“Why don’t we have dinner at my place tonight and then yours on the nights you work?” he suggested.
He didn’t seem to be in any more of a hurry to leave than she was to have him go. But they both had things to do.
Agreeing to be at his place at six, Tabitha waved at him and listened as he started his SUV and pulled out of the drive. She was inside her house by the time he’d parked next door, but she could still feel him with her. Inside her heart.
And she knew that when this was all over, when she had Jackson consuming her days and he had his life consuming his, she was still going to care about him.
She was going to miss him like crazy, but she’d have Jackson.
Life with her son was all she’d wanted for a long time now.
Chapter Ten
They had dinner that night at his place and worked on the lists as planned. He grilled steaks, threw some potatoes in the oven and made a salad. Learning to cook had been something his mother had insisted on when Johnny was in junior high. She hadn’t put her foot down often in the Brubaker household, but when she did, she got her way. Every time.
She’d insisted that no son of hers was going to be incapable of caring for himself and his home if the need ever arose. He’d spent a summer earning his allowance—enough to buy a brand-new sports car when he turned sixteen the next fall. He’d regularly cleaned the ground floor of the five-thousand-square-foot home in which the family lived. The summer before that, he’d had to help the landscapers five days a week—his father had insisted on that one.
He’d also taken lavish vacations to exotic places with his parents every summer. Some of that information she’d known already. Some she was just learning.
But it pointed out their differences so acutely. He knew how much his real life intimidated her. How uncomfortable it all made her.
She wasn’t like him. Growing up with her mom and grandmother, she’d shared the household duties. She’d never been pampered and had told him she never wanted to be. Her independence, and her privacy, were too important to her. They’d had that discussion early on, just a getting-to-know-you talk about their differences.
Differences that didn’t matter during this time out of time, as she’d once called it.
Very little about her life had been easy.
Other than Angel’s death, he’d had a perfect life. Everything money could buy and the richness of family, too. Aunts and uncles. Cousins. A blessed upbringing by parents who not only adored him but were still in love with each other as well.
Yeah, he had everything—except drive. Passion. Maybe because he hadn’t had to fight for a chance. His chances had all been given to him. That had been Angel’s take on it, as he’d explained to Tabitha. But then, Angel had had chances given to her as well, and she’d been overflowing with passion.
His own version of his situation was a bit more difficult to understand. Or fix. He felt he’d been born with a deficit, a defect. Whatever it was that drove people to do crazy things, to take risks, to push themselves beyond endurance in the pursuit of a goal. He had no burning need. No fire.
Not even for the food truck, except insofar as he was doing it to honor Angel. He wanted it to be a success. He knew it would be; he’d made the commitment. But that choice had been driven by his rational mind and his sense of obligation, not by something deep inside himself.
Tabitha was driven from the inside out. Her work, the way she’d taken on the food truck, of course her search for her son...all of it came from some force deep inside her.
It was that force he was missing.
And that would eventually make him less in her eyes.
As it had in Angel’s. And maybe his parents’, too. Their quick approval of his announcement that he was taking a year’s sabbatical to run a food truck was evidence of that. They’d been thrilled that he was determined to do this—to the point of walking away from everything else in his life. That he needed to do it badly enough to sacrifice for it. He hadn’t had the heart to tell them that it wasn’t about passion. Or a burning need. That it was simply his own brand of justice, the way he dealt with the fact that Angel, who’d been so filled with fire, had had her life snuffed out before she could fully live. He’d felt he owed it to her family, her parents were still some of his parents’ closest friends.
In spite of his lack of passion for her, she’d still put Johnny, their families, first. Family first had always been his priority, too. Still was.
He and Tabitha had just finished dinner when his phone buzzed a text message. Seeing the number, he opened it immediately and watched a couple of pictures download.
Tabitha had been clearing the table and came up behind him as he looked at the first one. A man in running pants, a tight T-shirt and tennis shoes was looking toward someone off to his right.
“Who is that?”
His gut sank as he held the phone closer to her. “The text is from Alistair Montgomery,” he said.
“That’s Matt?” She sounded shocked. Took the phone. Stared.
“His hair’s a different color and much longer. He’s not wearing glasses. He’s twice as buff as he was, and he’s lost the little belly fat he had. His lips seem a bit more prominent, but the nose and chin... It could definitely be Mark.”
It sounded to him as though she was talking herself into seeing Mark in the photo. He’d wanted her to instantly recognize the man she’d slept with. To be so certain it was Mark that he was reassured that they were on the right track. He wasn’t. “Tabitha...” At what point did encouraging what might be a wild goose chase become wrong? Their partnership agreement required his support. But when did support mean speaking hard truths?