him lately, he recognized the truth as it was coming out of his mouth, as he was surprising himself with it.
He loved Nora Walsh, the pixie doctor who was only staying in town for two years. He loved her zombies and her thoughtful questions and the clear-eyed, unflinching way she looked at the world. He loved the hair on her head and the brain inside it. He loved how much she loved the lake and his cove.
He loved her stupid, tiny dog named after the wrong band.
“Congratulations,” Kerrie said. “That’s wonderful.”
“It doesn’t feel wonderful.”
“What does it feel like?”
“It feels like I’m betraying him.”
“I know,” she said.
He was startled by her easy agreement.
She went on. “Like, how can you just carry on and be happy when he’s dead—right?”
He sucked in a breath. That was it. That was exactly it. “It’s the same with you?”
“I used to feel that way, but not anymore.” When he didn’t say anything—he wasn’t sure what to say—she kept talking. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you really need to talk to someone. That grief counselor I told you about or someone like her. I know when you’re in it, it feels like the biggest, most unique thing that’s ever happened to anyone. But what you’re feeling is textbook. And there are things you can do, simple things, to help. You don’t have to feel that way anymore.”
“But what if I don’t want to stop feeling it?” What if he didn’t want to give up the waves?
“Ah.” They had reached the playground. Sienna was laughing as Cody pushed her in a swing. Her delighted baby laughter was making her dad laugh, too. Kerrie led him to a bench on the far side of the play structure. “That’s a problem, then, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“Let me ask you a question. Do you think I don’t deserve to be happy? That I don’t deserve this?” She gestured at her family.
“Of course not.” He bristled at the suggestion. What kind of monster did she think he was?
“So why is it any different with you?”
Because I let him die.
She knew his thoughts. She knew him. “He died, Jake. Kids die. It fucking sucks, but it’s a thing that happens. It wasn’t your fault.”
How many times had he heard that phrase in the years since Jude died? It was a refrain in his life. Background noise.
She grabbed his upper arms. He let her turn him so they were looking into each other’s eyes. “You were the best dad. You were a better parent than I was.” He tried to interrupt, to protest that he wasn’t better, just different, but she kept talking over him. “Jude was lucky to have you. It wasn’t your fault.”
He wanted to argue with her, but she was in what he used to think of as lawyer mode. You couldn’t win an argument with Kerrie when she was in lawyer mode.
“You’ve been a dad without a kid for a lot of years, Jake. Your girlfriend, or whoever she is, is going to have a baby. Do you want that baby to be a kid without a dad because you’re too stubborn to get over yourself?”
No. Oh God, no. He couldn’t breathe at the image her words conjured. A kid without a dad.
“Do you want that kid to have a stoic, silent dad who’s too lost in his own guilt to do right by him, or do you want that kid to have a dad who’s happy, who loves him and loves his mom? Who shows him what love is like?”
She was right. She was right. It sounded so simple when she said it like that.
He forced air into his lungs. It hurt like hell. It sounded like hell, like the dying gasp of a broken man, but it wasn’t a dying gasp. It was the first breath of a new era.
He remembered, suddenly, Jude’s first breath. He’d come out into Jake’s arms—the doctor had positioned Jake to catch him—and had been utterly silent. They’d all paused for a moment, waiting for him to cry. It had seemed like an eternity, that liminal space between birth and breath. He’d looked at his tiny, slimy son, and thought, Breathe.
And then Jude had breathed.
Everyone else probably just heard the crying that came with the exhalation, but Jake was paying such close attention that he heard the inhalation before the exhalation.
His son’s first breath.
He was there for his son’s last breath, too.
Kerrie delivered her closing argument. “I know you have this twisted notion that by moving on, you’re dishonoring Jude’s memory, but I personally can’t think of a better way to honor Jude than to love his little brother or sister.”
He was at the top of his first breath, and like with Jude, what came out on the exhale was a sob.
His phone blew up on the drive home. He wasn’t the sort of idiot who messed with texting while driving, so he didn’t look at it until he stopped for gas on the Bluewater Highway before turning into town. He had a bunch of texts from Sawyer. He scrolled back to the first one. It’s Sawyer. I heard you got a phone, you asshole. Call me. Or come to the station. I need to talk to you.
He wondered who had spilled the beans about the phone. Clara had kept his phone secret for so long. Nora? Why shouldn’t she have, after the way he’d treated her when she’d told him she was pregnant? She needed someone to help her, and the way he’d acted had given her no indication that it was going to be him.
He kept reading. I’m home now. Come here. We’re starting a new canoe.
Yep, Nora had told him. Probably everything. Or someone had. He still hated the idea of everyone in town talking about him, knowing his business, but it really couldn’t be helped, could it?
There were two more texts, one from half an hour ago. I went to your house and let your damn dog out. Where the hell are you? And the last from a couple minutes ago. Listen, I know about you and Nora. She told Eve months ago, and today Eve told me. Get the hell over here.
