Page 34 of Sing with Me

Skye sensed his need to explain his marriage. She began to feel sorry for him. Had his marriage been unfulfilling? “Your arrangement is odd to me, considering this is the twenty-first century.”

“We both came from wealthy families, so our circle of friends is small. I’m not sure if there was anyone else I could have married except her.”

“Wow. No one else?”

Diehl shook his head. “Unless I let Mom be the matchmaker. There was no way I’d do that.”

“I feel like I’ve been transported to the nineteenth century here.” Truth be told, she wasn’t sure if she should care. What he had—or hadn’t—with his deceased wife was none of her business.

“Like I said, she was pregnant. My child, my responsibility,” Diehl said. “Besides, I’ve always wanted to be a father.”

Skye simply listened while she rearranged a few things in the refrigerator to make it easier to find them later. She took out the carton of organic eggs.

“After we lost our baby, I wanted to try again. I was twenty-six and she was thirty, so I figured we were young and in that childbearing age.”

“I don’t need to know more,” Skye said. “I really don’t.”

“I wanted to tell you that a year later, she conceived Elisa. I was overjoyed.”

“Congratulations.”

“And then Ethan came two years later. So God gave us two more children after we lost our firstborn.”

“God? I thought you said you don’t need Him.” Skye cringed. She hoped her words didn’t shut him down just when he was opening up. If he mentioned God at all, perhaps he was returning to Him. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Your turn to say sorry?” Diehl grinned. “I’ve got thick skin. That’s how I got to be where I am in the company. Words are not going to hurt me.”

“What will?” Skye folded the two grocery bags for use later.

“A lack of loyalty, unfaithfulness, that sort of things.”

Skye washed her hands again, and looked for a pan to cook those bacon strips. “Those are important moral elements.”

“Okay. Great. What can I do to help?” Diehl asked.

“Wash your hands first. Then you can choose. Do you want to watch the bacon or peel the potatoes?”

“Bacon.” Diehl washed his hands at the sink and dried them on a kitchen towel.

Standing that close to him in the kitchen gave Skye some kind of feeling she couldn’t define. He looked domestic, though she hardly knew him.

Well, she knew a lot about him from the many prayer requests that his sister had asked for in the last few years. Most of them related to stress at work and his difficulty of being a single father who had to be at the office all the time. The prayer requests had extended to his live-in nanny, and then the children’s grandparents on both sides—none of whom were saved. And then they circled back to Diehl, who had been far away from God.

Skye knew all that, but confidentially, of course. No one divulged those prayer requests from the Women’s Bible Study Group at church.

“Just want to be sure we’re on the same page,” Skye said. “Yesterday morning at church you told me that you want eggs-in-a-nest for breakfast today.”

Diehl nodded. “What I said.”

“Okay. Just want to be sure because it’s not on our original menu.”

“It’s perfectly fine to deviate from it.” Diehl reached for the bacon.

“Let me start it for you and you can flip it.” Skye pushed the bacon away from Diehl.

“You don’t trust me to cook bacon.”

“I don’t want you to give me a bad rating at the evaluation.”

---