“DON’T GET USED to this. I’m not a dog person.”
Noah sat in his recliner, Woof in his lap. He ran his fingers through the dog’s thick fur, surprised at how restful Woof was.
It wouldn’t be fair to the animal, his father had said anytime the idea of a pet was brought up.
Noah felt as if he’d missed out.
The road, the Snake River and the Sawtooth mountain range weren’t visible through the snow flurries and low-hanging clouds. Undoubtedly, Ella’s snow tunnel, made when she fell backward down the hill, was filling. This late in the afternoon she and her family would be tucked into the inn, warm and dry, displaced doctors with deep scars the furthest thing from her mind.
Ella should be the furthest thing from his mind.
Noah closed his eyes, letting his mind take him back in time.
He was conducting an ACL reconstruction on the knee of a world-class soccer player. The notes of Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” filled the surgery theater. Everything was going as planned. Noah could see his patient would face a smooth recovery. Acknowledgement of his skill filled him with a sense of power and pride.
And then the unthinkable happened. Everything went to hell. His right hand seized up, fingers crimping on the scalpel. He fought to keep the scalpel still, to withdraw, to release. He couldn’t move.
The music changed, turned loud and angry. Something by Linkin Park. And still, he couldn’t pull back his hand. His patient…
Noah knew with one hundred percent certainty that one more tremor in his fingers and he’d slice his patient’s tendon irreparably.
Noah cringed, startling himself awake.
Snow still fell in a gray curtain. The dog was still lying curled in his lap. Sweat dampened his spine.
The good news was he hadn’t botched the surgery or destroyed a helpless man’s career. History proved the procedure had gone off without a hitch. It was only in Noah’s mind that he’d bungled the surgery. The bad news was he wasn’t going to extend any more sports careers. This was his reality now. A sleepy practice. Not a surgery center. Patients with minor complaints. Not a patient whose body was insured for millions. Nothing high-risk or high-profile that would land him in the news.
Something scrabbled outside his front door. Woof’s ears perked.
Nothing should be out in this storm.
Noah placed the dog on the floor and got to his feet. “Odette, if that’s you…”
The old woman shouldn’t be traipsing around in a blizzard so near dark. If it was Odette, he’d have to walk her home to make sure she didn’t fall into a snowdrift or lose her way.
Woof reached the door ahead of Noah and gave it a sniff.
“What? No barking? Some watchdog you are.” Noah opened the door, not to Odette, but to a small snowman in a navy stadium jacket holding a pinkish snow baby. Bright blue eyes stared at him from a muffler wrapped around a face.
Ella.
Woof danced back out of the wind as Noah tugged the pair inside. “What are you doing?”
“She’s got a cough and a fever.” Ella handed Penny to him and dropped her diaper bag to the floor. “The fever started last night, went down this morning and spiked this afternoon.”
“Someone should have called me.” Mitch or Ivy. Cell phones sometimes failed, but they had landlines in town.
“I was worried. I didn’t ask. I…” Ella unwrapped her layers at record-breaking speed. “You have antibiotics, right?”
Noah nodded. “Not every cough needs antibiotics, but yes, I do have them.” He set Penny on the floor and began removing her snowsuit. Her green eyes were dull, and her nose dripped white, not clear or yellow, mucus. She gave a worrisome, productive cough. With a child this age, things could get worse quickly, even if her symptoms weren’t acute now. “You were right to think she needed medical care.”
“Even if I was wrong to walk across the road in a snowstorm?” Ella shed snow pants and her stadium coat and joined him at the exam table. She wore navy leggings and a green hooded, knit sweater. “I’d do it again.”
Only when she was standing next to Noah did he realize he wasn’t wearing gloves. His stomach did a slow, sickening 360. He hurried to wash his hands and snap on a pair of latex gloves, forcing himself to check first to make sure Penny wasn’t allergic to latex.
“You should have called.” Noah let annoyance weigh down his words. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Ella’s face to see how repulsed she was. “The last time I checked the weather, the winds were supposed to be thirty-five to forty-five miles per hour. You could have been blown off your feet. You could have slid down a slope again and I’d never have known.”
This last possibility sent his blood running cold. This woman needed a tracking beacon.