He got the hell over there. Cheerfully, even. Well, okay, not cheerfully. But determinedly. Aside from the past couple of months, when he’d had his head in his ass about “cooling things off,” he was a man of action. That was what Nora said she liked about him. So he needed to make a plan. And he needed to show her that plan, not tell her about it. And for that, he was going to need help.
When he got to Sawyer’s, Law’s truck was parked out front. Good. He went around back to the garage.
There was no canoe. There were just his friends, sitting in Sawyer’s backyard.
“Lured me here under false pretenses, I see.” He lowered himself into a lawn chair. “Is it time for another intervention?”
“It sure as hell is,” Sawyer said. “Let’s see. You and Nora. You like her. That’s what you told us. You have shared values. I see you guys cracking up over inside jokes. You seem to have joint custody of her dog. And you’re sleeping together.”
“But it’s not serious,” Law said mockingly. “You’re not dating.”
“Right.” Sawyer nodded sagely. “But oh, wait, you’re helping her with her vaccine crusade, too. And making decks and shit for her. But I guess all that still doesn’t add up to ‘serious.’”
“You know what is serious, though?” Law asked. The two of them seemed to be performing a conversation, which was probably fair giv
en that Jake usually didn’t have much to say in these types of situations. They were saying his lines for him—or at least what they thought his lines would be. In another circumstance, it might have been funny.
“The fact that she’s pregnant with your baby,” Sawyer said, outright sneering at Jake. “That is pretty fucking serious. And what did you tell her when she told you?”
“He told her it was the last thing he wanted,” Law said before Jake could answer.
He had to wince at that. He had said that. He was such an idiot.
“That,” Sawyer said, “is incorrect. It was the first thing you wanted. And you had it. But you lost it.”
Okay, enough. “What does that mean?”
“It means you had some shitty luck, mate, that’s all. But this thing with Nora, and a baby, is what you want. It’s exactly what you want. Maybe you’re too chickenshit to reach out and take it, and that’s one thing, but don’t pretend it isn’t a second chance at exactly what you want.”
“You’re right. It is what I want.”
“And you know what—” Sawyer was still on autopilot when Jake’s answer caught up to him. “Wait. What?”
“It is what I want. The baby. Nora. Nora, mostly.”
Both men gaped at him. He couldn’t help but smile. It felt strange on his lips, after the storms of the past twenty-four hours. Strange, but good. “I want Nora and the baby. I want us to be a family. But I need help.”
It was so easy to say in the end. So astonishingly easy. So he said it again. “I need help. I need help fast. I need to get a couple things done before I talk to her, and I don’t want to leave her hanging any longer than necessary.”
“Anything,” Law said. “Name it.”
“Well, first, I need to find a grief counselor. Or someone in that vein. I saw Kerrie today, and she recommended someone, but she’s in Guelph. I’ll go there if I have to, but there must be someone closer. I googled and most sources said to ask your family doctor for a referral. But…” He shrugged. Allowed himself to crack another smile and was gratified when his friends did the same. “I’m not sure that’s the best course of action in my particular case. I’m going to tell her about it, of course, but I need to take responsibility for this, to get this underway on my own.”
“Amber will know,” Sawyer said. “I’ll ask Amber. What else?”
“I need someone to drive to Guelph to pick up something from Kerrie’s house.” Assuming she said yes. He would text her as soon as they were done here. He was pretty sure she would agree.
“I’ll do it,” Law said, and Jake was glad they hadn’t asked any questions. He pulled out his phone. “I’ll find someone to cover the bar and go tonight.”
Jake thought back to when Nora had first come to the cove. She’d told him he was lucky to live in such a place, and he’d agreed. He’d felt lucky at that moment, that he had the cove and that she was there with him. It had been a strange sensation, something he hadn’t felt for a long time.
He felt it again. He was lucky to have these guys in his life.
“Okay,” Sawyer said. “That’s covered. What else?”
“I need some help with the cottage.”
“I have something to tell you.”
The sisters spoke in unison, then both shouted, “Jinx!”
Nora laughed. “You go first.” She would take any reprieve, even a momentary one, from having to deliver her dreaded news. Just because she’d decided to stay in Moonflower Bay didn’t mean she wasn’t full of mixed feelings. She’d decided to take a path that would close off another path. It was a sad thing. It was going to upset Erin.
“Dad found Grandma’s will.”
“Oh, good.” There had been some confusion over the will. While Grandma was in the hospital and starting to fade, she had started insisting that she’d recently updated her will and that they needed to be sure they were using the new one. But then no one had been able to find it.
“It was in her breadbox with that pastry knife thing your friend there gave her.”
“Pearl?” Nora chuckled. “And what does it say? Any surprises?”
“She left me her condo. Just me.”
