Page 129 of A Soldier's Return

He couldn’t lie to her. Not about something as important as her future. “We don’t have to talk about this right now. We’re all tired and overexcited. Come on, let’s have some of Sage’s cheesecake.”

“I don’t want cheesecake! I don’t wantanything.”

“Chloe—”

“I won’t go! Do you hear me? I’ll run away. I’ll come here and live with Sage.”

She burst into hard, heaving sobs and buried her face in Conan’s fur. The dog licked her cheek then turned and glared at Eben.

Join the club, he thought. Everybody else in the room was furious with him.

He didn’t know what to do, certain that if he tried to comfort his daughter he would only make this worse. To his vast relief, Sage stepped in and sat on the floor right there in the doorway in her elegant dress and pulled Chloe onto her lap.

She murmured soft, soothing words and after a few tense moments, Chloe’s tears began to ease.

“I don’t want to go to boarding school,” she mumbled again.

“I know, baby.”

Sage ran a hand over her hair but he noted she didn’t give Chloe any false reassurances. “Do you think you’re going to be up for cheesecake tonight? If you’re not, you could always take some home with you.”

“I’m not hungry now,” Chloe whispered. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll take it home. Thank you.”

By the time Sage cut into her friend’s ironically labeled cheesecake—he had never feltlesslike celebrating—and packaged up two slices for them, Chloe had reverted to an icy, controlled calm that seemed oddly familiar. It took him a moment to realize she was emulating the way he tried to stuff down his emotions and keep control in tense situations.

Somebody ought to just stick a knife through his heart, Eben thought. It would be far less painful in the long run than this whole parenting thing.

Anna had disappeared back to her apartment earlier during the worst of Chloe’s outburst and Sage and Conan walked them down the stairs and to his car.

The rain had stopped, he saw. The night was cool and sweet with the scent of Abigail’s flowers.

Chloe gave Sage an extra-long hug. If he wasn’t mistaken, he saw Sage wipe her eyes after Chloe slid into the back seat, but when she lifted her gaze to his, it was filled with a Zen-like calm.

“This isn’t the way I wanted the evening to end,” he murmured.Or the week, really.

Their time with her had been magical and he hated to see it end.

He gazed at her features in the moonlight, lovely and exotic, and his chest ached again at the idea of leaving her.

“Will you come running with Chloe and me in the morning? Just one more time?”

She drew in a sharp breath. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. It’s late and Chloe probably will need sleep after tonight. Perhaps we should just say our goodbyes here.”

“Please, Sage.”

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they brimmed with tears again and his heart shattered into a million pieces.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “Goodbye, Eben. Be well.”

She turned and hurried up the sidewalk and slipped inside the house before he could even react.

After a long moment of staring after her, he climbed into the car, fighting the urge to press a hand to his chest to squeeze away the tight ache there.

Despite his halfhearted efforts to engage her in conversation, Chloe maintained an icy silence to him through the short distance to their rented beach house.

He couldn’t blame her, he supposed. It had been a fairly brutal way to find out that he was considering sending her to boarding school. He had planned to broach the idea when he returned from Tokyo and slowly build to it over the summer, give her time to become adjusted to it.

“You know you’re going to have to talk to me again sometime,” he finally said when they walked to the door of their rented beach house. In answer, she pointedly turned her back, crossed her arms across her chest and clamped her lips shut.

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