Page 35 of A Convenient Heart
Jack felt a line of tension stretch across his shoulders. He dug the shovel into the ash and began to move it aside, clearing down to the pure dirt underneath.
“What does it matter if Merritt loses her job? I thought y’all getting married meant she’d be finished in the classroom.”
Jack kept shoveling, but Drew grabbed his shoulder and hauled Jack around to face him. Jack dropped the shovel with a thunk. He straightened, chest puffing out, hands curling into fists at his sides.
The train whistle tooted two short blasts. Pulling out now. Jack should’ve been on it. He knew it.
“You planning on marrying my cousin or not?” Drew demanded.
She won’t have me!
Jack’s mind shouted the words, even as his lips were clamped shut.
His memory played scenes from last night—Merritt working in the kitchen with Tillie, the two of them with heads bent over the counter workspace, whispering. Merritt’s smile that had glanced off him when she’d looked up.
For the first time in decades, Jack wanted something more than his solitary existence.
But Merritt wasn’t for him. She hadn’t chosen him. He was playacting, trying to help her.
He was a fool for mollycoddling any emotions that felt real.
Drew scanned the ground that Jack had cleared. When he glanced up at Jack again, his eyes narrowed, like he didn’t fully trust him.
Jack didn’t trust himself.
Drew’s hand dropped away from his shoulder at the same moment that Jack caught sight of movement, a body striding down the boardwalk. The gait was familiar…
Morris.
Recognition flashed through Jack in an instant. Morris had his head turned to the side, looking in a store window.
It was the chance Jack needed to turn his back.
“I gotta go,” he told Drew.
The other man’s brows started to pinch, but Jack couldn’t stay here—not with Morris headed this way.
“Hang on?—”
But Jack was already walking away. He cut through the corner of the site and ducked through the alley behind the café. Paused there. Morris should walk past the end of the street in three…two…
Jack hung back behind the edge of the building as Morris passed across the side street between two businesses and moved out of sight.
A beat of relief flowed, followed by a twist in Jack’s gut.
Morris had been on that westbound train. Jack had watched long enough while the train had chugged out of the station to know that the hired gun hadn’t disembarked.
How had he ended up back in Calvin? He must’ve been on this morning’s train. Must still be hunting Jack.
And Jack’s first name was now known all around town, though he’d played fast and loose with the truth about his surname when Merritt had made assumptions.
Jack had never harbored hopes that somehow he’d end up with Merritt at the end of this. But if he had, this sighting of Morris would’ve been all he needed to set himself straight.
Jack had a past. One that might come looking for him at any moment.
And Morris wasn’t even the worst of it. Merritt didn’t know about his childhood, about how broken he really was.
Jack would never belong here.
