hard it felt like my heart had nowhere to go but up and out my throat.
Wondering if that could actually happen, what it might look like, whether the truck would be spattered with blood the way my SUV had been that awful fall day, I barely heard the door open. My engine was humming but the heat hadn’t begun to blow, so I didn’t even feel the cold it let in. But I felt the hands. They were large, one on my back, one on my shoulder, tentative but purposeful. And I heard the voice.
“Breathe,” it said with a kindness it shouldn’t have had after what I had done, the pain and the loss. “Breathe,” it repeated, frightened now.
I tried. Really, I did.
But it wasn’t until he said it a third time, with rising panic, Breathe, Maggie, that I managed to drag in enough air to begin to recover. I was breathing shallowly, ragged but consistent, when he pried my hands from the wheel and turned me into his jacket, where he held me, rubbing my back.
The jacket smelled of a Devon March night way more than of Edward. But the hands that returned to my back had an Edward feel, and the voice was his. It murmured words of encouragement that blurred together, because individual words didn’t matter, only the tone, which was filled with caring and concern.
“I’m okay,” I finally managed, but it was another minute before I managed to ease back, only then realizing that my gloved fingers were folded over the edge of his pockets. Muscle memory? It had to be. Taking them back, I refolded them on the wheel. “I’m fine,” I said and drew in a long, only mildly stuttering breath to prove it to him. I looked at my purse on the seat, the heat panel, the rearview, anywhere but at him. “I’m leaving now.”
He didn’t argue. After a beat, he stepped back and closed the door. Once he had backed off enough so that he could watch me pull out, I put the truck in reverse and moved. I had no idea whether Kevin was still back under the gaslight, and I didn’t look. I simply focused on breathing, driving, getting home.
* * *
Liam was in my living room. His new heavy boots lay just inside the door; his new flannel shirt and sturdy jeans covered his body on my sofa; his new Ragg socks warmed his feet, which were propped on the edge of my coffee table. Jonah was beside him, acknowledging my arrival by opening one eye before closing it and going back to sleep, but the cats came running.
“That was fun,” Liam said. His mouth moved, but not much else. He was satisfied, but clearly tired. He had earned that right.
I wasn’t sure I had earned a thing, but I must have been subconsciously holding it together for the sake of getting safely home, because one foot in the door and I was emotionally wiped. Toeing off my boots, I crouched down to greet the cats and just kept on going until my butt hit the floor. The problem wasn’t only my legs. My whole body felt drained. It often did, after one of my chest episodes—panic episodes, okay, it was panic, when the past came rushing back so fast that emotions clogged my veins, slowing the blood flow—but this one had been extreme.
The last thing I wanted to do now was talk.
Correction. The last thing I wanted to do was to think about what Edward had said. And here was Liam, so at home in my home and, just then, the perfect distraction.
“You did good,” I said with a hand on each cat.
“So did you, Maggie.” He shifted his head on the back of the sofa just enough to aim his apparently-not-so-tired voice my way. “I kept thinking you’d be in to check up on me, but every time I looked around, there you were with someone else. It’s like you know absolutely everyone in town, which I guess makes sense, small town and all, but you didn’t have so many friends growing up.”
“I had friends.”
“Not so many.”
“Maybe you just never saw.”
“True.” He frowned, pensive. “Five years is a big difference. Why do you think Mom waited so long to have a second?”
“Two miscarriages,” I said, but if my brother heard, he didn’t seem touched. I’m not sure a guy could grasp the sense of failure that a woman felt when she had a miscarriage.