“I followed Roy’s path. He showed it to me this morning.” Ella didn’t sound horrified at having seen the beast’s true appearance. “We didn’t get lost and I don’t have your phone number.”
“You shouldn’t have taken Penny out in the cold.” Noah was harping, but he couldn’t help it. He hadn’t quite shaken the shock of failure from his dream, much less the bitter embarrassment that came from exposing his scars. “It’s dangerous. Too dangerous to go back.” He gestured to the window. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, but it was nearly pitch-black outside and all he could see was snow.
“I know, I—I panicked a little.” Ella touched his arm. “I surprised you and I’m sorry.” She nodded toward his gloved hand.
His scarred, nearly useless hand. She’d seen it and now the storm had trapped her here with a wounded beast, a fact that didn’t seem to worry her. Or maybe it did, because she started babbling.
“I didn’t want to infect Sophie’s boys. Laurel hasn’t been feeling herself and Shane means well but doesn’t understand how quickly kids can get seriously ill. I just… It was quicker if I came by myself. I—I panic when she gets congested because my husband died from complications sustained in his car accident.”
“What kind of complications?” Back to her, Noah rummaged in a drawer for his stethoscope, curious despite his dark mood.
“A punctured lung. It was so hard for Bryce to breathe. They said they were ventilating him, but there was air in his chest cavity where there shouldn’t have been and he—he…”
She punctured Noah’s defenses. “He went into cardiac arrest.”
Ella nodded, swallowing thickly.
For most of Noah’s adult life, performance and preparation had taken precedence over his personal life. He’d dated women because of their beauty, their renown, their willingness to sleep with him without expectations of a future—none of which was personal. None of which applied to his attraction to Ella. He wanted to soothe her fears with a gentle embrace. He wanted to brush the blond hair back from her face while she told him more about her past. He wanted to volley one-liners back and forth with her across the same pillow. He wanted to know what made her tick. He wanted her to open up to him about her past.
You’re going soft.
He denied the thought because he didn’t want to open up to her about his past.
Noah pressed his lips together, not speaking again until he was finished performing a thorough exam on Penny. “Her fever is low-grade. It’s not viral, more like a mild case of bronchitis.” For little ones, even a mild case could knock them out. “All I can do is treat her symptoms. Analgesic for the fever. Albuterol to loosen up the mucus in the brachia. You can ask Mitch for a humidifier. I’m sure he’s got one from when Gabby was younger.”
She gripped the exam table. “That’s it? We don’t need to medi-flight her out of here or—”
“In a few days, she’ll be fine.” Noah wasn’t sure he could say the same. In a week, when the snow melted a bit and the pass reopened, Ella would conduct her inventory and the Monroes would leave. His days would go back to being predictable and no one in town would unsettle him.
Woof sat on Noah’s foot and leaned against his leg, as if to say, You’ll have me.
With Noah’s luck, Woof’s owner would show up with the county snowplows. If so, the dog would probably be better off.
He had no liquid albuterol, but he found an inhaler in the medicine cupboard and coaxed Penny to take in a small dose. Afterward, she curled up in a ball on the table and closed her eyes.
“Thank you,” Ella said in a wrung-out voice. “We’ll get out of your way.”
“I told you before. You can’t go back out there.” Without thinking, he’d moved between Ella and the door. “It’s a blizzard. It’s dark. It’s too risky.”
As if on cue, the wind howled.
Woof scurried to Noah’s side. Penny wasn’t the only baby in here.
The dog’s cautious.
Says the dull mountain doctor.
And now he was arguing with his alter ego.
“I’ll just follow my footsteps back,” Ella said, but then she looked out the window into the darkness and frowned.
“Not today, you won’t. You should stay.” To heck with soft. Both she and Woof stilled at Noah’s harsh tone. “I’ll make us dinner and in the morning we’ll have—we’ll have…waffles.” Not salad.
“Thank you, but…” Ella blinked, and glanced toward the small L-shaped kitchen. “I have some snacks in the diaper bag. That’ll get us through until morning. If the pass is closed, you’ll need all your food.”
It was Noah’s turn to blink. He’d assumed she was going to argue that she couldn’t stay, not that she couldn’t eat his food. “We’re not stranded on a deserted island. I’m not going to run out of food before the pass reopens.” Not that he’d experienced a Second Chance winter before, but no one had given him dire predictions of snowbound starvation, either.
