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Chapter Three

The situation was ironic, Jake decided.

He’d come back to Portland to heal one rift, only to face another one. And to be honest, in his adult life he’d been affected a heck of a lot more by what had happened between himself and Stacey than by the fact that his father and his uncle didn’t speak to each other.

Am I going to let this happen?

Am I going to let us go the whole evening without talking about what we went through together, and how we feel now? I want to say Anna’s name out loud, to the one person who’ll understand how sweet and sad it sounds.

No. He wasn’t going to let it slide.

He couldn’t.

They had to talk.

He looked across the room at Stacey. He’d been tracking her the whole evening, for a good two hours at least, although he’d tried not to let anyone see it—especially Stacey herself.

To his eyes, she was the star of the whole gathering. The prettiest. The warmest. The best listener. The one who set up the most unlikely conversational pairings—such as the one between his brother Ryan’s supercilious, bored-looking girlfriend and his cousin Eric’s quiet wife, Jenny.

“Anitra, Ryan tells me you’re studying for a law degree, part-time, while you model,” Jake had heard her say, while pretending he wasn’t listening. “Jenny, you’re an attorney and I know you were juggling a lot of commitments at one stage. Any tips for Anitra?”

Now Anitra was laughing with Jenny, in the middle of one of those very female conversations where they’re both nodding like crazy and going, “Oh, I know! Oh, absolutely! Oh, I totally understand!” the whole time.

Jillian and her friend Lisa Sanders were talking together very earnestly. Stacey had been a part of their conversation for some minutes, also. Lisa seemed a little upset and agitated. Stacey had listened intently to what she’d said, nodding and frowning. Now Jake heard Jillian say in a decisive way, “You cannot have something like this hanging over you, Lisa, and neither can Carrie and Brian. Get the legal situation checked out. If there’s any chance that your ex could invalidate the adoption…”

Lisa chewed on her lip. “My ex. I can’t believe we were ever involved. It seems a lifetime ago. And I can’t believe he would try to mess with all our lives like this, just because he thinks there’s something in it for him.” She shook her head, sounding distressed, and Jake realized he should move farther away from what was obviously a very personal conversation.

Meanwhile, Stacey had retreated to his kitchen to load the dishwasher, which unfortunately matched the oven and had similar cryptic controls.

His cue, he decided, heading in that direction. “Try the Mercedes-Benz symbol, Stace.”

“Yeah, I would,” she answered, straightening. If her cheeks had been a faint, pretty pink before, they were flushed now. It suited her, hinted at her emotional nature. “Only there isn’t one.”

“Leave the dishwasher,” he growled at her. “I want to talk to you.”

“The feeling isn’t mutual, Jake, right now.” She hunched her shoulders, and hugged her arms across her front. “We—we flirted before, and we shouldn’t have. It was irresponsible and meaningless and just dumb. If you think I’m backing off fast…you’re right! I don’t want to talk.”

“Don’t you think this is the best time?” He stepped closer, because he didn’t want people to hear this. “When seeing each other again has brought our emotions so close to the surface?”

“Why do we have to talk at all? We haven’t, for seventeen years, and we’ve done okay.”

“Have we? Have we really done okay? I think it’s all still there, underneath. I think it’s still affecting us.”

“Well, of course.” Her voice dropped low. “There’s still barely a day goes by that I don’t think about Anna….”

There it was. The sad sound of her name that he’d needed to hear, and that reproached him every single time. In his mind, he could see her, the tiny, tiny form, the black silky hair, the paper-thin translucent skin, those brief, fluttering movements she’d made before—

Stop.

Just stop.

“…especially since I had the twins,” Stacey was saying.

“Not just Anna,” he forced himself to argue. “The choices we made afterward. The things we turned our backs on.”

“You turned your back on.”

“You, just as much.”

“I don’t see it that way.” She sounded very stubborn, with a good bit of bravado in the mix.

“No?” he challenged her. “We always talked about seeing the world, and yet you’re still here in Portland with a failed marriage, stuck in a dreary suburban rut….”

She flinched, and he wished he’d chosen his words better.

