by Caro Carson
Her grin bloomed into a full smile under the white lights. “How’d you know? I hope they have baton twirlers and flag wavers and all that stuff.”
“They do. You are about to see a true-blue, all-American halftime show, Mrs. MacDowell. Enjoy.”
He gave her bare hand a squeeze.
I’m going to buy her a wedding ring.
It didn’t mean his heart wasn’t still with Amina, but he shared a life now with Kendry. For better or worse, he and Sam were living an American life, and this Mrs. MacDowell, the one he’d actually married instead of the one he’d planned to marry, should have a wedding ring.
* * *
The morning after the football game, Kendry and Sammy waited by the front door in their pajamas before Jamie left once more for a weekend of army reserve duty.
“It’s only one night this time,” Jamie said. “The time will fly.”
Kendry smiled at his words, so similar to what he’d said in September. She’d wondered then if he were trying to convince her or himself. She knew him better now; he was trying to convince himself that he wouldn’t be gone long.
“Hardly more than a long day at work,” Kendry said, trying to keep her voice upbeat as her two guys hugged. Her heart broke a little as Jamie pressed his forehead to his son’s for a long moment. They were so different, a large man and a petite baby, but they so clearly belonged together.
Kendry was certain the main reason Jamie had married her, the reason she could call these two guys her own, was to care for Sam if Jamie got called to active duty and sent back to war indefinitely. She prayed she’d never see these two part for more than a weekend’s drill.
“Okay, buddy. Time for you to go with Mommy.”
At the word Mommy, Sammy turned toward Kendry and pointed.
Kendry’s breath caught. She felt electric, like she was watching a winning touchdown.
“Mmah,” Sammy said, savoring the long m.
“That’s right,” Jamie said, sounding as excited as Kendry felt. “That’s Mommy.”
“Mmah.” Sammy dove toward Kendry with all the justified confidence of one who knew he’d be caught.
“Oh,” Kendry said, kissing his cheek as she settled him on her hip. “Just...oh.” She felt tears well up.
“I think he said ‘Mom,’ don’t you?” Jamie smoothed his hand over Sammy’s back.
“Yes!” Kendry laughed at the squeak in her own voice.
As he had the last time he left them, Jamie let his hand drift from Sam to her chin. His fingertips didn’t slide down to her shoulder and away. This time, he brushed her hair away from her cheek, burying his hand in the tumble of her hair, cupping the back of her head gently.
He’s going to kiss me.
She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. But her heart pounded, and she felt everything vividly. The warmth of his hand, the weight of Sam in her arms, the brush of Jamie’s camouflage pants against her pajama bottoms.
The heat of his lips, surprisingly soft, achingly gentle against her own, for one brief, perfect moment.
Then he was stepping back, picking up his heavy duffel bag, and not quite making eye contact with her as he opened the front door.
“You two have a good weekend.”
“Be safe,” Kendry said. “Come home tomorrow.”
“You couldn’t keep me away.” With a wink, he headed for his truck.
The way he said it jogged her memory. Only two months ago, when Jamie had come to the playroom to pick up Sam after work, he’d told Kendry that he’d be back tomorrow, that she couldn’t keep him away. Bailey had been certain—for about five minutes—that Jamie was interested in Kendry.
Kendry had wished it were true.
Maybe it was safe now to wish for more. She hoped so, because she couldn’t stop herself from wanting to be so much more than her husband’s friend.
Chapter Twenty
Jamie came home hours earlier than Kendry had expected, but she’d been ready. She’d washed her hair, then blown it dry in its beach waves, and then fretted that it looked too obvious that she’d done her hair. She wore a cheerful yellow sweater over her jeans and boots, then worried that the boots gave away how deliberately she’d chosen her outfit, so she went barefoot. She cleaned her glasses. She put on lip gloss, then decided the lip gloss was too much for a woman who was supposed to be hanging out in her own house on a Sunday.
It was all in vain, because the man who came home was not the same man who’d kissed her before he left.
Jamie said hello, as if he’d just returned from a day at the hospital instead of a weekend in the army. He didn’t ask where Sam was, although Kendry supposed it was obvious that he was still napping.
“How was your weekend? Was it full of exciting, top-secret army stuff?” The drill weekends were routinely dull, according to Jamie, but she wanted to cajole him into talking.
Jamie flipped through Saturday’s mail, which she’d carefully piled on its usual corner of the kitchen counter. He pushed aside the top pieces, looked at the bottom pieces, and then...stood there.
Something was definitely wrong.
Kendry tried to smile naturally. “Did you notice the college catalogs? Every nursing program in the city sent me their materials. It’s going to be exciting to read through it all.”
Jamie looked at her briefly, and a ghost of a smile passed over his mouth. “That’s good.”
Then he reached into the cargo pocket on his camouflage pants and pulled out a handful of tattered white business envelopes. He added them to the pile.
“We had mail call this morning. Things sent to my last unit finally caught up to me.”
The addresses were lines of letters and numbers, with forwarding stamps and more handwritten numbers. No wonder they had taken months to catch up to him. They looked official, because they had the kind of government seals in the upper left corner that her mail from the court usually bore.
