Page 54 of The Caretaker
“I’m here.”
“What did you remember?”
I kept it simple, sticking to the thing that would mean the most to him, if I were going off the look on his tear-stained cheeks in the memory. “Forehead kisses…” I trailed off. “Do they make everything better?”
“Yeah,” he said, voice tight, “they do.”
I spoke through the emotion piercing my chest. “Thanks,” I said. “For putting up with my shit. For waiting for me.”
“Always,” he promised, then we hung up.
I’d been about to pull off when I realized that in my dazed state I’d left my coat in the bistro. I jogged back inside, removing it from the hook when part of my conversation with Pauly came back to me.
“He’d sworn that he’d be divorcing the douchebag the second he returned from that ‘save the children mission he was on.’”
Another memory came on the heels of that, from the night Solace told me about Gavin’s death.
“Gavin’s father is a doctor.”
My coat slipped from my hand, and in a daze, I dragged myself over to the bar where Pauly worked on restocking the shelves.“Pauly,”I mouthed, then repeated it. This time with sound. “Pauly!”
“For fuck’s sake,” he breathed, wheeling around and clutching his chest. “I might not take a hint, but that doesn’t mean I’m deaf, Noon. What the hell are you still doing here? I thought you left.”
“The mission that Solace’s husband was on,” I began as my old friend Panic started working its way through my veins.
“Yeah,” he said, waiting expectantly.
“Is it possible that it was called Doctors Beyond Borders?”
“Yes,” he hissed, snapping his fingers and cracking my heart in two. “That was it.”
Solace was asleep in the same position I’d left him in, only now his back wasn’t hidden by his hair, and I finally had to admit to myself what I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge before.
The sweat-slicked spine I’d been dreaming about for months came into sharp focus then, and it was undoubtedly male. And the thick mass of hair I’d tangled around my fist like an endless spool of yarn in said dream was ashen blond, not golden. Not like Stacey’s.
I think I knew. I always knew, or at least intrinsically from the moment I saw him, that he was the reason I’d felt such a strong pull toward Haley Cove. That the sensually moving body that haunted my dreams had been staring back at me every day since I’d arrived here. Pauly was right. I hadn’t wanted to know the truth, which was why it had never seemed like the right time to kiss Solace. To do more than hold and be held by him, because that had felt safer.
Solace stirred after I sat on the bed, blinking up lazily until he noticed I was fully clothed. “Noon?” He scrambled up, catching the sheet at his waist. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere,” I said, wrapping my hand around his hair, closing my eyes and revisiting the ghost of my dream.
“You’re scaring me,” he said. “How does your head feel? And why are you dressed?”
There was no escaping the truth, even though I wanted to. If I wanted to know where I was going, I first needed to know where I’d been and why. It started with asking the right questions. It started with asking the hardest one first, the one that squeezed at my heart and clawed at my gut. I took the deepest breath I’d ever taken and then started where I knew it would hurt the most.
“The baby wasn’t mine, was it?”
Solace sucked in a sharp breath, gaze darting across my face, over the pain he saw there. He inched closer, cradling my cheeks between his hands before whispering, “No, Care Bear. It wasn’t.”
Solace
Then
I TOOK OVERthe task of driving once we arrived in Haley Cove. Not only because Noon missed our exit twice, but because I wanted to play tour guide, and he wanted to capture every scene and every second of the place I dreamed of calling home one day.
“Can you close the window now?” I asked with a carefree laugh.
“The photos don’t come out the same when a sheet of glass is in the way,” he replied, face hanging out the window as he snapped photos of the mom-and-pop shops we passed along Main St. I shook my head as I cranked the heat up to compensate for the brisk air pouring in.