Then she lifted her chin and returned the attack, which shouldn’t have surprised him. “So making a family means being in a rut, does it, Jake? What about you? Some people wouldn’t call what you’ve done with your life widening your horizons, they’d call it running away.”

“They’d be wrong. I like my life very much.”

“Good for you.” She blinked back sudden tears. “And I like mine. There. We’ve talked. We’ve told each other we’re happy. We’ve defended our choices. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“Stacey…”

“It’s enough,” she repeated. “Thank you for this.” She waved vaguely at the gathering, which was still going strong after two or three hours. “I like your family. I’ve had a good time. I’m glad Jillian invited me. But I’m going home.”

He didn’t try to argue, but only because he’d already decided to tackle their talk a different way.

The worst part about Stacey’s rare evenings out when the twins were away was that she had to come back to an empty house. She’d left the heating turned up and a couple of lights on in strategic places, so the space was cozy enough. Her garage opened directly into a mudroom off the kitchen, which meant there was no interval of cold and vulnerability as she walked between the car and the house, but still it felt lonely and wrong.

So much in her life was right. Her children, her job, her house, her friends.

This part of it wasn’t.

She’d never planned for a life in which she had to come home at night alone. She liked the warmth of people around her, and found it nourishing. As a poor substitute for actual human contact, she checked the answer machine and found a message from her sister, Giselle, which was unusual. Stacey was the elder by five years and they’d never been all that close. Giselle had only been thirteen when she and Mom and Dad had moved to San Diego.

On the machine, she sounded perky and busy. “Hi-i, Stacey! Just calling. No reason. Talk to you soon. Bye-ee!”

No other messages.

Which was good, because it meant that everything must be running smoothly for John with the twins.

Stacey looked at the clock on the microwave—9:42. “What?” she complained to the green numbers. “You leave me with an hour between now and bed, and no suggestions about what I should do? You couldn’t have made it 10:25?”

No reply from the clock.

She made herself some hot chocolate, lit the gas fire—more for the companionship of its cheerful blue and orange flames than for its warmth—and put on a DVD.

About twenty minutes later, she’d gotten comfortable when her doorbell rang, which spooked her a little at this time of night—until she looked through the peephole.

She should have known.

Jake.

Heart sinking, she opened the door for him, with a brief, “Hi,” then stood back in silence for him to walk past her into the house. Clearly, he’d meant what he said about needing to talk. Even outside of rush hour, his place was a solid twenty-minute drive from here. He must have left his guests with Jillian to act as hostess. What kind of excuse had he made?

He didn’t intend to waste any time getting to the point, it seemed. She offered several beverage options, hot and cold, but he waved them all away. She ushered him toward the fire, but he ignored her and paced up and down the patterned Persian rug instead.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said what I did about you being in a rut. It wasn’t exactly the best start I could have made.”

“Start to what?”

“We have to say this stuff, Stacey! We’re going to keep seeing each other around the hospital. Nancy and Jillian both think of you as a friend, and I’m working on thinking of them as family. The connections are there, and ongoing. We ended in such a mess seventeen years ago. We’re a lot older now. You know I loved you—”

“Did you? You loved me? You’d claim that?”

“Do you doubt it?”

“You pushed me away! You picked fights. I was the one who finally said It’s over, yes, but you made me say it, Jake. You didn’t rest until you’d goaded me into it!”

He stopped pacing in the middle of the rug, pinned by her words. They’d hit home. She could see it.

“You manipulated me into saying it,” she went on, “as the punch line to a massive fight, and you left me with the guilt when I did. We conceived Anna together, and we lost her, and then you manipulated the relationship so that I was the one who couldn’t let the loss bring us closer. It took me a long time to see all of that, but I know it’s the way it was. The only thing I don’t understand is why. If you’re telling me you did love me…”

“Of course I did.”

“But you stopped loving me after Anna died? Because you wanted to be free?”

“After Anna died, I was never going to be free,” he muttered, so low that she wasn’t convinced she’d heard him right.

“Well, it’s the only reason I can come up with.” She turned toward the gas fire, needing to look at those leaping flames, instead of Jake’s frowning face.

“Is it?” he said.

