Page 67 of Where You're Planted

Tansy stuttered over her retort to his knowing dig. Buthowhad he known it?

“Briar,” he said simply, grasping her hand and molding it into a cupped position to receive the screws he’d gathered. His hand was warm and calloused, and he didn’t ask first. She hated that it thrilled her on some base level.

The stinging response she meant to sling back was interrupted by her loud hiccup.

“Had to get drunk for this, huh?”

“Screw you,” she said without heat, clenching her fistful of screws.

He leaned back against one of the cabinets and rubbed his knuckles against his beard, just looking at her. She crossed her arms, uncrossed them, and then braced herself against another cabinet, mirroring him. She raised a combative eyebrow, nervous under his scrutiny ofhernow. “What?” she finally demanded.

“You’re having a bad day.” It wasn’t a question or an accusation, just a gentle statement.

She scoffed.No shit, she wanted to say. But her attitude wasn’t about him. At least, it mostly wasn’t. He seemed to sense that instead of taking her negative energy personally.

“Must be hard,” he added. “Being away from her.”

Stinging pressure pushed behind Tansy’s sinuses. His gaze on her was steady and soft now. She swallowed but couldn’t speak past the lump that formed in her throat. She could only shrug helplessly. How he’d read right through her hostility tothatshe didn’t know. But it also chipped something free from the walls she’d erected around herself this afternoon. “It’s the actual worst,” she confirmed, voice tight. “Every single time.”

“Because you miss her, or because he’s…” He trailed off, scowling, and Tansy wasn’t sure what descriptor he was thinking about Charlie, but protective energy practically pulsed off him.

“Charlie’s not a bad guy. He’s a good dad, now.”

“Now?”

“It took him a while to get there.”

Jack crossed his arms. “What does that mean?”

“I told you his dad died before Briar was born?”

“Yeah.”

“It was unexpected, and they were really close. Charlie was a mess, only he hid it from me. Stopped going to work and his law school classes. He’d leave the house in the morning and then come back and sleep all day while I went to school and work. I didn’t know he lost his job until Briar came—three weeks early, by emergency C-section. I missed my college finals and didn’t graduate. And then, between the hospital bills and him not working forweeksbefore he told me, we were suddenly in this deep financial hole. Our utilities got shut off, and we lost the apartment. His mom was struggling, too, and he felt like he should be with her. Honestly…I think he just wanted to be the kid getting cared for again instead of one of the responsible adults dealing with the mess.”

“What the fuck?” Jack muttered.

Tansy waved a hand. “I’m not explaining it right. He truly was not in a good place.”

“So he abandoned his wife and baby?”

“Fiancée,” she corrected, lifting a shoulder.

“Same difference.”

She opened her fist of screws, pressed them to the top of a cabinet, and corralled them with the sides of her hands into a neat square. “Well, it was a cleaner break anyway. Briar and I moved in with my parents, which was about the worse decision of my life.”

“Why?”

“They never let me live down my mistakes—living with Charlie, not using better birth control, going through with the pregnancy.”

“Jesus.”

“They wanted to be grandparents when it suited them,” she said with a harsh laugh, the first break in her careful, neutral delivery, “but the minute I needed childcare for work or classes to finish my degree, I was taking advantage of them. They would agree to watch her but then something would come up at the last minute, and I’d have to scramble or miss a shift, lose another job. It was so demoralizing. I was in debt because of the hole Charlie and I dug, and I couldn’t hold down a job, let alone save up and get back on my feet. And I guess I was waiting for Charlie to come back and fix everything. I wasted a lot of time waiting to be rescued.”

Jack’s jaw ticked, and she could feel his protest of all this, his anger on her behalf. She rarely let herself dwell on it because she could so easily get sucked back into that familiar state of helplessness and despair, crying,It’s not fair!but neverdoinganything about it.

“You’re wondering why I let her go with him now,” sheguessed, and he nodded. “Because I can’t really hold his grief against him. And because he went to therapy, and he did a lot of work on himself, and he has never once let her down since he came back into her life.”

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