“So she’s said, again and again. I’ve had to bite my tongue raw to keep from telling her how short-sighted and immature she’s being.”
“Maybe you should call her on it, if that’s how you really feel,” he suggested. “But I take it you didn’t do that.”
She shook her head, the slump of her shoulders revealing just how hurt she’d been by the whole conversation.
“I couldn’t get my brain to kick into gear after she hit with me with that,” Hannah admitted. “It didn’t matter, anyway, because she took off as soon as she said it.”
“Where’d she go? Timbuktu?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why didn’t you follow her? Straighten things out? I assume she had it all wrong.”
“This from a man who slipped away to avoid talking to me directly about something that concerns me,” she commented wryly.
“Guilty as charged,” he agreed. “But why didn’t you go after Kelsey? You’re not a coward, Hannah. Everything about you tells me you confront most things head-on.”
“I certainly used to,” she said. “Lately, I seem to be quite comfortable sticking my head in the sand. Besides, I didn’t know where to start.”
“The beginning’s always a good place. You weren’t pregnant when you married her dad, were you?”
“Of course not,” she said, indignation putting a blush on her cheeks.
“Then you must have married him because you thought you loved him.”
She nodded.
“Well, it seems to me that even when things don’t work out, sometimes the beginning is as simple as that,” Luke said. “Two people love each other. Marriage is a huge leap of faith based on hope as much as love. In reality, though, it doesn’t mean they have the fortitude or the passion to make it work over the long haul, not with all the crises likely to crop up along the way. There are probably thousands of things—big and small—that can trip up a marriage and make it fail.”
She turned toward him, her expression curious. “Is that what happened to your marriage? It couldn’t withstand the separation of you going to Iraq? Or did you go to Iraq because there were already problems?”
For a moment, Luke was taken aback by her insight. As much as he hated admitting it, there had been problems. Maybe they hadn’t pushed him toward the decision to reenlist, but they’d been there, lurking just below the surface of the mostly separate lives he and Lisa had begun to lead because of the demands of his work and her social nature. He considered not answering Hannah’s questions, partly because it was so much more complicated than that and partly because he didn’t especially want to reveal just how badly he’d been betrayed. Maybe he wasn’t even ready to face the self-examination of his own role in what had happened.
“Did I touch a raw nerve?” Hannah asked, not sounding especially contrite about it if she had.
“Yes,” he said honestly. “And we were talking about your marriage, not mine.”
Her gaze locked with his. “Maybe we should be talking about yours. You’ve been awfully evasive when it comes to discussing anything the least bit personal. If Gran hadn’t told me you’re a surgeon, I wouldn’t even know that much. Why is that, Luke?”
“I thought we were trying to figure out some way for you to make things right with your daughter,” he said testily. “That’s the more immediate problem.”
“True, but maybe what I really need right now is for you to tell me why it was so easy for my grandmother to warn you off of spending time with me. Are you still married, Luke? Is that it?”
He was dismayed that she even felt the need to ask. “No,” he said at once. “The divorce is final.”
“But you’re not really over it? Are you hoping to win her back?”
“Absolutely not,” he said fiercely. “But I do have two kids and I haven’t figured out how to make all this work for them. I’m so angry I can’t even imagine being in the same town with my ex-wife, much less in the same room.”
“Anger implies that the feelings still run pretty deep.”
Luke considered the comment. She was right. His feelings did run deep, just not the way she meant. At least he didn’t think it was because he still loved Lisa. He was pretty sure anything he’d ever felt for her died the day she’d told him about her relationship with Brad.
“Okay, here’s the condensed version,” he said, avoiding her gaze. He stood up and began to pace, agitated just thinking about how his life had unraveled. “I decided to reenlist without talking it over with my wife. I suspect my motives were less clear-cut than I pretended they were. Our marriage was in trouble. I just didn’t want to see it. I guess I thought a break would help and I did think I had a duty to do whatever I could in Iraq.”
Hannah gave him a knowing look. “You ran away. I’m sensing a pattern here, Luke.”
“Do you want to hear this or not?” he said, annoyed that she’d called him on his cowardice.
“Please,” she said.
“Lisa was furious, which she apparently thought justified her having an affair with my business partner, Brad, and then asking for a divorce just two weeks before I was due to come home to my loving family. The request came in an e-mail.” He clenched his fists, because just the memory of that made him want to break things. “She didn’t even have the guts to try to reach me by phone or to wait a couple of weeks until we were face-to-face. She just laid it all out in an e-mail, how they’d fallen in love while I was gone and wanted to get married.”
Hannah stared at him, her eyes filled with dismay. “Oh, Luke, I’m so sorry. How could she have done such a thing? Not just betraying you, but telling you like that?”
“I guess she thought it would be easier for me to come home without any expectations of picking up where we’d left off,” he said, trying for once to see it from Lisa’s perspective. He hated to think that she’d intentionally gone out of her way to add to the pain she knew she’d be causing him.
“How considerate of her,” Hannah said sarcastically.