“The evidence is there in the life you’ve lived since, Jake.” She didn’t turn to face him again, but felt him move closer. “I’ve seen your résumé. No wife. No kids. You don’t stay in one place for longer than two or three years. You’ve worked all over the world. Clearly that need for newness and change and movement runs deep. And it angers me that you couldn’t be honest about it. You wanted your freedom, but you couldn’t say so. You had to turn me into the bad guy, instead.” She shook her head. “I had the same thing from my mother my whole life, growing up. I was the disappointing daughter, the one who messed up, while Giselle was perfect. I can fall into the role of bad guy sooo easily, Jake. Very convenient for you. And yet—you didn’t put me there on purpose? If you did—” she shook her head again “—then we really have nothing to say.”

“You weren’t this angry yesterday, or earlier tonight.”

She laughed. “No, because believe it or not, in a rut or not, I do have a life—one that I find very satisfying, by and large.”

“Tell me.”

“My job, my kids, my friends, my house, my hobbies. I haven’t spent the past seventeen years dwelling on grievances. I’m a pretty positive person. At first, when I saw you and talked with you, I remembered the good times. The connections.”

Oh, boy, did she remember the connections! He’d moved to stand beside her now, and they both watched the fire. Every cell in her body seemed to pull toward him. What was it about this one man? She had to take a breath to steady herself before she could continue.

“Now, though, when you tell me that I’m in a rut, and say that you did love me…Yes, I’m angry. It’s confusing and upsetting. And I really don’t understand.”

She had to wait a long time for his reply. The fire purred faintly, and the room was so quiet that she could hear the whir of the DVD player, which she’d left on the pause setting. Finally, he spoke. If that DVD player had been any louder, she wouldn’t have heard.

“I pushed you away because I felt so damn guilty, Stacey.”

Jake heard the words that came out of his mouth after the long silence and didn’t know if he could follow through with the full truth, even now. Was this what he’d meant by talking? Had he intended to make this much of a confession?

He’d driven here without rehearsing his lines, without much rational thought at all. He’d just known he needed to see her again tonight, not wait for some awkward moment when they ran into each other at the hospital.

As soon as he’d entered her house he’d felt the old attraction flare once again. He’d barely taken in the decor, just a vague impression of warmth and color and quirkiness, the kind of detail you promised yourself you’d take a closer look at next time.

And then the first thing he’d done was apologize, because there was so much he regretted when it came to Stacey and their shared past. But could he talk about it?

“Guilty?” she echoed. “Because Anna came too soon? How was that your fault? The doctors told us—”

“Because it let me off the hook. It opened the door to the original plan, the one we’d had to let go of when we found out you were pregnant. You know the saying. Be careful what you wish for.”

Tears filled her eyes. “You wished for—”

He swore harshly. “No! Of course I didn’t wish for us to lose Anna! But I would never have chosen at that age to get married and be a father and settle down in Portland, Stacey. I wanted you, but I didn’t want the whole traditional package. Not then. Not at eighteen.”

“And now?”

“We’re not talking about now. But, no, I don’t see myself ever going that route, I have to say.”

“Because it’s boring? Narrow?”

“Because it’s…”

Too scary, and too hard.

Anna had taught him this. Most men—boys—have pretty simplistic attitudes to life at eighteen. Love is love. Grief is grief. Freedom is freedom. You want what you want. No ambivalence. No excuses. Until Stacey’s pregnancy he’d never imagined you could tear yourself in two with such conflicting, opposing emotions—emotions that simply had no way to coexist. Loving Stacey became a burden. Loving Anna was a burden, also, and every bit as heavy.

“Because it’s just not for me,” he finished after a moment. “It’s still not. And it definitely wasn’t for me back then. There were times—a lot of times—when I just wanted the whole situation to go away. Like for some superhero to fly up into space—” he mocked himself with words and tone “—and reverse the rotation of the earth so that time would spin itself back to the moment before I didn’t pick up a pack of condoms the night of the prom, or something. It wasn’t logical. It was never logical or rational or thought out, Stacey. I just wanted the situation to go away,” he repeated.

“And then it did.”

“And then it did.”

