In Your Dreams (Blue Heron #4)(119)

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” She paused. “I was there that night. I guess I’d just like to hear about him.”

The woman’s face didn’t change for a second; then it softened, and her eyes smiled with memory. “Oh,” she said, and her voice was young again. “He was so beautiful. And mischievous!” She reached out to touch Josh’s hand. “He had this laugh that let him get away with murder. Always running, always breaking things, but then he’d look at me with that smile, and I just couldn’t be mad at him.” Her voice cracked. “I just couldn’t. I loved him so much. I still do.” She started to cry. “My husband says we have to let him go, but I can’t! How can I let my baby die? How do I stop being a mother?”

In a flash, Em knelt by Mrs. Deiner’s side and hugged her. “I don’t know,” she said, her own voice shaking. “I don’t know.”

“The doctors say he’s already gone,” Gloria whispered, clutching Em’s shirt. “My husband says the same thing.” She looked at Emmaline. “Do you think he is?”

This was her chance to say the right thing. To make all the difference to Gloria Deiner, whose son was surely dying. “I don’t know,” she repeated. “But whatever the right thing is, you’ll know. You’re his mother.”

But Gloria just looked at her son, her face so full of sorrow that Em couldn’t understand how she bore it. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered. “I’d like to be alone now.” She looked back at Em. “And thank you for talking to him. No one does that anymore.”

Em hugged her again, but Mrs. Deiner was locked back into her vigil.

She was almost out of the room when Gloria’s faint voice stopped her. “You were there that night?”

Em turned. “Yes. Chief Cooper and I. We...we took over for Jack Holland.”

“Jack Holland.” Her voice hardened. “We wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for Jack Holland.”

No, Emmaline thought. You’d be visiting a grave.

“Jack left him for last,” Gloria said in an odd lilting voice, as if she were trying to remember a song. “The one who needed him the most, and Jack left him for last. My baby was all alone.”

The respirator breathed in and out, in and out.

“He wasn’t alone,” Em said very, very softly. “Jack was in the water the whole time.”

But Gloria’s head was turned to her son, and Em doubted that the grieving mother even heard.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

JACK KNOCKED ON the door of 3-C. A second later, Hadley opened the door. “Hey,” she said. “Come on in.”

She looked different. Younger and tired. And she wasn’t beaming at the sight of him.

It had been a week since her incident at the police station, and while Jack had seen her every day, they hadn’t really talked.

Today, they would.

“Can I get you anything? Coffee or water?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “Sit down, Hadley.”

She did, taking a throw pillow and holding it over her stomach. “This weather, huh? Crazy.”

It hadn’t been particularly crazy, not for western New York, anyway. Then again, people always talked about the weather when they were nervous.

“Hadley, it’s time for you to move on,” he said.

Her eyes filled. “I know.”

He leaned back in his chair. “I’ll take you back to Savannah, if you like.”

“Why? Why would you do that for me, after all the trouble I caused?”

A good question. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel responsible for you. For us. For how our marriage didn’t work.”

“I cheated on you, Jack. I’m the one to blame for our divorce.”

She’d never admitted that before. “People don’t cheat for no reason,” he said, looking out the window. “You weren’t happy, so you looked elsewhere. I’m not excusing it, Hadley. But I understand. You were lonely and bored and wanted more attention than I could give.” Than any human could give, he guessed.

“My parents barely spoke to me, they were so mad,” she whispered. “They thought you were the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“I don’t agree,” he said. “I think we were just...wrong for each other. No matter how it seemed at first.”

A tear ran down her cheek.

If he’d listened a little more carefully to smart people like Honor and his grandparents, to Mrs. Johnson and Connor O’Rourke, he might have picked up on their subtle (and not-so-subtle) notes of caution. If he’d taken longer to get to know Hadley, had her spend more time here rather than one idyllic weekend, the truth would’ve come out. And the truth was, they’d both seen what they wanted to see and not what was actually there.

“Why’d you come back here, Hadley?”

She wiped her eyes. “It seemed like everyone around me was married and having babies or a fabulous career or both, and you know what I was doing? Part-time clerk at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I was thirty years old with nothing and no one, divorced before our first anniversary. A failure.”

He could’ve pointed out that there was no shame in hard work, or that she could’ve gone back to school for something else, but he knew from experience those words would fall on deaf ears. Hadley had always had a picture of how life was supposed to be, and anything less was just what she said. A failure.