eaten.”
She looked at him, her eyes gentle for once. “Keep going.”
Right. She wouldn’t let him stop now. He nodded. “So, she got cancer. Breast cancer. Had chemo, had surgery. Was in remission for a little while, but I feel like she knew…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It ended up in her spine, and I feel like even when they said she was better, she knew she wasn’t. But my mum was very cheerful. She was always smiling and focusing on everyone else, on helping people. She didn’t think about herself much.”
“Like you,” Ruth said. Not as if it were a compliment, exactly; more like she was clarifying, verbalising her understanding. So Paris is the capital of France, and your mother was like you.
He shrugged, feeling suddenly awkward. “I don’t know. I’d like to be like her. She was a good person.”
Ruth nodded.
“But when she died I signed up to the army. So I suppose I’m more like my dad. I mean, he was an officer, but I like making things, so I became a metalsmith. That’s what it’s called.” Most people had no idea what he meant, when he told them what he’d done. Ruth just nodded. She was doing a lot of nodding right now. He didn’t mind. “I served for eleven years, and I felt like it made me… better. I felt like I got over it.”
She gave a sad smile. “There are some things you don’t get over. You just accept them and keep breathing. That’s enough.”
He huffed out a humourless laugh. She didn’t know how right she was. Eleven years in the army, while everyone else forged friendships that would last a lifetime, and all he had was friendly acquaintances and fuck buddies.
He hadn’t been capable of much else, not for years, no matter how hard he tried. He hadn’t been over the loss of his family. He’d just been trying to accept it.
“I wish I’d had someone to tell me that,” he admitted. “My mum would’ve told me that. But…” He shrugged. Because he was better now and had been for a while. “I met a guy here in Ravenswood. At work. I like him. Turns out, his mother’s sick too.”
“Zachary Davis,” Ruth said.
Evan stared. “How’d you know?”
“Hannah told me. Hannah knows everything about everyone.”
Hannah, her mysterious older sister. The way Ruth talked, Hannah just might be God Herself. Evan shook his head, a smile creeping past his sadness. “Right. Well, I’ve been visiting Zach’s mother. She’s a great woman. But they…”
Now that Ruth knew who he was talking about, giving her details felt like a betrayal of trust. He wanted to. Desperately. But sharing the Davis’s business was not something a friend would do, so he tempered his words.
“They got some bad news about Mrs. Davis’s condition,” he finished. “Nothing is certain; it could be a mistake. They’re running tests. And I don’t know why it upset me so much—I mean, it’s bad, but I feel like…” Like his heart had been torn out of his chest. Like an invisible hand had plunged into his body, grabbed his guts, and twisted.
Ruth said, “Like your mother’s dying again?”
His mouth fell open. His throat was dry, his eyes stinging, his pulse thick and sluggish. “I… Yes. Shit. Yes.”
She ran her tongue over her teeth. She was thinking. And since when did he know her every subtle expression? Since when had he learned to read an unreadable woman?
He’d been expecting her to spring into action, but he still jumped a little as she rose. With one of those almost-smiles he’d grown to love, she plucked the tray from his lap and said, “Want to go for a walk?”
Evan stared. “With you?”
Her smile flickered, disappeared. “I… Um… Not necessarily—”
“I just meant—you want to go outside?”
She raised her brows. “You have seen me outside before. It happens. You know that, right?”
Evan squinted, pretended to think about it.
“Oh, behave yourself,” she huffed. “Do you want to, or not?”
“I do,” he said. “I really fucking do.”
Evan didn’t know what he’d expected when Ruth disappeared to change clothes, but it wasn’t this.
They wandered into town, their arms swinging close enough for him to fantasise about holding her hand. He wouldn’t, though. She might push him into the road. Instead, he took furtive glances down at her. At this strange, pyjama-less Ruth.
It had genuinely never occurred to him that she might have real clothes. He’d seen her in the car park, after all, the first day they’d met, and she’d been wearing