Jenna Mills - This Time For Keeps

“How’s that sweet baby?” Lori asked as soon as she entered the room. Who would have guessed that beneath the awkward ugly duckling of high school lay the makings of an all-American knockout? “She didn’t hurt herself, did she?”

“No worse than any other day,” Meg said, pouring her coffee. She’d never gotten around to touching the pot she’d made at home. “A bump on her noggin, but she was laughing with Rosemary when I left.”

“Such a sweetheart,” Lori said, and Meg had to wonder if her friend even realized the way she drew her hands to her stomach. But Meg noticed…and Meg knew. Lori and Trey had been trying for a baby for over five years. Recently they’d begun tests to figure out why they’d been unsuccessful.

“How’s Trey?” she asked.

“Fine,” Lori said with an odd briskness. Once, she would have smiled and launched straight into her latest Trey story. Now she again changed the subject. “I’m so glad you found someone to watch Char at your place.”

Meg saw no point in pushing. The pace was Lori’s to set. “Rosemary’s a godsend,” she agreed. A friend of her mother’s, the former schoolteacher was itching for grandkids—and happy to practice with Charlotte.

“Oh.” Lori put a dainty little mug with a Pisces sign on it into the sink. “That guy called for you again.”

Meg looked up from the sugar packet she’d just opened. “The same one from yesterday? Did he say what he wanted?”

“Nope.” Lori frowned. “Wouldn’t leave a message or a name—but he had a great voice.”

“Did you get his number?” Julia asked.

“Came in as Out-of-Area.”

Julia’s eyes took on a rare twinkle. “You hiding something, cuz?”

Meg dumped the sugar into her coffee. “I wish.” It had been a long time since there had been anything worth keeping to herself, certainly nothing in the man department.

With sobering speed, Julia became all business again, reaching into her blazer pocket. “Then here,” she said, handing Meg a square, pink sheet of message paper.

“What’s this?”

Julia’s eyes, all steely and serious, met hers. “His number.”

Meg stilled. Her throat burned. Something in her gut jumped. She didn’t need to see the number to know that the subject of their conversation had shifted. Whereas Meg preferred to let sleeping dogs lie, Julia was all about meeting them head-on.

“I called the bureau,” she said. “He’s in Venezuela.”

Against the thin paper, Meg’s thumb and forefinger tightened.

“They said he’s out on assignment, but they expect him back—”

“No.” But Meg glanced at the string of fifteen numbers anyway. A phone number, such a simple thing really. Dial the numbers, hear the voice.

His voice.

I’m here…with you, he’d promised.

“Meg, you can’t pretend he doesn’t exist.”

He’d said something almost identical right before he walked out the door: I can’t stay here anymore, can’t pretend.

Why didn’t anyone understand there was a difference between prevention and pretending?

“I told you to leave it alone,” Meg said, looking up.

But Julia wouldn’t back down. She’d been on Meg about this for almost two months, since shortly after the car accident that changed so many lives. “Russ was her brother.”

Meg told herself to walk away. To wad up the paper and toss it in the garbage, go back to her office and prepare the agenda for the staff meeting or read Henry’s report. Review plans for the silent auction, which she was in charge of.

But something inside her just broke.

“A lot of good that did her!” she snapped in a rare display of emotion. “He didn’t even come for her funeral!” Didn’t call to check on arrangements for her child, didn’t acknowledge in any way, shape or form that the little sister who’d picked up her life in Scotland and traveled all the way to Texas, to be with her big brother, had died, here in a country so far removed from her family. Alone. Except for Meg—and Charlotte.

“Maybe he didn’t find out in time.” Lori’s words were quiet, hopeful. A romantic down to the bone, she couldn’t give up her belief in happy endings. Russell’s rich brogue didn’t help matters. In her book, just because he talked like a poet, he walked on water. “Maybe he couldn’t.”

“Of course he couldn’t.” Meg saw Lori wince, but it didn’t change the truth. “Because that would have required him to come…” Back. Home. “Here.” It still stunned Meg that someone Ainsley’s age had actually made out a will. And that a nineteen-year-old from a small town in Scotland would choose to have her final resting place here in small-town America. Among strangers.

Of course, from what Meg knew of Ainsley’s relationship with her parents, they, too, had become little more than strangers.

“Meg.” Lori’s voice was soft, pleading. “He’s Charlotte’s uncle, your—”

“Past.” Meg swallowed hard, didn’t want to hear the word. “He’s my past, that’s all.”

Julia snatched the paper from Meg’s fingers. “If you don’t call him, I will.”

The glare was automatic. Meg hated confrontation, but this wasn’t a game or contest. It was real and it was absolutely none of Julia’s business. “Don’t.”

She hated the way her voice broke on the word.

“Meg…” The lines of Julia’s face softened. “It’s not fair that you have to do this alone. Maybe he can help.”

He. Him. Meg couldn’t remember the last time any of them had spoken his name aloud. They didn’t need to. They all knew. “He left, Jules.” Packed up, walked away. If she’d come home that night a little later, she still wondered if he would have said goodbye.

Just for a few weeks, a month at the most.

“You were going through a hard time,” Julia reminded her. “You yourself said it was probably for the best.”

She had. She’d said that in the immediate aftermath, when she’d found herself able to breathe for the first time in months.

But then the days piled onto one another, one after the other. And the nights…

“He didn’t come back,” she whispered. It was still almost unfathomable to her that the man she’d loved so dearly had turned his back on her so completely. He’d never called, sent only the occasional e-mail.

E-mail.

That’s what their marriage had been reduced to.

“It’s what he does.” She still didn’t understand how she’d been so blind. “What he always does.” The pattern was clear now, time after time after time. He’d left his family the day he turned eighteen. He’d left the country of his birth. He’d left the news bureau, the university. “When the going gets tough…” Russell Montgomery walked.

But Julia wouldn’t leave the subject alone. “Then why aren’t you divorced?” Her tone made it sound like the answer was obvious.

“Just a technicality.”

She lifted a perfectly sculpted brow. “That’s a pretty big technicality.”

Meg drew the mug to her mouth and took a sip of now-cool coffee. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Then why haven’t you been with anyone else? Two years is a long time.”

A strangled noise broke from Meg’s throat. “What is this? Let’s Ambush Meg Day?” Simply because Russell’s parents had been calling and she hadn’t called them back yet? She was going to. She had to. She knew that. So long as she was raising their granddaughter she couldn’t pretend they didn’t exist.

But not yet.

Done with it all, she snatched the paper from Julia and strode toward the door. “Editorial in ten,” she called over her shoulder. Then, at the door, she turned. “And anyway,” she tossed with a wicked little smile. “Who says I haven’t?”