Page 24 of Embracing the Change

“Well, no offense, but I suspect you had little to do with it,” she teased.

“No,” he said low, and her attention on him deepened. “For talking about her so openly. Talking about her, and talking about the fact she’s gone, and we’re dealing with that. Thank you. People skirt around her name, her existence, her loss, like she’s some villain locked away in prison, and not the wife I loved who I miss, and I want to talk about, because I damned well fucking miss her.”

Her lovely face softened before she asked, “Do you talk about her with Dru?”

He bit off a bite of his dumpling, chewed, swallowed and answered, “All the time.”

Her expression became approving. “I’m glad.”

“And you’re correct.” He circled his chopsticks in the air. “This is all Lindy. I had nothing to do with it.”

Her eyes twinkled. Even so, that light didn’t hide the sorrow she felt for him. “As suspected.”

“She liked you,” he told her.

“I liked her,” she replied.

“I think she would have liked to know you better.”

“She was a busy woman.”

“As are you.”

She lifted a shoulder and dropped a prawn in her mouth.

Once she swallowed, she murmured, “I should have made time to get to know her better.”

“The ‘should haves’ will kill you if you let them.”

She turned her head his way, and her tone was actually tender when she said, “You made a beautiful couple.”

“I have a talent with that,” he muttered cynically, snagging his own prawn.

“You’ve traveled a rough path, Jamie,” she noted carefully.

“And I reaped the bounty, Nora. Belinda gave me my son. The time I had with Lindy. The fact she left me with Dru.”

“Don’t think for an instant you didn’t give her bounty too,” she admonished.

His laugh came, and it was so harsh, it wasn’t a laugh at all.

“Do you doubt it?” she asked incredulously.

Jamie got a lock on his self-pity, reached out and touched her wrist, then went back to his food, saying, “Don’t mind me.”

“Please explain, if you would, why you laughed like that,” she pressed.

He stopped building his duck pancake and looked to her.

“I hate my father. I think I’ve hated him since my first memory of him, which was watching him shout at my brother after he fell off a horse. I believe Andy was maybe ten years old. In my memory, the way my father spoke to him, I wouldn’t speak like that to my worst enemy. I wouldn’t even speak like that to my father, who I have no respect for, and this was his son.”

“Lord,” she whispered.

She had that right.

“Andy, my brother, had broken his collarbone in the fall. Mom couldn’t take him to the hospital until Pop was done with him. I can’t imagine the pain he was in, physically, standing there waiting to get the medical attention he needed. But I can imagine the emotional pain he was in, having his father shout at him like that, even if you factored out his ignoring his son was injured, but the fact remained, he was injured.”

She stared at him.

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