Page 77 of You've Got Male

“I want to reopen my own organizing business.”

“So you can terrorize your clients?” he teased.

She shot him a prim glare. “I like to think I have a velvet glove.”

“Not when it comes to me. But you’re softening up.”

“Maybe a little. Tell me something about you. Wait, let me guess, you were one of those popular jock types.”

“Why do you say that?” She reached up and squeezed his bicep. He laughed. “I may have been the captain of a few teams in my day.”

“Was your dad your team parent, too?”

After all these years, questions about his dad still hit like a sledgehammer to the chest, cracking his foundation and knocking off chunks of confusion, guilt, and disappointment.

She must have seen something in his expression because she quickly said, “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want.”

“My dad committed suicide when I was ten,” he said quietly.

Her hands jumped to her throat. “Jonah,” she breathed. “I am so sorry. I had no idea. Amber never said a word.”

“Because she knew I didn’t like people to know. To think of my dad like that, you know? When people hear suicide, especially when attached to someone who’s a parent, they think it makes the person selfish or weak. My dad was haunted. He went to Kuwait my hero and came home a shadow.”

“That sounds like mature logic for a ten-year-old.”

“Oh, I was confused, devastated, angry at the world. At him. I wanted to rage, but the suicide broke my mom, so I had to be the strong one. I got all the aggression out on the field.”

“Did your mom remarry?”

He was quiet for a moment. He didn’t usually talk about this with people but now that he’d started he couldn’t seem to stop. “She never even dated.” He looked over at Evie, and those beautiful eyes of hers were filled with pain and a fierce protectiveness—for him. “Not even once. I think it was the shock of it all that knocked her so off axis she was never able to realign.

“You know, when he was deployed, she’d always have me set him a place at the dinner table. After he died, she started doing it again. She still does. Every night, there it is, the giant reminderthat we weren’t enough for him to stick around.”

“It had nothing to do with you. You know that, right?”

“Oh,Iknow that. But ten-year-old Jonah still wonders what he did wrong. Or what he didn’t do that could have made a difference.”

She kissed his fingertips. And instead of saying how sorry she was or some other empty platitude, she said, “I’m angry for the boy who lost his dad and even angrier for the man who carries those scars.”

“Sometimes I’m angry, too. Like when I graduated college, when Waverly was born, when Amber was diagnosed. And all the small, in-between moments when a decision makes you a boy or a man. I had to figure it all out on my own. For a while I had Amber and now…” He shrugged.

“You have me,” she said earnestly. “I know I’m not family, and this is an arrangement, but I’m a good listener and I give great advice.”

There it was. The reminder that this was short-term. Something to be endured for her until they both accomplished their goals.

“You also give great orders.”

She laughed. “I might also be an I-told-you-so kind of person, but it’s because I’m usually right. And if people just listened to me the first time it would save everyone a lot of frustration.”

He couldn’t help but smile. That’s what she did to him—made him want to push past the pain and be in the here and now. “That explains the personal organizer dream.”

“I never told you it was my dream.”

“You didn’t have to. I could tell by the way you talked about it how much you loved your job.”

She smiled and shifted the focus. “What about you? Where do you see a new job taking you?”

He saw it taking him to a place that was full of possibilities. “Iwant to help people like me, who was so buried in grief it was hard to get up, let alone manage Amber’s life insurance payout.”

---