“And I was racked with grief, while you—”

“I was, too. Never doubt that! Only I didn’t have the right to be, I only had the right to feel guilty, because at some level I’d made it happen. Again, not rational. We were both in a mess. For a while, I tried to pick up the idea of us traveling, going to college together somewhere different. Like New York.”

“I remember you talked about New York.”

“You weren’t interested. You didn’t want to know. You wanted me to stay at Portland State.”

“I needed time, for heaven’s sake!”

“I know,” he answered quietly. “I just couldn’t see it then. Of course you did. But even if I’d given it to you, I’m not sure that it would have helped, because I wasn’t ever going to let myself be happy with you after we lost Anna.”

“Because you didn’t think you deserved to get what you’d always wanted—the two of us and the wide horizons.”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, Jake…” She didn’t sound angry anymore.

“I picked the fights. I did push you away. I’m so sorry about that, Stacey, believe me. When you told me we were finished, it hurt like hell, but I felt like it had to happen. It was inevitable. There was a relief, too. Cosmic justice had been served.”

“Jake…”

“I was eighteen. We were eighteen.” To both of them, it sounded so impossibly young.

He put his arm around her and she leaned in, not away. Her head dropped to his shoulder. They stared at the flames. He felt a cloak of peace settle over his shoulders. Peace and trust.

“Tonight, when I said her name…” Jake revealed. “You’re the only one I can say her name to, Stacey. My mom and dad, maybe, but it’s still not the same.”

“No. It wouldn’t be.”

Her bare arm felt warm beneath his hand. Her hip bumped his and he realized their thighs were pressing together, separated only by the fabric of his jeans and her frothy skirt. None of this was about sex, though, it was about shared pain and mutual support.

“I said something about her to my mother, once,” she said quietly, after a minute. “Maybe five years ago? I used her name. After Anna died. Do you know what Mom said?”

“Tell me.”

“‘Who’s Anna?’ Mom had forgotten that we ever named her.”

“She’d forgotten? The name of her own lost granddaughter?”

“I know. It felt like a punch in the gut.”

He turned her into his arms and said against the softness of her hair, “You are a miracle, Stacey.”

“Because I’m not like my mother?” she whispered.

“Yes!”

He couldn’t speak.

He had more to remember.

Those awful moments when they’d had to break the news to their respective parents that Stacey was pregnant. They’d announced their plan to marry at the same time. He knew his parents had had doubts and concerns, but they’d expressed them in the context of their love and support, and they’d swallowed a lot of their fears, ready to just be there, rather than preach.

Stacey’s mother had been far more vocal, all of it a variation on the theme of, “How could you do this to me?” How could Stacey and Jake embarrass Trisha Handley with a teen pregnancy in front of her friends? How could they make her a grandmother, when she was only forty-three? And if they thought they’d be able to dump the baby on her for free child care whenever they felt like it, it wasn’t going to happen, because Bob Handley’s company was transferring him to San Diego in the spring, thanks very much, so she wouldn’t be around.

He wasn’t surprised that Stacey had chosen to stay in Portland when her parents and her younger sister had moved. She’d toughed out her freshman year at Portland State, earning a couple of incompletes when they lost the baby, and she’d stayed on there after Jake himself had left town. She’d moved into one of the college dorms when her parents sold their house, continued her degree part-time while she worked, and, he suspected, had remained independent of her family ever since.

He might question her choices and her priorities, but he would never question her courage.

He held her closer, feeling the heat from the gas fire against his legs. She made no move to push him away, and time seemed to slow while the universe shrank to this one point of sanity and rightness. He and Stacey, holding each other, seventeen years too late. He pressed his cheek against hers, needing the touch of her skin. She rubbed her face against his jaw like a cat, and he could smell the soft, flowery fragrance she must have dabbed below her ears at the beginning of the evening.

“Oh, Jake…”

He didn’t intend to kiss her. He really didn’t. But she pressed her lips to his cheek…it wasn’t an intentionally sexual or inviting gesture, and yet it had the same effect. This close, he wanted her, and his body reacted to the signals she sent, even if she didn’t know she was sending them.