Ella nodded slowly. Whatever reason she had to worry about food, she wasn’t going to share it with him.
Penny coughed, deep and productive. Ella was by her side immediately, lifting her limp daughter into her arms. More coughing ensued.
Noah wished there was more he could do for her, but sometimes you had to let the body heal in its own time. For Penny, she needed rest, liquids, meds and humidity.
Humidity.
Noah darted in the bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as it would go, and then shut the door behind him. “When the bathroom gets steamy you can sit inside with her for ten minutes. That and the inhaler treatments should help.”
While they waited for the bathroom to fill with steam, Ella paced, and Noah called Mitch on the landline, updating him on the situation and asking him to tell the Monroes.
“I hope Penny gets better soon,” Mitch said. “And I hope you know what we need from you to—”
Noah hung up before Mitch could say anything more about him being the town’s spy.
Penny went into another coughing fit and Ella disappeared into the bathroom with her, where the little girl’s hacking eventually stopped. Ten minutes later, they emerged, moist and wilted.
Ella put Penny on the couch and turned to Noah. “We’ll sleep here with Woof.”
“It’s a lumpy old couch. The bed is upstairs and…”
The dog hopped onto the couch next to Penny, curled up and laid his big head on her chubby little legs.
“And I’ve been outvoted.” Noah went to the galley kitchen that was next to the living space. He started to take off his gloves to wash up and prep dinner, then hesitated.
“How did it happen?” Ella laid her hand above his right wrist.
He stiffened, not having noticed her come up beside him. The kitchen was so small she was not quite in it and not quite not.
“How did it happen?” she asked again, still holding him tenderly. Her blue eyes didn’t shy away from his. “Your scars?”
He couldn’t move. Hardly anyone but other doctors and medical staff had looked at or touched his right hand since the accident. No one had wanted to. Likewise, no one asked about the accident. Most people respected Noah’s privacy.
Ella wasn’t most people.
Her gaze swept the cabin. The small kitchen they were in, the small living space, the exam area, the sleeping loft above them and then finally her focus came back to Noah. She was waiting for his answer.
Noah couldn’t seem to open his mouth, to form words, to ask her not to dig.
“I didn’t mean to pry,” she lied, not at all well.
“You did.” That was Dr. Bishop’s voice. Hard, egotistical, distance-setting. And no longer limited to conversations in Noah’s head. “You were curious.” But not repelled.
Why wasn’t she repelled? Mitch had been. Hell, Noah was repelled every day.
Dr. Bishop’s authoritative voice didn’t deter her, either. She still held on to Noah, still probed for answers. “Do you wear gloves all the time in public?”
“Still curious, I see.” There used to be safety behind the facade of Dr. Bishop. He used to be able to cow the most experienced staff. Now he couldn’t even intimidate a toddler’s mother.
She didn’t flinch. “You know what they say about curiosity…”
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, tugged at his resolve to keep his scars from the world, tugged at the feeling that he should stay away from her for his own protection. A part of him was right. She made him soft.
Ella had a subtle confidence, an open way of looking at a person that made Noah feel as if he’d known her a long, long time, that they’d been friends forever, that he could joke and share stories. She wasn’t as fragile as the girl next door he’d initially thought she was. But that wholesome, welcome quality seemed to span the distance between them, whether she was across the road or standing so close he could pull her into his arms and kiss her.
Kiss her.
He’d been avoiding that specific image since the moment she’d walked into the Bent Nickel. He could no longer avoid it when she touched him. The physical attraction beckoned like a warm heavy quilt on a cold winter’s night. And boy, was the temperature ever dropping outside.
He couldn’t move. He couldn’t look away. He could only breathe. He was stuck the same way he’d been stuck during his distorted flashback earlier. Only without the sense of dread and disaster. Strike that. She brought a different sense of dread and disaster. The kind a beast felt when dragged out of the shadows into the light.
“What good would it serve? This…curiosity?” Was that his voice? It was gruffer than Woof’s growl.
That is, if Woof ever decided to be brave and growl at something.