Then he pulled out a padded manila envelope. The square outline of a DVD case had rubbed through the worn surface.
Kendry bit her unglossed lip. Jamie’s face was expressionless, unnaturally so. She wanted to touch him. She reached a hand out and tapped the padded envelope instead, taking in the return address at a glance. “Who do you know in London?”
“It’s not really from London. It’s from Afghanistan.” He held the padded manila envelope a moment longer, then put it down. “Do you think Sam will sleep much longer?”
“Yes. He went down about twenty minutes ago.”
Jamie rubbed the back of his neck. “I need to watch this DVD and get it over with. I’ll shower while I charge my laptop and...” His words drifted off.
Kendry had never seen him so unfocused, so distracted.
“I’ll watch it in my bedroom.”
Kendry made one last, lame attempt at a joke. “So it’s actually top secret, then?”
Jamie grabbed the envelope in a decisive motion, his face as grim as if he were being forced to declare a patient dead. “It’s about to be shown all over the world, actually. It’s the documentary they were filming the day Amina died.”
* * *
Sam’s second surgery was scheduled toward the end of the week. Kendry knew it would be more involved than the heart patch. Repairing a cleft palate required scalpels and stitching, and the recovery was going to be painful for her child. The surgery itself was scheduled to take longer than the heart procedure, too. This gave Kendry time to sit next to the silent man whose name she shared, the man who hadn’t smiled in days.
Sam had been understandably fussy as they waited for his surgery, since no eleven-month-old child could understand why he had to be fasting. Despite the demands of keeping Sammy as calm as she could, Kendry had noticed Jamie’s peculiar tension. He’d hedged his answers to the
hospital registration clerk, providing the same written statement that he’d attempted to get a replacement copy of Sam’s birth documents from the embassy in Kabul. Attempted, but not yet succeeded.
Without the embassy’s report of birth, Sam still had no Social Security number. So far, Jamie’s health insurance had been covering Sam as his dependent, but for this surgery, the clerk had asked Jamie to sign an affidavit that he’d pay all expenses in the event that coverage was denied.
In the surgical waiting room, Kendry and Jamie settled into side-by-side chairs, which lasted about two minutes. Jamie stood. He paced. He walked over to the coffeepot, then walked back again without pouring a cup. He sat. Just as Kendry put her hand on his shoulder, he stood and started the whole process over again.
She was ready for him when he returned to the chair. She waved the paging device in her hand. “Let’s go for a walk. They’ll let us know when he’s in recovery.”
“No, thanks.”
A piece of the old Kendry, the dutiful orderly, wanted to sit silently and be a good, obedient girl. But another piece, a stronger piece, felt she had the right to make this decision for the two of them.
Maybe because she was worried about her child, or maybe because she’d been referred to as “Mrs. MacDowell” all morning, or maybe because she knew that whatever was wrong had everything to do with Jamie’s military mail call and nothing to do with her, Kendry stood and reached for Jamie’s hand, tugging him with her. “Let’s walk.”
Kendry kept up the small talk as they made their way to the park in the center of the complex. “That room was too small for you to pace in. Besides, you were scaring the other families. You were scaring me, and I know this is a minor operation, not a heart transplant.”
He gave her hand a quick squeeze in agreement.
Kendry slowed their pace once they were outdoors. The October days had been quite warm, but this close to dawn, at the early hour surgeons seemed to prefer to work, there was a definite chill in the air.
She and Jamie probably looked like a contented couple, he in his leather jacket and she in the red peacoat she’d purchased as a fall-to-winter staple. They stayed on the meandering path that led past the glorious autumn colors of a large sumac tree as Kendry headed for the most private bench in the park, the one she’d thought would hide her when the cost of her pink scrubs had derailed all her careful plans.
She didn’t care about those plans anymore. Those meager hopes and dreams no longer existed. She wasn’t Kendry Harrison, a solo woman focusing on a sole career goal. She was Kendry MacDowell, in a nontraditional marriage that still formed the basis of a traditional family.
She dreaded the conversation she was going to have with Jamie when they reached the bench, but this was her family and her life. She needed to know what was going on, for better or worse.
* * *
“I don’t think you’re mourning Amina.”
Kendry’s voice was soft but firm, familiar to Jamie in a way that soothed. It took a moment for the actual words to sink in. Not so soothing. Jamie’s first response was surprise at the sudden topic. His second was to be offended. “Of course I’m mourning Amina. I will always mourn her.”
With that knee-jerk declaration out of the way, Jamie had nothing else to say. The two of them never discussed Amina. They discussed Sam and their work at the hospital. They talked about nursing schools. Lately, they’d mentioned getting a dog, but they never spoke about Amina.
Jamie changed their grip, threading his fingers between Kendry’s. He wasn’t ready for this. He’d never be ready for this.
Kendry apparently was. “I thought seeing that DVD must have refreshed all your memories of Amina. I was hoping it would be at least bittersweet for you.”
Kendry would hope such a thing. What other woman would hope he’d remember good things about a former love?
Not former. Forever. He still loved Amina. He did.