“Stace…” He turned his head the necessary inch and found her mouth, sweet and soft, while it was still imprinting those chaste, emotional kisses on his skin—the kind of kisses she might have given a crying child. “Stace…”

The kiss changed.

She made a small sound of protest in her throat.

Protest or need, he couldn’t tell.

Mixed signals.

He interpreted them the way he wanted, supported by the evidence of her arms holding him tighter, her body going pliant and soft, her lips parting to welcome him in. Their tongues met and swirled together, and he remembered. They used to kiss for hours, long ago. They burned each other up.

Tonight, she tasted of chocolate and wine and her hair smelled like strawberries. He felt the push of her breasts and the bump of her hips. He slid his hands over the back of her skirt, loving the taut curves he could feel beneath the swishy fabric.

Her fingers stroked his neck, ran up into his hair. His mouth wasn’t enough for her and she kissed his whole face—his closed lids, his cheekbones, his forehead and back to his eager lips—as if she had to learn every contour by heart while she could.

They both grew breathless, and the heat of the fire became totally swamped by the throbbing heat in his groin. He wanted to pull off her clothing, see her body, feel the weight of her breasts in his hands, suckle her until she gasped and cried out, take her right here, thrusting into her swollen sweetness without another word or a pause for thought.

If they were going to stop…

They had to stop.

She thought so, anyhow.

She pulled away with a gasping breath and held his face between her hands, studying the expression in his eyes.

Which was probably pretty easy to read.

“You have a bad effect on me,” she said.

“Yeah…?”

Sounded like a nice idea. How much bad effect did she want? He had plenty, he could give her a ton of it. And her mouth was so close.

“Your body switches off my brain.”

“Brains need a break, sometimes.”

“Not tonight, Jake. Not with you.”

“Not even when it’s obvious how much we both want it? Not even when we think about how good it once was?”

“Especially not then.” In her eyes, clouds crossed over the blue. “I—I don’t even know why we’re standing here like this. Why I let you kiss me. Or why I kissed you back.” She muttered something under her breath. Swearing at herself?

“Stacey…”

“Should I still be angry with you? I have no idea. You talked about how you felt back then. Is that enough? Do you hear how I sound? I’m at sea when it comes to you. I don’t know what I do feel or what I should feel or what I want to feel.”

“No…”

“It stopped being simple after Anna died and I don’t think it’ll ever be simple again. If seventeen years of complicated living didn’t solve it, I’m not sure what could.” She took a couple of shuddery breaths and then he felt her shoulders lift and square. “Jake, let’s please not get ourselves into a situation where this can be repeated.” She dropped her hands from his face. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry. It’s what we missed before, isn’t it? What I missed. The saying sorry. It’s seventeen years too late, but for what it’s worth, after what we’ve said to each other tonight, I’m so sorry.”

“For what?”

“For turning you into the bad guy when we split up. You’re right. I mean, I don’t think that was my motivation—to let myself off the hook—but I can see that the end result was the same. You felt as if it was your fault, and it wasn’t. It’s funny how two people can see the same situation from such opposite angles.”

He still held her loosely, but wasn’t surprised a few seconds later when she peeled herself out of his arms and put some distance between them. “I guess we did need this. The talk. But you should probably get back to your family dinner.”

“Kicking me out?”

“Not exactly. But I do think you should go.” Her blue eyes still glittered with emotion.

“What are we left with then, Stacey?”

She spread her hands. “You tell me. We’re going to see each other pretty much every week, for as long as you stay in Portland. There should be an agreement. Daggers drawn? Nasty e-mails? Frosty formality?” Her humor attempted to undercut the lingering atmosphere, but didn’t fully succeed.

“Listen, I want us to be…if not friends, then amicable colleagues. We can manage that, can’t we?”

“Sure.” She gave a bright nod. “I can do amicable. I’ve had practice.”

“Yeah?”

“My parents. My sister. My ex. I’m the queen of amicable. I wrote the manual. I can do amicable in my sleep, with both hands tied behind my back.”

“You’re telling me that’s not what you want?”

“Not at all. I just wonder sometimes if that’s the best I can hope for.” She looked him in the eye. “Sometimes amicable is just code for superficial, don’t you think?”