“What good does it serve to pretend you haven’t been hurt?” She tried to lighten the mood by smiling. “Your scars may affect you, but they don’t define you.”
The beast within him, the one that howled at rainbows and refused the possibility of any resemblance to his past life—that beast didn’t want to smile. He wanted to glare at the world and women like Ella, warning them away.
And maybe he was glaring at her now, because her hold on him loosened.
“I…” She faltered then, her gaze dropping to his hand. “Lots of people bear scars, inside and out. Even me.”
Her last words triggered the fury inside of him at the injustice of his injury. “When were you ever hurt as bad as this?” The words came snarling out of his mouth before he thought things through.
Ella yanked her hand away as if burned, backing off, taking most of his anger with her.
“I’m sorry. That was a visceral reaction.” But he wasn’t ready to apologize for it. “I… You’re right that everyone has wounds of some kind.” Just not as deep and life-altering as his. He stared at the latex glove on his hand, seeing the bumpy scars beneath. “Gloves make it possible for me to be…” What? Kind? He nearly laughed. No one in his old life would ever call him that. He finally settled on a reply. “Civil. Gloves help me be civil.”
She looked dubious.
He wasn’t going to dive into his messy emotions and try to explain. If she truly was the girl next door, she’d pat his shoulder and change the subject. And perhaps she might have if he’d answered her question.
How did it happen?
Flashes of light and darkness blinded him as images of the past pushed forward. The slow-motion drop through the air toward towering pine trees. The scream of metal and crack of glass. The amalgamation of noise that swallowed the horror.
Delicate hands clasped his forearms. “It’s all right.” Ella’s voice. She faced him, square-on.
It wasn’t all right. It would never be all right. He could never go back to who he’d been before the accident.
The here and now returned. Here being Ella and her gentle touch. Now being an ear-ringing silence punctuated by the howling wind.
“I used to be a surgeon in New York,” he said, surprised it was his voice that filled the silence, no longer that of the cold, distant Dr. Bishop. “I specialized in orthopedics at a practice that served some of the highest-paid sports stars around. I repaired torn ACLs, performed Tommy John surgery, set stress fractures. I had a reputation for quick solutions and efficient rehab to get players back in the game as soon and as safely as possible.”
Ella nodded the same way she would have nodded if he’d said he’d been a bus driver in Queens. Unimpressed. Not in awe.
A year ago, that would have gotten under Noah’s skin like a stinging, thorny splinter.
But her gaze didn’t say unimpressed or uninvolved. It said his story mattered. It said he mattered. To her.
So, he kept on talking. “One of my patients was a professional golfer. He’d blown out his knee the year before and had slowly worked his way back onto the circuit. He wanted me to see him play and he wanted to fly me to the tournament in his plane.” Noah’s throat clogged with memories and regrets, about who he’d been back then and how he’d taken a little thing like hand dexterity for granted. “I went, because it was amazing to be invited.” He would’ve bragged about that for years. “But…something happened.” They’d barely begun their steep climb into the air before they’d plunged back down. “Crosswind. Wind shear. Whatever.” It didn’t matter. “We crashed in the trees just past the runway. I would’ve been fine if I’d gripped the seat belt. Instead, I reached for the dash.”
She dug her fingers into his sweatshirt. “And the pilot?”
“My patient? The golfer?” Noah flexed his fingers and stared at a knot in a log on the wall behind her. “He died instantly.” Gruesomely.
“And you’re dying a slow death now,” she surmised.
He startled at her words. But they rang true, resonating deep down in his chest, where the ache of loss resided.
“Let me see.” Her grip on his arms eased.
Noah recoiled. “Why? No.” Never.
“I’ve seen my share of scars, including my husband’s, which were…not pretty.” Ella’s fingers flexed on his forearms as if in response to a stab of pain. She looked both a little nervous and a lot determined. “I think I can handle yours.”
He shook his head.
Her eyes narrowed. Resolve was winning out. “Did I mention I delivered Penny naturally? I’m not squeamish about blood and such.”
“You might be.” After a good look at his hand.
“We all have scars, Noah. Don’t be a baby about yours.”
