Her friend’s gaze begged for understanding.
“Did you tell John how you felt?”
“No! How could I? What he did was so sweet and he was so happy knowing he was giving me what I really wanted.”
Had Kirk ever done anything like that for her? Lillie couldn’t remember.
“I just...” Caroline’s hands twisted in her lap as she started rocking back and forth. And then she glanced up. “What if something happened to John and me? Who’d care for our kids?”
Lillie knew then why Caroline was in her office. Lillie had been a junior in college when her own parents had been killed in a car accident while on a business trip in Chicago.
“I was devastated when I lost Mom and Dad,” Lillie said. “Honestly, I didn’t think I was going to make it. A year later, I was still having panic attacks. But then I was also getting ready to graduate from an elite university with a near-perfect grade point average. And eight years later, while I still miss them terribly, I get up every morning with joy in my heart. I’m living a life I love, working in a career I love, surrounded by friends I love.”
Caroline didn’t know about baby Braydon. She didn’t need to know. No one in Shelter Valley did.
Straightening her light pink scrub top, Lillie turned her chair until it was completely facing Caroline, rested her elbows on the arms and gripped the chair with both hands.
“So you think I’m not a bad mother if I take this trip with John?”
“Of course you’re not!” She put every ounce of passion she had in that answer. “Quite the opposite. You’re doing your children a huge disservice if you let fear of what might happen keep you from living. Because they’ll learn by your example....”
Her words faded off.
Had her phone just rung? She’d turned the volume up, but in her purse the sound would have been muffled.
Which mattered not at all. If Jon Swartz called, he’d leave a message. Or call back.
Or not, if he’d decided that she’d helped Abraham enough.
She hadn’t.
She thought of the boy’s solitary play, of the tantrum he’d thrown at the day care the day before when the teacher announced that it was snack time and all of the other kids hurried to their places on their washable mats. Abe had already been sitting in his spot but had burst into a screaming fit.
And now was not the time.... She purposely pushed all thoughts of Jon and Abraham Swartz away.
Caroline’s face was lined and Lillie hated to see her so stressed. Caro was the one who always found the positive in any moment. She was the embodiment of the person that Lillie Henderson strove to be.
“You know that there’s as much possibility of something bad happening to you here as there is in Italy.”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “But it’s so far away.”
“It’s natural to experience separation anxiety. The kids are going to face it, too, when you go to Italy and when it’s time for them to go away to summer camp and, later, college. Or when they get a job offer that’s too good to pass up. You want them to give in to that fear and stay home with you and John forever?”
Her friend stuck out her tongue.
“You’re five hours away from Jesse. And you don’t love or care for him any less than you do the babies.”
“I know.” Caroline shook her head, her expression unreadable.
“What?” Lillie asked, growing more concerned. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Her cell phone rang. She heard it loud and clear, blurting from inside her purse. She looked at the leather satchel under her desk. Caroline stared at it, too.
“Do you need to get that?”
“No. The doctors know I’m here. If there was a medical emergency they’d try my office phone first.”
It could be Jon. A client. Requiring privacy.
“This isn’t just about a trip to Italy, is it?”
Caroline planted her feet on the floor and leaned forward until the rocker almost tipped her out of her seat. Then she looked up. “Probably not.”
“What is it, then?”
“It’s just... I’ve never... My whole life... It hasn’t been easy, you know? We never had any money. I had to quit school. There was Daddy’s drinking....”
And his rage. Lillie filled in the blanks. Caroline had loved her adoptive father, in spite of his alcoholism.
“Then Jesse’s father...he was the jealous type and didn’t have any money, either. There was debt when he died. And then I end up pregnant by some guy I don’t even know and have to face raising a baby alone, with no money and no education and...”
Lillie knew all of this. Caroline knew she knew.
“Don’t get me wrong...I’m not complaining. Or looking for sympathy.” Caroline’s gaze was direct now as she started to rock again. “Quite the opposite. My past has made me stronger.”
“So what’s the problem?”
Tell me, Caro. You have an entire town of people here who love you. Who will wrap their arms around you and see you and your family through whatever lies ahead. Good or bad.
“I don’t know how to live with so much happiness.” The words came out in a rush. “When things were bad, I got up every morning looking forward to whatever possibility the day might bring—whatever possibility I could create to counteract the challenges. Now I get up every morning to John’s kiss and that look in his eyes. The kids greet me with squeals and smiles. My biological twin sister is attached to my hip. I feel all the love around me and I’m scared to death.”
“Of what?”
“Of losing any of it. I’m afraid to go to Italy. Afraid to take a trip up the mountain or to go to the doctor. I’m afraid that I’m going to wake up and it’ll all be gone.”
The older woman burst into sobs.