Luke liked the fact that she was immediately on his side. It felt good to know that someone was. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he replied. “Instead of being prepared, though, my anger consumed every waking minute. I think that’s why I ended up wounded. I wasn’t paying attention when I went outside the gates of the compound to treat soldiers who’d just been wounded by a car bomb. I didn’t see the person sneaking into the middle of the chaos, didn’t suspect a thing before he detonated another car bomb not fifteen feet away from where I was working on someone, trying to get him stabilized enough to take him inside. So, I suppose I blame Lisa and Brad for that, too. If I could lay blame for global warming on them, I’d probably do that as well.”
Hannah’s cheeks were damp with tears. She reached for his hand. “I am so, so sorry. No wonder you’re angry.”
“When I can see past that anger, I can manage to count my blessings,” he said. “For one thing, I’m lucky to be alive. And my leg’s doing better than I had any right to expect when they first took me in. I think that was the worst part of all. I knew just how bad my injuries were. I knew it would take a miracle to save the leg. Ironically, I was the surgeon whose job it would normally have been to try. Thankfully one of the other docs had been working with me on some of the more complicated cases. He did just fine on his own. I owe him. Otherwise…” Luke couldn’t even express what might have happened.
He waved off her sympathy before she could express it. “Hey, I’m here now. I’m almost back to a hundred percent. I have a lot to be thankful for.”
“Have you seen your kids since you came home?” she asked.
“Lisa brought them up to D.C. while I was in rehab. We got to spend a couple of days together. It was awkward as hell, though. I couldn’t really get around yet, so we couldn’t go out and do stuff. Kids that age need to be active. They were just seven and nine the last time I saw them, but they’ve both had birthdays since then. Lisa offered to bring them back, but I told her not
to. They don’t need to be cooped up in some hospital room, especially when there’s so much tension between their parents.”
“But they do need to spend time with you,” Hannah protested.
“We had e-mails and phone calls, at least for a while. The past couple of weeks I haven’t been in touch. Lisa said they were getting too upset.”
“Which meant she didn’t want to keep having to explain things to them,” Hannah said dryly.
“More than likely,” Luke agreed. “They’re too young to fully appreciate the whole situation. Meantime, back home, they’ve had to adjust to this new guy being around all the time, the man formerly known as Uncle Brad, though he’s now acting as a surrogate dad. They don’t know what to make of that, either. They’re totally mixed up about where their loyalties should lie. They’ve always liked Brad, but now their dad is gone because of him.”
He regarded Hannah with regret. “I get that they need my permission to be happy with the way things are now, but I’m sorry, I’m just not quite ready to forgive and forget.” When she was about to speak, he held up a hand. “I know that I need to for their sakes, and I will. Just not today. Or even tomorrow.”
“What a mess!” Hannah said. “I know marriages are complex and that there are two sides to everything, but this just seems flat-out wrong to me.”
“Me, too,” he said. “But I’ve stopped trying to analyze why it happened. I had a few minutes alone with Lisa when they came up to D.C., so I could have asked her, but I didn’t. It was too obvious that it was over for her, that she couldn’t wait to move on. Since it’s too late to change anything, I need to figure out how to pick up the pieces and move on myself.”
“I’ll tell you what I told Kelsey earlier,” Hannah said. “This may not be the best place for you to do that. She needs to be with Jeff, working things out. You need to be where your kids are. That’s where the answers are.”
“And I will be with them, eventually,” he said. “However that works out.”
“Meaning?”
He shrugged. “I wish I knew. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, Hannah. I don’t know what I’m going to do or where I’m going to live, much less how to go about building a whole new relationship with my son and daughter.”
“You didn’t give your wife full custody, did you?” she demanded. “Please tell me you didn’t do that. I asked for and won that from my husband, but now I see that it wasn’t in Kelsey’s best interests, any more than it had been when my mother got full custody of me after my dad left. If Kelsey’s dad had been in her life more regularly, if I’d helped to facilitate that, maybe she wouldn’t have such a skewed view of marriage and divorce. Ironic, isn’t it? I knew what having my dad cut out of my life felt like, but I turned right around and did it to my own child. Now Kelsey’s about to repeat the pattern by skipping the marriage altogether.”
Luke gave her a penetrating look. “Hannah, we all do what we think is right at the time. You can’t second-guess yourself now.”
“Oh? The way you’re second-guessing your choices?”
He sighed. “Exactly. But I did insist on sharing custody of the kids. I’ll have liberal amounts of time with them once I get my life in order. And before you say it, I do know that needs to be sooner, rather than later.”
“Good, because kids need to know they’re loved. And they need to hear it and feel it day in and day out. It doesn’t take much to shake their faith in that. Look at Kelsey. She was so affected by her father’s abandonment that she can’t envision holding a family of her own together. She doesn’t even want to try. I guess we never see how the decisions we make as parents can reverberate years down the road.”
“Which is exactly why I need to be careful with you. I don’t want you to get caught up in my drama.”
She gave him a wry look. “Isn’t it ironic, then, that you’re already caught up in mine?”
“Not the same,” he insisted. “I have no idea where I’ll be a month from now, Hannah. You already know you’re going back to New York. You have a plan.”
