He’d honestly thought it was for the best. She made him forget Jude. When she was around, he wasn’t himself. So if he wanted to protect himself—to protect the memory of his boy—he had to stay away. That was the theory, anyway. The problem was, try as he might, he couldn’t stay away. She was too easy to be with. He missed her. He felt himself drawn back to her, almost against his will, like she was a planet he was orbiting. He’d started bringing Mick around more. Stopping into the Mermaid’s cocktail hours. Putting himself in her path.
Also, he was worried about her.
Which was why, a couple weeks after she’d thrown up in the gazebo, he invited her to the cottage for dinner. Picked up his stupid phone and texted her. I never made you any of that panfried pickerel I promised. You want to come for dinner?
He was surprised when she accepted, given how weird things had been between them lately.
And even more surprised when she showed up looking like a million bucks. Gone was the dullness he’d noticed before. She looked rested and radiant.
He suppressed a sigh as he took her coat and steadied her while she stepped out of the boots he’d left on the other side of the outcropping. She was so gorgeous. It wasn’t fair.
Well, if she was suddenly fine, maybe that made what he’d been planning to say obsolete. But hell, he’d just say it anyway. So as he was dredging the fish in flour and transferring it to an egg bath, he came right out with it. “I’ve been texting with Kerrie a little bit. She went to this grief counselor after Jude died, and she said it really helped her. I thought you might want the name.”
She blinked rapidly. He’d offended her. He tried to change the subject. “You sure you don’t want some wine? Or bourbon?”
“No!” She sounded a little manic. She blew out a breath, paused, and her voice sounded calmer when she spoke again. “You’ve been texting with Kerrie?”
“Yeah. Not much. Just…it was Jude’s birthday recently, so we kind of reconnected.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
She probably thought this was why he’d pulled away from her. “Not like that,” he hurried to say, even as he made himself carry on with the flour-egg-parmesan fish prep. “We’ve just been reminiscing about Jude a bit.”
“Oh, well, that’s good.” She didn’t sound like she meant it. But he didn’t have much time to ponder it because she hit him with a doozy of a question. “If you hadn’t had Jude, do you think you and Kerrie would still be together?”
“Probably not.” He had never really thought about it, but once the question was posed, the answer was right there. “I think we would have grown apart. We got together so young, before we figured out that we wanted different things.” That was the first time he’d verbalized that, but once again, as soon as he said it, he recognized its truth. His hand shook a little as he laid the first prepared fillet into a pan of oil.
“What things? How were they different?”
It was easier to talk about this stuff without looking at her, so he stayed by the pan to fuss over the fish. “Well, she was a hotshot lawyer. She commuted to Guelph every day, and I suspect she regretted that she couldn’t get a job with a big Toronto firm. She would’ve rather we moved, but she let it go—probably because we did have Jude. She knew I’d never want to leave Moonflower Bay, and she knew it was important to me to raise him here. So she didn’t force the issue.”
“She loved you.”
He turned. “Yes.”
“And if Jude hadn’t died?”
“We probably would have made it work for no other reason than we were both stubborn. But in a hypothetical world without Jude, I’m not sure there would have been any point to digging our heels in.”
It struck him as funny suddenly, the way that thought announced itself in his head. A hypothetical world without Jude. He’d meant a world in which Jude had never been born. But a hypothetical world without Jude wasn’t hypothetical. It was this world. He no longer had Jude.
That was a big thought. It was a fact. It was a fact he confronted every day. But it was still intense to think it like that, so overtly.
He wondered why she was asking all these questions. She didn’t seem like the jealous type. And that didn’t seem