“You’ve been so withdrawn, though, that I assumed seeing that DVD must have intensified your grief instead. I tried to put myself in your shoes. If I’d loved someone like you loved Amina, what would I do when his memory became painful?”
It was a rhetorical question. He wasn’t expected to fill the silence that came after. Thank God.
They sat on the bench. She angled her whole body toward him, her knee brushing his thigh, their hands interlinked. “If I were missing someone, I would have clung to the baby we created together. I would have taken comfort in the miracle my lover left behind.”
The miracle my lover left behind. That was Sam. Jamie wanted to tell Kendry she’d gotten it exactly right. He wanted to thank her for putting it into words for him.
If he spoke, he might choke on this sudden emotion. He couldn’t speak.
Kendry could, and she did. Deliberately, carefully, logically. “But you’ve been very distant from Sam this week. You look at him with such longing, Jamie, but you don’t hold him every second that you can, not anymore. It’s like there’s a pane of glass between you, and you are looking at something in a store window that you want, but you can’t have.”
It was frightening to have someone see him so clearly. Frightening to know he could no longer hide.
It was time to tell Kendry, whether he was ready or not.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kendry sat on the bench, studying Jamie’s face while he studied their hands. She heard the siren of an approaching ambulance carry over the hospital walls.
“I don’t know how to have this conversation,” Jamie said. He let go of her hand and stood up, shoving his hands in his jacket’s pockets. “There’s a dinner event here in Austin, soon. A fund-raiser that goes with the documentary. We’ll all be seeing it on the big screen. If that mail had taken much longer to catch up with me, we’d have missed it.”
“We can still miss it. You aren’t required to relive anything in a movie theater.” Kendry didn’t want to see it herself. She didn’t want to know Amina better. As a vague, faceless ghost, she was already too much competition. “We can pack the DVD away for Sam. Someday, he will treasure that film of his mother.”
Jamie kicked a few tree leaves off the sidewalk with the toe of his plain, black boot. “I have to be there. I owe them.”
“You owe whom, what?”
“They were filming forty miles away when Amina went into labor. That may not sound like a great distance, but over there, it can be days of trekking on foot. The crew gave a ride to the midwife who was left with Sam. She never would have made it to the base before Sam died of dehydration, otherwise. The cameraman and the producer stayed. They wrote letters attesting to the fact that I was the father of Amina’s baby.”
“Is that some kind of Afghani tradition?”
“It’s an American legal requirement. If I can provide proof of paternity to the embassy, then Sam’s a U.S. citizen.”
Kendry remembered those other redirected envelopes, the ones with the official seals. At this morning’s patient registration, Jamie had denied that he’d gotten a reply from the embassy.
Maybe he hadn’t. “When do you have to give this proof to the embassy?”
“I did, when Sam was born. Actually, a whole group of us did. At our base, there was no way to feed Sam. No formula. No wet nurses among the locals. We kept Sam on IVs, but time was running out. Guys in my unit spent their internet minutes to read State Department regulations instead of emailing their families. Everyone helped put together a packet with the witness letters and my statement. We did a quick blood-type test. Then Sam and I got out on the next plane to a U.S. base in Germany. I had to trust the film crew to deliver the packet to the embassy in Kabul. It’s not the kind of thing you can drop in the mail.” He reached up and yanked a leaf off the tree. “There is no mail in Afghanistan.”
“Is that the problem? They didn’t deli
ver the packet?”
“They did. Amina was their friend, and they knew her baby had no chance as an orphan in Afghanistan. There is no adoption in that country. Officially, there are no orphanages.”
Jamie dropped the leaf, then reached up and yanked another one off.
Kendry stood and took the leaf out of his hand. “What is on that DVD that has to do with this paternity paperwork?”
“Another man.” She watched Jamie force the words through a tight throat and clenched jaw. “There was another man.”
“Another man who did what?” The obvious answer came to her before Jamie could form a reply. Kendry’s world tilted. She grabbed Jamie’s arm. “But Sam is yours. There were blood tests.”
Jamie steadied her with a strong hand on her other arm. “Blood tests can rule out paternity, but they don’t prove it. Our blood types only mean it’s possible that I’m the father.”
Numbly, she sank to the bench with Jamie.
“I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing her arms briskly. “I don’t know how to make this less of a shock for you.”
Anger exploded inside her. How dare Amina deceive Jamie? How dare this woman lie to Jamie about carrying another man’s child?
“Oh, Jamie,” Kendry managed to choke out, despite the fury clogging her throat. “That DVD must have been devastating.”
Her husband had fought so long and so hard for his son, only to learn this week that Sam’s mother might have been unfaithful to him. Kendry wanted to defend Jamie, but against what? A dead woman’s betrayal? She couldn’t fix that. Tears of helplessness stung her eyes. She cupped Jamie’s face in her hands, his strong jaw warm in her palms. “I’m so sorry.”
“No, it wasn’t like that.” Jamie took her hands and held them close to his chest, inside his open jacket. “I’m not explaining this right.”
Although Kendry was practically vibrating with outrage, she could feel Jamie’s heartbeat through his shirt. Steady, strong—this wasn’t a shock to him.