Chapter Fifteen
Jamie took the keys Zee handed him.
“We made the decision it would be just as safe here as in a rented storage,” she said. He nodded. “You were already paying for storing all the contents of the house, so—”
“It’s fine. I would have done the same.” His mouth tightened. “I should have.”
“Yeah, well.” She wouldn’t argue with that. “Would you rather be alone?”
He glanced at her. Had she said that just a bit too carefully? “True said you took care of it.”
She shrugged. Why not, it worked for him, didn’t it?
“Then you should be here.”
They started toward the garage. “I wonder what kind of shape she’s in?”
Why do you call it a she, Aunt Millie?
Tradition. Sailing ships, sleek cars…call me old-school, but why would I want to lose a tradition that likens what is thought most beautiful to a female? It’s quite a compliment.
Yes, but…couldn’t it be a he?
Zinnia my love, that’s your decision. You can make of your life and the things in it anything you want.
“Zee?”
She snapped back to the present. “Sorry. Lost in a memory there.” She met his gaze, held it. “I still miss her.”
“So do I,” he said softly. She didn’t think her expression changed, but he added, “I know you don’t think so, but—”
“I never thought you didn’t love her or grieve her passing.” Deck’s words flashed through her mind again. “Something else Deck said was that someone needing to be alone until they can at least see the other side doesn’t mean they care any less, hurt any less, they just handle it differently.”
“He’s full of hard-won wisdom.”
“He also said,” she added, with self-directed tartness, “that there are a lot of people who think that way is wrong and theirs right.”
For a moment his gaze sharpened, but then he looked away without saying a word. Which was answer enough.
I knew if I even set foot on this property again I’d break. So I trusted you to do it all, because I knew you loved her, too.
She steeled herself to it because she had to. She owed it to him. “I’m sorry, Jamie. I was one of those, who didn’t understand there was more than one way. I thought because you…needed us when our parents died, that it would be the same.”
His gaze snapped back. “I was a kid then.”
“Is that it? We both grew up. But I hung on to what I still had and you…started letting go?”
She hadn’t meant that to apply to them, to him letting her go, but he was looking at her as if she’d said it.
“Does everything always have to be neck-deep?” he finally said, sounding as weary as he’d looked when he’d gotten off the plane.
So. Back to the shallows. Men…
She managed not to sniff. “You going to open the garage?”
Accepting the change of subject, he looked at the keys she’d given him. She saw him catch the key fob, shaped like the car they were about to unveil. Millie used to joke about that, saying she wanted to be able to find the car keys at a touch, because if the whole place ever caught fire, the rest could burn but she’d by gosh save that car.
“It was his, you know. The car.”
“His?” It took her a second. “You mean…the man in the photos? The soldier?”
He nodded. “I found the original paperwork in the glove box last time I drove it. She kept it.” He was still touching the tiny car on the ring. And his voice was tight when he said, “When I asked her she said that car was as close as she could get to being in his arms.”
“No wonder she loved it so much. I wish we’d known back then, when we used to ride in it as kids.”
“We wouldn’t have understood, really. Even later I couldn’t understand how she could bear even having it around, let alone driving it like she did.”
She was suddenly swamped with memories. And realized the difference had been there all along; where she had clung to and taken comfort from her parents’ things, Jamie had wanted them out of sight.
But their things, they make them feel close again.
No, Zee. All they do is remind me they’re gone.
And then another memory, this time of her brother, who had wanted Hope to do what he would do in her situation, face down the threat and take her life back. And she herself telling him that what was right for him might not be right for Hope, and that he couldn’t decide that for her.
But hadn’t she done just that with Jamie? She grieved in her way, and had expected him to do the same. And when he didn’t, she had assumed it meant he wasn’t grieving at all, or at least not as much as he should for the woman who’d changed her entire life for him. That he hadn’t come home to see to her things because they didn’t matter to him.
Because I couldn’t take it!
Maybe Deck had been right. “Avoiding it gives the scar time to form,” she said softly, gently now, “but it doesn’t change it.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he agreed, sounding weary again. “Nothing ever, ever changes it.”