“Oh. Okay.” Nora didn’t know what Grandma had been planning to do with her condo to begin with. If she’d thought about it, she would have guessed it would have gone to her dad.
“There was a note about you and Alex not needing it.” Their older brother Alex was a successful—and wealthy—anesthesiologist with a lawyer wife and no kids. “Which is strange, because she knew about our plan to buy a place together. So anyway, it’s weird, but we’ll just sell it and put the money into our shared pot. I talked to Alex, and he doesn’t care.” She snorted. “Alex, okay, but I can’t imagine what Grandma was thinking saying you didn’t need any money.”
Nora laughed. She could. She could also imagine her grandma fitting right in with the meddling matchmakers of Moonflower Bay. Hell, for all she knew, she’d consulted Pearl. Maybe that was why the will had been in the breadbox.
“I had an agent out for an appraisal, and she thinks we can get six hundred grand for it. So that’s it. Our fairy godmother has delivered. I know part of your whole ‘Nora moves to small-town Canada’ plan was emotional, or a time-out or whatever, but just be done with that part, okay? We’ve got our down payment, so just come home.”
Oh boy. Nora sucked in a breath.
“What?” Erin said.
“I, ah, have a couple things to tell you.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Nora was feeling better—but she also wasn’t feeling better. The first-trimester morning sickness was gone, and she felt good physically. But getting through the rest of the week after she’d told Jake had been hard.
But she had done it. She’d seen all her patients. Jacques was really getting the hang of things. They’d had calls from some schools in the region asking about flu clinics for next season.
She had also met with a real estate agent and was about to make an offer on a cute little place near Art and Jamila’s house. Eve had assured her she could stay at the Mermaid indefinitely, but Nora wanted to get her own place established before the baby was born in October.
Things were okay with Erin, too. She had been shocked by Nora’s news, but she’d recovered quickly, and was currently at work trying to convince Nora that they should still buy a place together—but that it should be a cottage on the lake so the cousins could still grow up together on weekends and in the summer. Nora had told her she needed to get her main housing sorted out before she could worry about a second place, but Erin had resumed her habit of sending real estate listings. They were all sweet little lake cottages in and around Moonflower Bay. None of them were as sweet as Jake’s place, though.
Erin was like a dog with a bone over the Jake question, but she’d finally let it go when Nora had sketched out the details of their last conversation. Now she probably had a Jake voodoo doll to go with her Rufus voodoo doll. Her mom was planning to take a short leave from work to come and stay for a few weeks after the baby was born.
And the baby. Her baby. She was having a baby!
She had a midwife in Grand View, and everything was looking good. She had an appointment for her twenty-week ultrasound and was trying to decide if she wanted to find out the gender at that point or if she wanted to be surprised.
It was all good. Mostly.
It was also…a lot. Thankfully, she had Eve and Maya by her side every step of the way. One of them was in the waiting room of the clinic at the end of every day—sometimes both of them. They’d have dinner for her, or they’d pick up pizza from the bar. She’d already told them to tell Sawyer and Law the news and had also decided that since she was starting to show, it was time to let the cat out of the bag more widely. So she stopped trying to hide the bump. In fact, she did the reverse: she wore formfitting clothing on purpose because she was anxious to get the big reveal over with.
The weird thing was that though it was clear everyone
knew, no one said anything. When she went into the hardware store one morning for a light bulb, the old-timers stopped talking immediately—they had been yammering about something to do with human assembly lines? There was a weird, uncomfortable pause while they looked alternately at her belly and at each other. Then they started talking a mile a minute about stupid stuff, clearly overcompensating. She would have expected them to be over the moon about her news. She was staying. There was nothing like a kid to tie a girl down.
But no one said a word.
The other person who hadn’t said a word? Jake. It wasn’t like she’d expected a dramatic change of heart. She knew he was shocked and upset, and she respected that. But she kind of thought he would eventually be in touch to let her know what kind of involvement, if any, he wanted. But she hadn’t seen him or heard from him in the few days that had passed since she’d dropped her bomb on him, not even in passing. She hadn’t seen her dog.
Was Mick even her dog anymore?
She was heartbroken, was what it came down to. She was feeling better physically and accomplishing a lot, but she was heartbroken.
Still, as she had learned from Rufus, the way to deal with heartbreak was to keep going. To make a plan and execute it. And given that it was Friday night and she was locking the door to the clinic, right now her plan was to walk across the street to the bar to see her friends—strangely, neither Eve nor Maya had shown up in her waiting room today. But they were probably already at Law’s and assuming she’d meet them there. Maybe Jake would be there. Maybe it would be awkward. Maybe it would be excruciating. But she wasn’t going to let that deter her.
This was her town, too. She took a deep inhalation of the bracing early-spring air.
Despite her resolve, she didn’t make it inside the bar. Art and Jamila were standing outside, and judging by the looks on their faces—serious for Art, teary for Jamila—they were waiting for her.
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