Page 66 of This Time Around
Allie nodded and took another tiny drink. At this rate it would take her five hours to finish a single glass of wine, but she didn’t want to be tipsy for this conversation. Didn’t want to blurt something stupid or ask questions she wasn’t ready to have him answer. “Did Caroline ask why you were stalking her?”
“Nah,” he said. “But I did tell her it was fate that we’d run into each other again, so she should probably go out with me or risk angering the gods.”
“Not a bad pickup line.”
Jack grinned. “It worked. She gave me her number and we went out later that week.”
“And she fell instantly, madly in love with you and the rest is history?” She was careful to keep any trace of snark from her tone, but he looked up anyway. She gave him a small smile, an unspoken reassurance he seemed to understand. He nodded and kept going.
“No, she called me a loser and told me to call her when I had my life together.” He gave her a shamefaced grin. “I may have had too much to drink at dinner.”
“Nice.” She laughed. “So then what?”
“I took her advice. Went back to school. Got serious about the video game I’d been trying to develop. Moved out of my mom’s basement. A year later, I called her again.”
Allie felt something twist deep in her gut, but she forced herself to keep breathing. So what if he wasn’t willing to get his shit together for her, but he did it for another woman after pursuing her with such dogged determination? It wasn’t a reflection on her. It was a sweet, romantic story about the mother of his child. Nothing more.
“Was she happy to hear from you?” she asked.
“Not at first. But I convinced her to go out with me, and I think she could see right away that I was different. We started dating for real after that. I was still going to school, and she was in her first year of grad studies for architecture. We ended up moving in together during my last term of college.”
“And then you got married?”
“And then she got pregnant,” Jack said. “The marriage came pretty quickly after that.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t sure what to say to that. There were a million way-too-intrusive questions she could pose, but she couldn’t imagine herself asking any of them out loud. This was Jack’s history, and Caroline’s, too. Allie had no right to expect him to fill in all the gaps for her, or to volunteer anything he didn’t share readily.
Jack leaned back on the couch, spreading his arms wide across the back of it. When he looked at her, there was something thoughtful in his expression. “I always wondered if we would have gotten married otherwise, you know?
The we threw Allie for a second, and she thought he was talking about the two of them. When she realized what he meant, she hoped he didn’t see any of that on her face. “You mean if Caroline would have married you if she hadn’t gotten pregnant?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But when Paige came along, it was amazing.”
“Really?” Allie bit her lip. “People always say a baby can drive a big wedge in a relationship. Especially when you’re young like that.”
“I know. We heard all the statistics and I was braced for it to be pretty tough. But it wasn’t like that with us. We loved being parents.”
“That’s wonderful.” Allie gulped back the lump in her throat, but it wouldn’t go down. She tried forcing it with wine, keeping her gaze on the rim of the glass so she wouldn’t have to look Jack in the eye. She breathed in the tangy, citrus scent of Pinot Gris until the sharp stabs of unspoken memory began to dull. “So Paige was just a baby when her mom died?”
“Eighteen months.”
“It was a car accident?”
He nodded. “She was in the car alone. I’d stayed home with Paige so Caroline could go to some craft fair with her girlfriends. A guy blew through a stop sign when she was on her way home. She was dead before the ambulance even got there.”
“Jack.” Her chest squeezed tightly as she rested a hand on his knee. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.” He picked up his wine and took a small sip. “I’ve asked Paige if she remembers her mom at all. She says she does, but I’m not sure that’s true. Not that she’s lying or anything. I just wonder sometimes if she remembers the idea of her. The stories I’ve told her or that her grandparents and Aunt Missy have shared.”
Allie nodded, then noticed her hand was still on his knee. She drew it back, feeling foolish. Jack looked up and held her gaze for a moment. Then he shifted on the sofa, bringing him a few inches closer. Their knees were touching now, and it felt more intimate than any kiss they’d shared.
“Is it weird to hear this stuff?” he asked.
Allie started to shake her head, then changed directions, nodding just once. “Maybe a little. I don’t know. I guess I sometimes wondered what you’ve been up to all these years, but I mostly thought in terms of your job or where you might be living.”
“Not about my love life?”
She shook her head. “Not really. Not because I wasn’t interested or I didn’t care. I guess I just didn’t want to go there. It was easier to picture you frozen in time, sitting there on that futon with a bewildered look on your face.”