Lillie dropped to the floor at her friend’s feet, and took both of Caro’s hands.
She could feel her friend’s pain as though it were her own. Could remember waking up with that same fear shortly after she’d found out she was pregnant with Braydon.
And look what had happened.
“You’re a strong woman,” Lillie said, no longer in counselor mode, just being her. She needed Caro to succeed where she’d failed. “You need to use that strength, that courage, and enjoy all of life’s blessings without looking back.” Someone had to.
Lillie didn’t realize she had tears streaming down her own face until Caroline reached out and gently wiped them away.
“Thank you,” Caro said. “I knew I just had to talk to you.”
She hadn’t said anything. She’d blubbered.
“If it would help, I’d be happy to stay with your little ones when you go to Italy,” she said.
“I have always wanted to go to Italy.”
“I know.”
“Life is good.”
“Yep.”
But it wasn’t easy.
Papa and Gayle had been wrong when they’d said that she was too closed off—that she didn’t allow her friends into her inner sanctum.
It didn’t get much more personal than this.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JON WAS ON campus, heading toward the library after class on Friday night when Lillie called him back.
He answered immediately. Asked her how she was and told her, when she asked, that he was fine.
He’d keep things proper and businesslike, but damn, it was good to hear her voice.
Veering off the main path, he found a bench beneath a tree and sat as he took the call, watching the other students make their way to their evening activities. Even in the dark, he could see clearly due to all the streetlamps. Montford spared no expense when it came to safety.
“You said in your message that you were free tonight,” Lillie
was saying.
He’d offered to hit another item on her list, but he really wanted to talk about Abe.
“That’s right. My friends, Mark and Addy, have Abe. They usually take him one night a week.”
“All night?”
They’d offered. More than once. “No. I usually pick him up around ten.”
“Does he normally stay up that late?”
Was she checking up on him?
Paranoia, familiar and debilitating, knocked. Briefly.
Lillie had given him a key to her home. She trusted him.
And he’d confirmed that her interest in Abe was just as she’d said, through Bonnie Nielson.
“Jon?”
“Yeah, sorry. Abe goes to bed at eight every night. He goes down at Mark’s,” Jon said as his fear slid to the back of his psyche once more. “He does much better when I keep him on schedule,” he added, just in case.
“Is he cranky when you pick him up?”
“Nope. He doesn’t usually even wake up.” Campus was well populated, but what Jon saw was mostly couples. Men and women forging bonds. “Mark and Addy bathe him and put him in his pajamas,” he continued, and wasn’t sure why. Because he liked talking about his son to someone who seemed to be genuinely interested in the day-to-day business of his life? Or because he was still watching his back and wanted to make sure she knew that Abraham was well cared for.
“I secretly think they’re using my son as practice for having a child of their own.” He sat back on the bench, his ankle crossed at his knee. “Mark and Addy are engaged and in the process of finding a house.”
“When’s the wedding?”
“I’m not sure. Soon. Probably over Christmas break.”
She sighed. Smacking him in the gut. He sat up. “Is it too late to start on the faucets?” he asked, switching mental gears.
She’d emailed her choices and he’d picked them up at the newly opened home improvement store out by the highway on the way to work that afternoon.
Her pause made him uneasy. Standing, Jon hitched his backpack up onto his shoulder and headed to the sidewalk. He was an idiot. A woman as beautiful as Lillie, as sweet as Lillie, wouldn’t be spending Friday night alone.
“Or I can just go ahead on to the library like I’d planned and catch you later this weekend.”
“I was actually going to ask if you’d like to go get something to eat. You said in your message that you wanted to talk about Abraham and I haven’t eaten since eleven o’clock this morning.”
She doesn’t have a date should not have been the first thought that crossed his mind.
“Sure,” he replied. “Do you want to meet someplace?”
The Shelter Valley Diner and campus eateries were the only non-fast-food places he knew of in town.
He suggested the small on-campus pub that served food until midnight. “I discovered early in the semester that the place is virtually dead this time of night. Apparently kids don’t start partying until after ten.”
“I was one of those kids not so long ago,” she said with a chuckle, telling him that she’d meet him at the pub in fifteen minutes.
There was a new bounce to Jon’s step as he made his way across campus.
* * *
SHE ORDERED A salad. Jon went for the barbecue chicken burger. He longed for a beer. Longed to be just a guy out on a Friday night. But only for a second. Until he pictured the young man playing happily—he hoped—just a few blocks away who’d be a passenger in his truck in a couple of hours. Iced tea was just fine.
And he was not on a date.
“Abe had another tantrum today,” he started right in. “A bad one.”
“I know. Bonnie called. He had one yesterday, too.”
He nodded. Played with his straw wrapper. “Bonnie said you nipped that one in the bud almost as soon as it started.”
