She stared at him for a moment, her arms crossing over her chest, and she tapped her foot. “That better not be more self-pity,” she said.
“And why is that?” he asked, his gaze flying to her face.
“Because that’s one of the hardest things for anybody else to deal with. You need to toss that one off and walk away from it.”
“You make it sound so easy,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” she said, “but it’s not impossible. I never think in terms of what somebody can do for me or what somebody has got going that somebody else doesn’t. I don’t make comparisons,” she said. “Obviously something is between us, and we like each other’s company. We love spending time together, and I think it’s important to see where that will go,” she said. “But I would just as soon do it coming from a position of truth and trust.”
His gaze widened slightly, and he nodded. “I like the sound of that,” he said. Then he smiled. “But just because I take a step forward doesn’t mean I’m not taking a step back.”
“And,” she said, “just because you fall or fail once doesn’t mean you don’t try again.”
“Deal,” he said, and then he chuckled. “What’s the chance of getting a coffee this morning?”
“So, is it me you wanted to see,” she teased, “or just my coffee?”
His booming laughter rang out through the room, and she was afraid they would wake up the other patients. She walked to the door and said, “Be back in ten. Or not,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “You never know what I’ll find when I hit the kitchen.”
He chuckled and nodded.
She headed to the kitchen with a smile on her face. It was nice to have him back.
Keith listened to her footsteps as she walked down the hallway, his heart much lighter, and his soul wearing a smile for the first time ever. He thought about all the other areas in his life that were so messed up. Yet this one particular area may have just straightened itself out. He wasn’t sure how he’d gone from trying to tell her that she needed to find somebody else to warming to everything she had to say, desperately wanting to be the person who could follow through on it.
Had he really been cutting himself short? She hadn’t implied that, but she certainly had no patience with self-pity. Was he that kind of a person? Maybe he hadn’t been giving his all. And that hurt too. But he was willing to give it a try and to see what he could do. And that just brought up the email he got from his father. He had absolutely no freaking idea how the old man even knew what his email address was. But he half suspected that Robin was behind it. His father was getting a divorce and somehow realized, as he faced the loss of his second family, that maybe he’d already lost the first one, and it might be too late. But, if it wasn’t too late, could his son possibly respond and let him know that he was alive?
Keith hadn’t answered, and now it just sat in the back of his mind, festering. He wasn’t ready to talk to his father. He wasn’t ready to open up any more wounds. And his father, of course, wouldn’t have a clue. He probably had no idea that Keith had even been injured. Then again, with Robin around, his dad definitely might know. But their dad probably didn’t know the details because Robin was as loyal as she was caring.
She might have said that Keith had been hurt in the military and was recovering. But who knew? He should give his dad a chance to find out, but Keith had to look after himself, and enough was shaking loose in his world these days that Keith wasn’t sure he was ready to open up that Pandora’s box too.
It didn’t sound very nice on his part, to see his father as a problem, but Keith knew that his emotional state, although getting stronger by the day, was also still very fragile. And Keith hated that. But what he didn’t want was to have any more setbacks that would slide him backward emotionally either.
Midmorning, when Shane came by, he carried some big files. Keith looked at them and asked, “What’s all that?”
“Progress,” Shane said. “Progress that you need to see but probably wouldn’t, unless you could see the black-and-white of it.”
Keith stared at him and said, “You going to talk or will you show me what’s in there?”
Shane burst out laughing. “Well, I’ll show you.” He laid it out on the bed carefully across Keith’s knees and said, “These are the photos that I took that first day you and I had an appointment. That set of testing, where you were grumbling about how tired you were from doing nothing.”
Keith looked down at the pictures and winced. “Wow,” he said, “those are really ugly.”
“Well, nobody said I was a great photographer either,” Shane said, deliberately misunderstanding him. Then he continued, “This one is at three weeks.”
He held out a photo that was marginally better. The leg looked a little bit fuller, less angry.
“Now this is the one I took yesterday.” He picked up another photo, and he laid it down farther from Keith. “In this picture, what do you see that’s different?”
Keith stared at the pictures, as he studied the simple image of him sitting on a bench. There were two bench photos, both taken when Keith had been unaware. In the first one he listed to the side, his body inflamed and in obvious pain, but, in the last one, he sat up straighter, more muscle having developed on his left side, whereas it had been crunched in on that first photo. The color of his leg was more even-toned now, and the muscle obviously less inflamed, to the point of being almost happy.
“Wow,” he said, “that’s a really nice picture. I wasn’t expecting to see that kind of change.”
“It’s one of the reasons I document the progress with photos,” Shane said, “because, if you don’t see it, you don’t believe it. This is a godsend for you because seriously you’re already there, showing improvement,” he said. “This should show you that the work we’re doing has value.”
“I always knew it had value,” Keith said. “I just didn’t realize how much and how soon.”
“Of course not,” Shane replied. “But this? This is gold. So, are you going to give me any more guff about progress?”
Keith looked up in shock, smiled, and shook his head. “Absolutely not. Thank you. I really needed this.” He looked at the photos, then at Shane, and asked, “Can I keep them?”
“They’re yours,” he said, “for whatever you need to do with them.”
“Perfect,” he said. “Thank you.”
Chapter 9
The next morning, when Ilse walked into Hathaway House, she headed straight for Keith’s room. As she walked toward it, she could see his light shining, and she grinned. Her heart lightened as she stuck her head in the doorway and said, “So, is this like a standing date now?”
He chuckled. “Well, I tried to ignore you, and it didn’t work.”
He was sitting up this morning, looking at a bunch of photos. She hesitated to step forward because she hadn’t been invited, but he lifted his head, looked at her, and crimped his finger.
“Come here and see what Shane brought.”