middle of what she herself had called the most important night of her life, she had taken the time to think about him.
He wasn’t quite sure what to do with that.
He grabbed a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket and scribbled back, Just breathe. You’re rocking the house.
He folded it and wrote To the Chef on the outside and handed it back to the server when she returned to take their dessert orders.
He didn’t think anybody noticed the little interaction but after the server left, Claire McKnight leaned over and spoke to him in a low, amused voice. “Why am I suddenly reminded of our eighth-grade social studies class?”
He smiled. “You tell me.”
Despite what he had said the other night in the heat of the moment about finding Claire boring, he actually really liked the other woman. She struck him as a very kind and giving person.
“You have to remember, we didn’t have cell phones in those days,” she said now. “None of this texting business that takes all the fun out of things. Alex and I had to pass our notes to each other the old-fashioned ways.”
“Poor things.”
“I know. Primitive, right?” She smiled. “You’ll have to ask her about the most embarrassing moment of her junior high school life, when I accidentally dropped the note she had just written me about the boy she had a crush on, Tony Coletti, and it was picked up by our social studies teacher, Mr. Kaiser, who then proceeded to find it highly entertaining to read it aloud to the whole class.”
He tried to picture both of them as girls. It took a little more imagination than he could come up with, especially after such a delicious meal. “You’ve been friends with her for a long time.”
“You could say that. The first day of first grade, Corey Johnson stole my brand-new Barbie lunch box before school and put it way on the top of the big jungle gym that only the older kids played on. I was afraid of heights at the time, too chicken to go after it. Guess who came to my rescue?”
“Um, Wonder Woman.”
“In the form of Alexandra McKnight. Alex climbed right up there without fear, grabbed my lunch box and then jumped all the way down and started hitting Corey with it for being so mean. One of the teachers had to step in to stop her. She and I have been best friends ever since. Oh, and she ended up going to the junior prom with him. He’s a mean drunk now, something we should have guessed by the way he liked to torment little girls.”
He smiled at the story, entranced at these little glimpses into Alexandra’s past. “This is a huge day for her.”
“She’s worked amazingly hard to get here. I hope...”
Her voice trailed off, a worried light in her eyes.
“You hope?” he prompted.
“I hope Brazen is everything she dreams it can be.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s just...have you ever wanted something with all your heart, worked for it, sweated for it, even sacrificed other important things along the way in pursuit of it...only to discover your dream wasn’t exactly how you pictured it?”
He thought about how much he wanted to create a home here for Ethan. So far it was turning out to be everything he wanted and more.
“Not really,” he said honestly. “What about you?”
She glanced at a couple sitting at a nearby table, then turned back with a smile.
“Funny you should ask. Yes, actually. While Alex was mooning over Tony Coletti, all I could ever see was that particular man sitting over there. My ex-husband.”
Startled, he looked closer at the couple. The man was well dressed, if a little too trendy for Sam’s basic-guy tastes, and had artificially streaked blond hair. He sat holding hands with a very pretty brunette who looked to be about fifteen years younger.
He never would have pictured Claire McKnight as being divorced—but then, he remembered Alexandra telling him she had only recently married Alexandra’s brother. That explained how she had older kids then.
“I thought if I only married Jeff Bradford, my life would be perfect. For several years of our married life, I thought it was all I could ever want. One boy, one girl, a husband who was a doctor, a lovely home.”
“I’m guessing by virtue of the fact that he’s your ex-husband, you discovered otherwise,” he said.
She glanced at the man beside her, who was engaged in animated conversation with Jackson Lange, and