well at the end. How could we have? It was such a miserable end. I’m sorry, too.
That was a huge relief, and more than he deserved.
Jake: I wanted to ask you a question. You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. But you know when we drove the boat out to scatter Jude’s ashes? Should we have said something?
Kerrie: You mean like a prayer?
Jake: I don’t know. Anything.
Kerrie: I didn’t know what to say.
Jake: I didn’t either.
Kerrie: What would you have said if you could go back?
What would he have said? I’m sorry I didn’t protect you better, maybe? But that would open up another conversation about how it wasn’t his fault.
Jake: I don’t know. Maybe just goodbye?
Kerrie: Yes. Goodbye to our boy.
There was a certain comfort in seeing those words that she’d typed. Like they were saying them now. Too late, but also not too late. Because who would they really have been saying them for?
Jake: Anyway, sorry to ambush you. I’ll let you go.
Kerrie: I’m glad to hear from you. But…is there any reason you’re thinking about this all right now?
Jake: I’m never not thinking about it.
Kerrie: Yeah. Yeah, I know.
Chapter Eighteen
She should have called first.
She didn’t have his number, though. It had been written on the back of a receipt months ago and shoved into her purse. She had looked for it on Walsh-giving, to no avail. Anyway, that purse was in her room at the Mermaid, and she hadn’t stopped there first.
Despite Jake’s joke about actually checking his messages the day he’d given her his home number, Nora had never called him. They had an old-fashioned relationship. Friendship. Whatever-ship. He would show up in person, often at lunch. More recently at dinner, with pizza, while she was doing her billing. They’d make plans for the future, and they’d stick to those plans without having to text each other a million updates. It was refreshing.
Jake wasn’t a phone guy. He really wasn’t.
And after the past week and a bit, she needed one thing to stay the same. She needed one thing she could rely on.
She needed a place where she could fall apart. Someone who would let her do that and then prop her up afterward.
She hadn’t been planning on coming back to Moonflower Bay today. The clinic was closed until after New Year’s. There was no reason to hurry back. Her grandmother’s funeral had been yesterday, and today was supposed to be spent opening sympathy cards and sorting through memorial donations. It was supposed to be about grieving together, just her family, without her grandma’s legions of friends and former colleagues hovering. And it had been.
Until around dinnertime, when the weather reports started talking about a massive storm headed for Toronto.
They had all tried to talk her out of it. What was her hurry? It was dark. When the storm came, it might become dangerous. But once she’d heard the meteorologist on the radio say the phrases significant accumulation and snowed in, she’d become almost frantic. She couldn’t be snowed in in the city for several days.
She had to get…back. Initially she’d thought I have to get home. But that wasn’t right. She was home, huddling in a protective cocoon with her parents and siblings and nephews.
The problem was, it didn’t feel that protective. It felt, suddenly, stifling. Everyone was crying all the time and that, paradoxically, made her extra committed to keeping her shit together. Someone had to schedule obituaries and select caskets and wash casserole dishes. So she’d just kept putting one foot in front of the other, kept not crying, a robot carrying out the administrivia of death.
Until she was faced with the prospect of being forced to keep doing it because she was trapped. Escape had become imperative.
Once on the highway, she calmed down a bit. As she made her way along dark, empty country roads, and as the first snowflakes started falling, a word started to fill the silence, pulsing more and more insistently, like a weak heartbeat gaining strength.
Jake.
Jake.
Jake.
For some reason her mind kept landing back on the day—the moment—Rufus had ambushed her last summer. Jake had stood by her—literally stood by her—and lightly rested his hand on her back. He had not spoken. But he had been there, stalwart in his watchful silence.
That was what she needed right now.
She didn’t even know if he would be home. His truck was parked in its usual spot at the corner of Locust and Sarnia, but that didn’t mean