She laughed, though there was a nervous edginess to the sound. “I had a plan. It didn’t anticipate my grandmother being stubborn, my daughter being pregnant or the two of them siding against me.”
Beside her Luke smiled wryly at the frustration in her voice. “What’s that old saying? Life is what happens while you’re busy making plans?”
She nodded.
“So, welcome to life,” he said wryly, then noted, “Sometimes it sucks.”
“Amen to that.”
Kelsey drew in a deep, satisfying breath as she came outside with her cup of herbal tea. The morning was cool with a breeze from the north and blue skies were filled with faint puffs of clouds. It was perfect for working outdoors.
Setting the cup on a wicker table, she gathered all the supplies she’d need to fill the hanging baskets—potting soil, flats of flowers, a trowel and her watering can—then went to work, humming happily. She felt almost carefree.
When she heard her cell phone ringing, she ignored it. For one thing, her hands were filthy. For another, she knew instinctively it was Jeff. He’d been calling every morning at the same time—10:00 a.m. here, 7:00 a.m. in California. It was the second day in a row she’d ignored his call. She knew she couldn’t do it forever, but she was trying to buy herself a little time to gather the courage to tell him she wasn’t coming back to Stanford.
Unfortunately her mom walked out the door while the phone was still ringing.
“Want me to get that?” she asked.
Kelsey shook her head. “He’ll call back.”
“Then you know it’s Jeff?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t want to speak to him because he’s not going to like what you have to say.”
Kelsey nodded.
“Come on, kiddo. You know it’s not fair to leave him hanging,” her mom said quietly.
“I’m not going to leave him hanging forever,” Kelsey said defensively. “I just need a little more time.”
“For what? You told me you’d made your decisions about the baby and about staying here.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s not going to fight me,” she said, resigned to the arguments that lay ahead, just not ready to face them.
The phone finally stopped ringing and Kelsey breathed a sigh of relief. Once Jeff left for class, his day would be so busy, he wouldn’t try again before nightfall.
“Sweetie, what are you really afraid of?” Hannah asked, starting on another planter, tucking in greenery and a few of the flowering vines. “If you’re as certain of how you want to handle things as you say, then what makes you think Jeff can sway your decision?”
“He’s pretty persuasive,” she replied. “And I hate that I’m making him so unhappy, so yeah, I’m scared he’ll change my mind.”
“Okay, I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. If he can do that, then maybe getting married is what you really want, after all.”
“No,” Kelsey said adamantly. “This is what I want. I want to stay right here and have the baby here, then give it up for adoption.”
“Do you intend to admit to the social worker that you know who the father is?”
She stared at her mother blankly. “What do you mean?”
“They’re going to want to know who the father is.”
“Why?”
“Because he needs to relinquish his parental rights, too. Otherwise, he could have grounds later to challenge the adoption. Will Jeff do that? Will he challenge it?”
The plant Kelsey was holding slid from her fingers. “No,” she said, then sighed at the lie. “Yes. He says he will.”
“If you know that, then why are you trying to go forward with an adoption?” Hannah fell silent, her expression perplexed at first, then dismayed as she seemed to grasp what was going on in Kelsey’s head. “Please don’t tell me you were hoping that you could give the baby up for adoption here and no one would even try t
o contact Jeff. Is that the reason you want to stay here?”
Kelsey hesitated, then sighed again. “Okay, yes, that’s exactly what I was hoping.” She hated how it sounded when her mom said it. It made her sound deceitful and sneaky, when what she really wanted was to do the right thing for her baby. “It’s not why I wanted to stay here, but it is what I planned to do.”
Hannah regarded her with disappointment. “Sweetie, you know that’s wrong. Jeff could easily figure out where you’d had the baby and who’d handled the adoption. Can you imagine what would happen if he came here and the baby was taken away from people who’d already fallen in love with it? How is that fair to anyone?”
“It would be awful,” Kelsey acknowledged. “I guess I just never got beyond thinking that the baby would be much better off with two parents who really, really want it.”
To her surprise, Hannah’s eyes filled with tears. “Was your childhood really so awful?”
Kelsey stared at her with dismay. “Mine? No, of course not.”
“Really? Because it sounds to me as if you can’t imagine any scenario in which Jeff could give this baby a good home on his own. I can’t help thinking that’s because you think I did a lousy job, that you needed two parents to be happy.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she swore, filled with guilt. “And Jeff would be a great dad. Any child would be lucky to have him.”
Her mom studied her with a perplexed expression. “Then what’s really going on?”
Kelsey hesitated. The answer wasn’t pretty. In fact, it was downright selfish, but it was the truth. “I’m scared that if Jeff takes the baby himself, it’ll be the end of us,” she said slowly, waiting for her mom to regard her with total disgust. Instead, Hannah merely waited, giving Kelsey time to say it all.
“How can we still be together if he’s raising our child and I’m just this person who hangs out with them?” she continued. “That would be totally weird for everyone.”
“So, if you give him the baby, you lose him, and that’s not what you want?”
Again, Kelsey didn’t like the way it sounded when her mom said it. It sounded ugly and mean and totally immature.
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