Sitting directly across from him in the booth, Lillie looked over at him with those compelling blue eyes, and Jon had to take a deep breath and remind himself that they were working.
Only working.
What was it with him? Would he be forever looking for that special woman who’d magically sashay into his life and make it all better?
He’d given up the dream of having a woman in his life before he’d started kindergarten. And he gave it up again at twelve when Barbara gave him the boot. Then a third time when he found out that Abraham’s mother had only been using her relationship with him, an ex-con, to get her parents to agree to let her move to New York.
“I’m fairly certain that at least a part of his problem is his lack of language skills,” Lillie was saying. “Like most two-year-olds, Abraham understands most of what’s said to him. But while it’s developmentally normal for him to be much less skilled at verbalizing his own thoughts, he’s still behind his age when it comes to speech.”
Jon stiffened. Abraham was fine. He was not suffering because Jon was his father. And if he was, Jon would try harder.
That was why he was meeting with Lillie.
It wasn’t the only reason he was with her, a voice inside of him said. But it was the only reason that mattered.
“...verbalize needs.”
He had no idea what she’d just said, but Jon nodded, anyway.
“At two, he should have a minimum of fifty words, though you should expect only sixty-five percent or so of those to be intelligible.”
Abe had fifty different sounds. Jon knew what they all meant.
“Do you read to him?”
“Of course.” He had to relax. Lillie wasn’t out to get him. This wasn’t even about him. Jon leaned back as the waitress set his plate of food in front of him.
“Does he participate?”
A picture sprang immediately to mind. Abe in bed with him, sitting on the pillow, his little diaper-padded butt up against his ear, banging a book on Jon’s forehead trying to get his father to read to him.
From now on, Abe would get a story every single night before bed. He just didn’t think they could fit one in in the morning. But he’d try.
“I ask him questions. He points,” he said. If he was getting it wrong, he’d get it right.
“He does with me, too,” Lillie said. “It’s clear that he’s aware of what’s going on in the stories, and that he’s interested—at more than a two-year-old level, in my opinion.”
He sat back. There you go, then. Jon took a bite of his burger.
They had the place virtually to themselves.
“I wonder if his problem is that he can’t make himself understood, except when he’s with you.” She stabbed at the lettuce lined with chicken strips and Asian noodles, her fingers slender and feminine around the fork.
He and Abe didn’t get much of that at their table. The salad or the femininity.
“You said he doesn’t have problems when he’s at your friends’ house.”
“That’s right.” He popped a French fry into his mouth. She was going to think that was all he ever ate.
“And not at home, either.”
“Not much. Nothing like the books say he should be having at this age.”
Frowning, she ate silently for a couple of minutes. Jon was enjoying sitting there with her.
“In all other respects, developmentally, Abe’s either right on track or ahead of his age group.” Lillie’s words, when she spoke again, eased him even more. “He squats for long periods when he plays, walks up steps unassisted, but still one foot at a time. He grasps crayons with his fist, but draws legible lines more than he scribbles. Scribbling is more likely what you’d see in someone his age. He can balance on one foot. He opens doors by turning the doorknob....”
She didn’t need to tell Jon about that. He’d almost died when he’d seen his son heading out to the
front yard the week before. He’d since installed a dead bolt on their door, with permission from their very supportive landlord, Caroline Strickland.
Nodding, he took another bite of his sandwich. The thing was almost gone already.
“A lot of what I do involves play, even with my patients at the clinic,” Lillie said, still making progress on her salad. “Yesterday, Abe played with this pillow toy Bonnie has for the two-year-olds. It has big zippers and buttons on it and is fun for the kids, but it also helps me assess if a child is developmentally on track. And it begins to teach children how to dress themselves.”
“How do I get one of those?”
Holding her fork midair, she blinked as though changing her train of thought, and he realized he’d interrupted her.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I’ll ask Bonnie where she gets them.”
Nodding, he motioned for her to continue.
“Abraham was able to button and undo all of the buttons, and to master the zippers, too,” she said, “which is in keeping with his age group. He seemed to be really enjoying himself.”
He’d see that Abe had one at home, then. Right away.
“What I’m noticing is that Abraham struggles when there are a lot of people around him. It’s the only thing that comes together for me.” Jon dropped his hands to the table and focused fully on the gorgeous woman sitting across from him.
She was his ticket to Abe’s success.
He trusted her to know what was best for his son—at least where this tantrum thing was concerned.
“The lobby in the day care that first time I met you was so chaotic, everyone hurrying to get on with their day. When we were in the park, that big group was passing by. Yesterday he’d been sitting alone on his mat when all of the other kids came rushing over to join him for snack time. Today, Bonnie said that they were going into another room to watch a cartoon movie and Abe’s tantrum started as the kids all ran to the door.”
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