She wished now she’d insisted on it.
She wouldn’t be sitting there seeing him in his younger brother if she had. Wouldn’t be thinking she wanted Scott, when it was really Paul she longed for.
“How do you do it?” She probably shouldn’t ask, but spending so much time with Scott in the past two days had given her a false sense of emotional closeness.
“Do what?” He was bent slightly over his cobbler, though he wasn’t eating the dessert with any relish.
“Get by,” she said, setting her fork down on a plate still half-full. “Keep going.”
He glanced up, the look in his blue eyes tired but piercing. “Who says I do?”
“Don’t you?”
“Some days, maybe.”
“And on those days when you don’t get by, what do you do then?”
“Work.”
Laurel, too. All the time. Work was her salvation. Her life. The keeper of her sanity.
“Do you ever get mad?”
He fr
owned, putting a bite into his mouth with deliberation and chewing slowly. “Sure.”
“At God for taking him?”
“Maybe. Occasionally.” He wasn’t meeting her eyes.
“At Paul?”
“No.”
Laurel swallowed a lump of guilt. “Never?”
“Never.” He glanced up then. “Do you?”
She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t lie to him, but was ashamed to tell him the truth.
“Sometimes.” She blinked back tears that didn’t come as readily these days as they had during that first year. “I just get so mad at him for not hanging on, for letting fate take him away, for not choosing to stay with me....”
Scott didn’t say anything, but his gaze was warm, not disgusted.
“Crazy, huh?” Laurel asked.
“No.” He shook his head and took another slow bite of cobbler, almost as if it were his duty to clean his plate, not because he actually wanted the dessert. “Anger is a perfectly natural phase of grief.”
She knew that. She’d learned it in her Life After Loss classes. “But it’s been three and a half years. That phase should have ended by now.”
“You still get mad at him?”
“Yeah.”
“You mad at him right now?”
His gaze held hers, leaving Laurel feeling confused—and yet more alive than she’d felt since she’d left this town devastated and unable to cope three and a half years ago.