Page 42 of Wedding Season
Instead of responding directly to what he’d told her, Mariella shook her head. “Your mom didn’t like Amber.”
He blinked. “Of course she did.”
“Nope. She called her a twiddlehead. I remember it because I’d never heard anyone use that term.”
Alex let out a surprised laugh. “To the best of my knowledge, it’s a term my mom made up. I thought she reserved it for my cousin, Henry. He’s the kind of person who makes a brick seem like an extraordinary genius of monumental proportions. He gave my aunt no end of heartbreak. After a while, my mother refused to speak his name. She would only call him the twiddlehead.”
“She put your ex-fiancée in the same category.”
“I just can’t believe that. She was always nice to Amber. And Amber loved to tell me how much my mom adored her. She loved to tell me how much most people adored her.”
“I’d be curious,” Mariella said after a moment, “to know how many of the people who adore her are also on her payroll in one way or another. I worked with a lot of famous people. There was a certain type who liked to surround themselves with—not exactly sycophants—but yes-friends to be sure.”
He chewed on this piece of information for a few seconds and found that it sat in his belly with the weight of a lead balloon. “You think Amber is one of those?”
“I don’t think it, Alex. It was a well-known fact.”
“I wish somebody would have let me in on that little secret.”
“It sounds to me like you saw her in the light you wanted to. I did the same with Jacques and it worked out for me as well as it worked out for you. To your credit, you handled it better.”
“You’re doing okay now.”
“Some days,” she agreed then chewed on her lower lip as he pulled into the hospital parking lot. “I think you should go into her room without me. She’s already had a rough night, and I don’t want to upset her more.”
He nodded, hating the pain he heard in Mariella’s voice but respecting her for that choice. It was the way mothers were supposed to be. Unselfish and putting the welfare of their kids before their own needs.
Mariella was hard enough on herself, and he wasn’t going to dispute whether she had made the right decision putting Heather up for adoption. But he had no doubt that if she’d kept the baby, she would have found a way to make it work. That’s what moms did and she would have made a good one.
No matter what she believed.
MARIELLASATINthe waiting area of the hospital’s small emergency ward. Her foot tapped against the floor as she tried to calm the tumultuous emotions rolling through her. Wave after wave they came, sending her into a spiral of swirling uncertainty.
She hated waiting. Patience had never been one of her strongest characteristics. She hadn’t seen the value of it. As far as she’d been concerned for most of her life, patience was for wimps and people who weren’t willing to charge forward and get the job done.
Mariella had painstakingly shaped herself into a charge-forward sort of person.
Maybe it was something she would have learned earlier if she’d really been a mom. Because in the past few weeks, she’d had more lessons in the value of patience than she’d been granted for her previous thirty-plus years on the planet.
Only one other person sat in the waiting area, a woman who looked to be in her midseventies. The woman had arrived fifteen minutes earlier, following in a gurney with her husband on it. He’d been surrounded by EMTs and hospital staff, then quickly wheeled into the back.
“We told him to lay off the cheese,” the woman said when Mariella accidentally made eye contact with her. “That stuff is crap on your heart, but he wouldn’t listen.” Her voice broke on the final word.
Mariella didn’t want to bear witness to this woman’s emotions when hers were teetering on the brink of control. She gave a tight nod. “I hope he’s okay.”
The woman compulsively shredded the tissue she held between her fingers. “He fell over right in the middle ofJeopardy. My Thomas is great at supplying those questions. He’s so smart. I told him he should try to get on there. I would have loved to meet Alex Trebeck back in the day. It’s too late for that now and maybe Thomas won’t even have a chance to answer another Final Jeopardy! question.”
Oh, God. This was a nightmare. Having to comfort somebody in such emotional distress. “I’m sure he’ll have many more moments with Final Jeopardy. I’ll...um...pray for him.” She didn’t have much experience with prayer, but she’d be willing to try if it meant this nice old woman would get her husband back.
“Thank you,” the woman whispered. “Who are you waiting on?”
The wordsmy daughteralmost slipped out of Mariella’s mouth, but she didn’t allow herself to say them out loud. She hadn’t earned those words. “A friend had an accident while rock climbing. She’ll be okay though.”
“It’s nice of you to be here,” the woman said.Nicehad never been a word Mariella associated with herself.
Alex came through the big double doors at that moment.
He’d sent home Jack, the employee who had stayed with Heather, when they first arrived. Mariella had been tempted to rail at the guy for putting her daughter in danger, but he looked so young and miserable that she hadn’t bothered.
