The words resonated in his chest. He was doing it again. Falling for someone who was completely wrong for him. His life was here in Cape Sanctuary. He had a business here, his mother, Sophie, while Jess had created an entire business model based on being willing and able to travel as needed.
“I loved your mom. If she hadn’t died serving her country, I hope we could have tried hard to make it work. We might have figured out a way.”
“It hurt that you lied to me all this time.”
“I’m sorry.”
This was the crux of the matter. She felt betrayed that the worldview he had always created for her was only one perspective of the wider picture.
“I was trying to protect you. I can see now where you would feel like I kept important information from you. I’m sorry for that. I don’t blame you for being upset with me. I wish you had told me this a month ago, though, so we could have avoided all the slamming doors and cranky comments.”
“Jess basically yelled at me and told me to stop being a baby. She didn’t use those words but that’s what she was really saying.”
“Was it?”
“She told me it wasn’t fair to take out my anger at the parent who stayed and took care of me all this time.”
Warmth and gratitude seeped through him along with more of those tender feelings he didn’t know what to do with. Nate had to swallow hard before he trusted himself to answer. “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”
“Yeah. I hadn’t thought of it that way. She’s kind of right. I’m...sorry. Next time, I’ll talk to you before I go all pissy for weeks at a time.”
“I hope there’s not a next time. I missed you.”
“Same.”
She rested her head on his shoulder for a minute, just as she used to do when she was small and sleepy from a long car ride, and Nate felt emotions rise up in his throat again.
He had Jess to thank for this, too, this rare and precious peace with his child. Just another reason he was falling for her. She was amazing. Strong, feisty, loyal.
How was he supposed to simply stand by and let her walk away?
37
Nate
Nate drove home from the hospital late Saturday completely exhausted.
He found it quite odd that he could work on a construction site in the hot summer sun for twelve hours straight and be perfectly fine, yet a day sitting around in a hospital while his mother underwent testing left him so drained.
If he was tired, his mother had been completely wiped out. She was sleeping soundly when he left. He didn’t think she would stir for most of the night, even when the nurses came to check on her.
He pulled up in front of his house feeling guilty about leaving Sophie all day but she would have been bored senseless hanging out in a waiting room.
After Sophie had spent a long visit with her grandmother in the morning and had been all but climbing the walls, Jess had popped in to check on Eleanor and had asked Sophie to help her finish a few cleaning projects at Whitaker House.
He suspected the request had mostly been a ruse to distract his daughter from driving Eleanor too crazy with her restlessness. It had worked wonders, though.
He’d checked on them around dinnertime with a phone call and Sophie told him they were going to walk down to the beach and do some beachcombing and have a picnic.
That had been three hours earlier. He imagined Jess must have gone back to her trailer hours ago, but no lights were on when he drove past and pulled around to his house.
To his surprise, he found her at his kitchen table, working on a laptop. A fierce yearning hit him hard. How wonderful would it be to come home to her in his kitchen, in his house, in his bed on a regular basis?
She smiled a greeting, obviously with no clue what crazy things were running through his head. “Hi. How’s your mom?”
“Doing well for now. She’s sleeping. The cardiac docs are saying she can probably go home tomorrow.”
“Really? That’s great news.”
“It is,” he agreed. “The verdict is in, though. She does need a pacemaker, which she’s not too happy about. They’re talking about putting it in later in the week.”
“So soon?”
“Believe it or not, they’re hoping it will be an outpatient procedure and she won’t have to stay overnight again.”
“Wow. That’s amazing!”
“Definitely.” He looked around. “Where’s Sophie? Has she gone to bed?”
Jess gestured over her shoulder to the small family room he had added on to the house, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the water. “Asleep in there, last I checked. We had been watching The Princess Bride, which she said is her favorite movie, but about halfway through, she fell asleep, so I came in here to take care of some paperwork.”
“I don’t think she slept well last night. She was too worried about Mom.”
“I don’t blame her. I didn’t sleep well either.”
Why? Because of his mother? Or because of something else?
“I still can’t believe my mom never told me she hadn’t been feeling well.”
“I don’t think she wanted to admit it,” Jess said.
“You could be right. She also said she didn’t want to worry me, so soon after losing my father.”
Jess gave a soft smile that made him wish he could drag her into his bedroom and spend the night with her wrapped in his arms.
“She loves you. You’re her miracle baby.”
He made a face. “She told you that?”
“Yes. She told me about the miscarriages and the stillbirth of your sister. It breaks my heart to think of all the pain your parents went through.”
“Yeah. Makes me wish I hadn’t been such a shitty teenager.”
“You’ve more than made up for it in the years since, from what your mother says.”
He raked a hand through his hair, concern again edging through him. Despite the doctors’ claims that the pacemaker would help, he still worried. He also couldn’t believe his mother had had what appeared to be a mild heart attack and even she hadn’t known it.
In the past thirty-six hours, he had learned more than he ever expected about how women experience heart attacks differently from men and often discount their symptoms or attribute them to something else, like acid reflux or normal aging.
He had learned that while heart disease was the number one killer of women, it often went undiagnosed.