“Can I come in?”
When she didn’t answer he entered anyway, but only a few feet.
“I’m sorry. I heard what you were saying. I just wanted to tell you about your mom and me.”
What a calm voice, what kind eyes...
Hannah was frowning toward him but she gave a shallow nod. Wiped tears.
“Your mother and I used to date. Years and years ago. Before she met your father. Only for a few months. Then it was over with.”
Parker said earnestly, “Han, cheating? No, that wasn’tus. I had my faults. Your father had his. But that? No, never.”
What was the point? In fast memory, flaring spontaneously, she was picturing the last time Jon and she had made love, which wasn’t that long before he was arrested for assault.
It had been so nice. It always was. Consuming. And it was yet one more thing she regretted saying goodbye to when she’d pressed charges.
This memory killed her.
What she’d told her daughter was one hundred percent true. Oh, there were flaws in the Merritt-Parker marriage, but infidelity was not one of them.
“All the things he said when he was drunk? Nonsense and mean. And half of it didn’t make sense in the first place. He lit candles on a waffle for your birthday—six months early. And got mad at you when the tablecloth caught fire. He said why didn’t you thank him for the dog he bought you? What dog? There never was a dog. He accused me of banging up the new car—when it was him. His reality was different.”
Hannah was wiping tears on her sleeve. Her mother plucked a tissue from a box printed with gaudy orange daisies.
Don’t go away, she begged silently. Stay with me.
Hannah took the slip of Kleenex and wiped.
For the tenth, the twentieth, time in the past two days, she found herself touching her cheek, the skin just above the crack, long healed, the ridge prominent as a mountain, despite the doctor’s reassurance that that could not be.
Parker took her daughter’s hands. “They’ll find him, they’ll get him some help in prison.” And added spontaneously, “The help I should have gotten him last year.”
This was what the girl needed to hear. She nodded.
Emotions roiled within Parker. Oh, her daughter believed her about the infidelity. She was pretty sure on that. But this, of course, was not the end of the story. For the time being, though, the angst and anger were sidelined.
It was time for strategic withdrawal.
“I’m starving.” She looked at her daughter. “Mr. Vill—”
“No, make it Frank.”
“Frank’s going to make some lunch for us.”
“Okay.”
“You go on,” Parker said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
The girl blew her nose and pitched out the tissue. She pulled her jacket off, tossed it on the bed and followed Frank into the hallway. Parker stepped into the bathroom and leaned, hands on the vanity, head down, wiping her own tears.
From the moment they’d met in the research department of Midwest Particle Technology she’d been comfortable with him. He was kind and funny. And he was as smart as she was, smarter in some disciplines.
They had both understood at exactly the same moment that there wasn’t enough chemistry to make them a couple—the sort of chemistry that sparks a true connection.
Chemistry...
That flare, that gut twist she’d never experienced with Frank but was front and center the first time she’d met boyish Jon Merritt at a Halloween party. She’d been wearing a Chicago Bears T-shirt with a large price tag on it, he’d been wearing a dark blue police uniform. They made eye contact and he walked up. “Okay,” he said, eyeing the outfit. “I give.”