Keith (Hathaway House #11) - Dale Mayer Page 0,30

We love spending time together, and I think it’s important to see where that will go,” she said. “But I would just as soon do it coming from a position of truth and trust.”

His gaze widened slightly, and he nodded. “I like the sound of that,” he said. Then he smiled. “But just because I take a step forward doesn’t mean I’m not taking a step back.”

“And,” she said, “just because you fall or fail once doesn’t mean you don’t try again.”

“Deal,” he said, and then he chuckled. “What’s the chance of getting a coffee this morning?”

“So, is it me you wanted to see,” she teased, “or just my coffee?”

His booming laughter rang out through the room, and she was afraid they would wake up the other patients. She walked to the door and said, “Be back in ten. Or not,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “You never know what I’ll find when I hit the kitchen.”

He chuckled and nodded.

She headed to the kitchen with a smile on her face. It was nice to have him back.

Keith listened to her footsteps as she walked down the hallway, his heart much lighter, and his soul wearing a smile for the first time ever. He thought about all the other areas in his life that were so messed up. Yet this one particular area may have just straightened itself out. He wasn’t sure how he’d gone from trying to tell her that she needed to find somebody else to warming to everything she had to say, desperately wanting to be the person who could follow through on it.

Had he really been cutting himself short? She hadn’t implied that, but she certainly had no patience with self-pity. Was he that kind of a person? Maybe he hadn’t been giving his all. And that hurt too. But he was willing to give it a try and to see what he could do. And that just brought up the email he got from his father. He had absolutely no freaking idea how the old man even knew what his email address was. But he half suspected that Robin was behind it. His father was getting a divorce and somehow realized, as he faced the loss of his second family, that maybe he’d already lost the first one, and it might be too late. But, if it wasn’t too late, could his son possibly respond and let him know that he was alive?

Keith hadn’t answered, and now it just sat in the back of his mind, festering. He wasn’t ready to talk to his father. He wasn’t ready to open up any more wounds. And his father, of course, wouldn’t have a clue. He probably had no idea that Keith had even been injured. Then again, with Robin around, his dad definitely might know. But their dad probably didn’t know the details because Robin was as loyal as she was caring.

She might have said that Keith had been hurt in the military and was recovering. But who knew? He should give his dad a chance to find out, but Keith had to look after himself, and enough was shaking loose in his world these days that Keith wasn’t sure he was ready to open up that Pandora’s box too.

It didn’t sound very nice on his part, to see his father as a problem, but Keith knew that his emotional state, although getting stronger by the day, was also still very fragile. And Keith hated that. But what he didn’t want was to have any more setbacks that would slide him backward emotionally either.

Midmorning, when Shane came by, he carried some big files. Keith looked at them and asked, “What’s all that?”

“Progress,” Shane said. “Progress that you need to see but probably wouldn’t, unless you could see the black-and-white of it.”

Keith stared at him and said, “You going to talk or will you show me what’s in there?”

Shane burst out laughing. “Well, I’ll show you.” He laid it out on the bed carefully across Keith’s knees and said, “These are the photos that I took that first day you and I had an appointment. That set of testing, where you were grumbling about how tired you were from doing nothing.”

Keith looked down at the pictures and winced. “Wow,” he said, “those are really ugly.”

“Well, nobody said I was a great photographer either,” Shane said, deliberately misunderstanding him. Then he continued, “This one is at three weeks.”

He held out a photo that was marginally better.