Page 65 of The Keeper and I

Chapter 16

Jordanloweredhishandsand opened his mouth to apologize, but Gene only smiled.

“Funny place for a door, isn’t it?” he said. “Never have been able to get the blasted thing open. Perhaps we’re better off.”

He shuffled over to the bins and flipped open the lid. Jordan went to help him lift the bags up.

“I saw Laci inside,” Gene said. “She was quite upset but wouldn’t say what happened. Is everything alright between you two?”

Jordan heaved a sigh and took care of the boxes as well. “We had a fight.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Gene replied. “I’m sure you’ll work it out. Love always wins.”

“Not always.”

Gene raised a curious eyebrow. “Bad as all that, is it?”

“I dunno…”

“Forgiveness is a pillar of a good relationship.”

“Easy to say with a perfect marriage.”

The words came out before Jordan could stop them, no matter how much he wished he could snatch them out of the air and swallow them. Gene blinked.

“Perfect?” he questioned, and a chuckle rose in his chest. “Oh no, son. Pam and I are far from perfect. We’ve worked hard to get to this place in our marriage.”

Jordan was barely able to resist rolling his eyes.

“I know it seems unlikely given what you’ve seen,” Gene went on. “But there were significant bumps in the road. Some I worried weren’t bumps at all, more like cliffs.”

Jordan didn’t answer, but his skepticism must have shown in his expression.

“Pam had an affair once,” Gene said. “Right after Tate was born.”

That could have knocked Jordan over with a feather. Laci’s mother, that sweet, devoted woman who looked at Gene like he placed every star in the sky just for her, had strayed? How was it possible? Was any relationship sacred?

“I was working a lot,” Gene explained. “Caught up in London. And even though I swore I’d be home on the weekends, more often than not, I stayed in a hotel to save myself the drive out here. I hired a nanny to help Pam out with the kids, but that wasn’t exactly the solution she was looking for.” He paused, looking out over the grounds with a pensive stare. “She had a landscaper out here to update the garden, and she started seeing him—for months. When I finally came home for Christmas, she told me everything.”

Jordan was still reconciling that something like this could happen to a couple who danced around the dining room to “She’s a Bad Mama Jama” the night before.

“How…” he swallowed. “How did you get over that?”

“I didn’t get over it,” Gene answered. “We got through it. Together.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Well, to put it simply, I had two options: I could forgive her or not forgive her. I knew what would happen if I chose not to forgive her, a divorce that would lead to a love I deeply cherished dissolving and seeing my children even less than I did. I knew what that would do to me, and I wasn’t keen on it.

“So, I chose to forgive her. It was undoubtedly the more difficult decision, but she wanted our marriage back as much as I did. It was worth it to us. So we dug in and did the work. We went to counseling, I cut back my hours at work, and eventually sorted it out so I could work from home full time and only go to the city for meetings. We became partners again. We became intimate again. Before I knew it, we were a family again.”

Jealousy roiled in the pit of Jordan’s stomach. So, it could be done. When you had enough love, you could overcome feelings of neglect or an affair and avoid a complete breakdown of the family. Why couldn’t his parents have had that? Had they not wanted it bad enough? Even for him and Ava?

“How did the kids handle it?” Jordan asked, hating himself for how he treated Laci.

“They never knew,” Gene told him. “We never let them know, that is. I didn’t want them to look at their mother any differently. Some things are better left unsaid. A bit like that door.”

Jordan leaned against the wall and took a deep breath through an unfamiliar tightness in his throat. They cared enough to protect their children. Memories swam to the front of his mind of the screaming matches his parents got into in front of him and Ava, the way their mother flaunted her affair, and how their father would wave the divorce papers he refused to sign in her face.

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