system. She’d taken the paper cover off a book and put it on what I really wanted to read so I could read in private.”
“That’s awesome.”
“I kept changing out the covers until two weeks after we got back from Christmas break, when we had a guest speaker—a retired astronaut. He brought an old space suit, and all the kids went crazy. The next week, they all started taking out books about astronauts on library days. Mrs. Moynihan was always special to me. I kept in touch with her for years. When I was in tenth grade, she died, and my mom took me to her wake. We walked over to Mr. Moynihan to give condolences, and he recognized my name. Turned out, the reason he remembered my name was because his wife had spent an entire Christmas break hand-writing letters to a hundred-and-fifty astronauts begging them to come speak at the school because she had a student who needed the others to see how cool space could be.”
“Wow. A hundred-and-fifty, hand-written letters. That’s dedication.”
I nodded. “What did you want to be when you were little?”
Ford grinned. “Well, it changed as I got older, but in kindergarten my teacher had us draw pictures of what we wanted to be. I drew Santa Claus.”
“You wanted to be Santa?”
“Don’t laugh. It’s a damn good job. You only work one night a year, you get to fly around on a sleigh pulled by kick-ass reindeers, and everyone leaves you cookies on the table when you stop by.”
“Uhhh, Santa works all year making the toys.”
He shrugged. “I thought the elves did all that.”
“What happened after you found out Santa wasn’t real?”
Ford abruptly stopped in place, and his eyes bulged. “Santa’s not real?”
The two of us cracked up. When we started walking again, Ford said, “You’re going to think I’m full of shit, but after I realized the Santa thing wasn’t going to work out, I wanted to be an astronaut.”
I shoved his arm. “You’re just saying that because I told you I was obsessed with space.”
Ford drew an X across his chest. “I swear. But it does make sense why our connection is so strong. We’re both space nerds at heart.”
He was teasing me, but he wasn’t wrong. Our connection was strong. Even before I knew his personality came attached to a gorgeous face and ridiculously hard body, I’d felt it, too. Ford made me laugh and feel good about myself.
I tamped down that thought and steered our conversation to safer territory. “So how did you wind up going to school for architecture if you were such a space nerd?”
“I was actually a dual applied science and architecture major in college the first two years. But dropped the science in my third.”
“What made you focus on architecture?”
He looked over at me, and it seemed like he was debating how to answer. Finally, he shrugged. “Life. I’d been living away in Boston at college, and after the accident, I wanted Annabella to stay in New York and finish school with her friends. We have a pretty small family—my dad was an only child, and my mom has one sister. My Aunt Margaret lives in Ohio and offered to take us both in, but we’d just lost our parents and experienced enough change to last a lifetime. So I moved back home, and Bella and I stayed together in our parents’ apartment while I finished my degree and started to work full time in the company. The change to one major just seemed more practical. I didn’t have as much free time to do the work for two difficult majors.”
Oh. Wow. I hadn’t thought about the logistics of them losing their parents—what had happened immediately after his parents died. Naturally, I’d assumed it had been a life-changing event—to lose both young parents unexpectedly in one day. But Ford had sacrificed so much for his little sister. He’d become a parent with a teenage daughter and an inherited business to run overnight. The choices he’d made were noble and mature.
I reached out and touched his arm. “Not every person would have given up what you did.”
“Trust me, I had my moments where I didn’t do the right thing. A few years back, my aunt had to step in and set me straight. One morning I walked into the office and sat at my desk, and it hit me that I was a forty-five-year-old man at twenty-two. I had a sixteen-year-old kid, lived in my parents’ house, and was