Stunned, he rocked back on his heels. She thought he was being childish? “I keep my hand covered because I don’t want to—” sicken “—shock other people.” He did a quick inventory of her hands, neck and face. Her skin had nothing to reveal about her past but freckles from too much sun as a kid. “Your scars don’t show.”
“That’s because my scars are internal.” She tapped her chest over her heart, releasing him.
Every instinct urged him to console her. He stood his ground. “Internal scars aren’t the same.”
“You’re not doing a good job of fooling yourself, Noah. You’ve got deeper scars inside than on your hand.”
The truth of her words chilled him.
The wind howled again. Woof’s eyes flew to Noah. He snuggled closer to Penny, seeking comfort. Noah looked at Ella, who cast too much light on Noah’s dark side with her bright blond hair and sprinkling of freckles. Her head was bowed, as if she sat in church praying.
“My mom had me when she was sixteen,” Ella admitted quietly in a voice that could be barely heard above the storm. “Her parents kicked her out when they discovered she was pregnant. And my father… Who knows who he was.”
Noah leaned forward, straining to hear her thin, wounded voice.
“It was hard for her. She held down two waitressing jobs to keep me. But somewhere along the line Mom developed a new love affair, this time with liquor and she…” Ella faltered. Frowned. “She was a good mom in the ways that counted.”
Noah made a sound meant to agree even as he realized her tone had turned defensive. He wondered if she was making a case to herself.
“When I was twelve, Mom went out on a Friday night, which wasn’t unusual. When I got up the next morning she wasn’t there.” Ella still wasn’t looking at Noah, still had her head bowed, still sounded brittle and un-Ella-like. “That wasn’t unusual, either. But then Sunday came. And Monday. And…” She swallowed.
Noah couldn’t swallow. He could barely breathe as he imagined a child dealing with an alcoholic mother, much less an alcoholic mother who’d gone missing.
“I couldn’t call the police. I’d made that mistake before and Mom had to fight to get me back.” She hesitated, just for a breath or two. “So, I didn’t answer the door. I waited. And by waited, I mean I went to school and pretended everything was…the same.” Her eyes came up far enough to meet Noah’s. They were a deep, watery blue. “It was February in Philadelphia. The rent was overdue. The heating bill was overdue. There wasn’t much in the refrigerator or the cupboards.”
“How long?” he croaked, hurting so badly for this child in a way he hadn’t known existed. “How long was it before…?” Before what?
“A month.” Her gaze slid to Penny. “They turned the heat off a few days after she disappeared.” She shivered. “Our apartment wasn’t well-insulated. I wore three layers of clothing and I still couldn’t get warm.”
Noah wanted to wrap her in a jacket, in a blanket, in his arms.
Ella’s eyes were glazed and unseeing. “I ate everything in the house, including the mayonnaise in the jar. When there was nothing left, I stole packets of ketchup from the fast-food restaurant on the corner.”
Her fight against starvation explained her prioritizing the need for food. He cursed in his head, feeling helpless and indignant and protective. He held on to her arms, although whether to steady himself or her…he wasn’t sure.
“And finally…the landlord called the police, suspecting I’d been abandoned.” She was staring at his chest without seeing anything. “It was a Saturday. I was buried in blankets reading a book I’d borrowed from the school library.” She turned to look out the window. “And it was snowing.”
Silence descended upon the cabin once more.
“What happened to her?” Noah had to ask twice before she answered.
“Mom got picked up for drunk driving that first night. They put her in the drunk tank to dry out. They didn’t realize she lived on liquor. Busy shift. Change of staff. She went through withdrawals and died half a day after she was arrested.”
The skin on Noah’s arms pebbled. Ella had been twelve. She seemed so normal. He’d been thirty-five when he’d crash-landed and he…felt like a monster.
“And she didn’t tell them to check on you? No one checked to see if she had a daughter or family?”
“Somehow…” Her voice sounded very small. “My existence slipped through the cracks.”
As if she wasn’t important enough to be remembered. To be saved.
“Do you tell this story to everyone?” Was that what he was going to have to do? Put on a brave face and pretend he was like everyone else? Make idle chitchat about his horrific scars with strangers? He didn’t think he could do it.
“No.” She chewed her bottom lip before continuing. “I told Bryce. I told Grandpa Harlan.”
“What about Sophie? Shane?” The redheaded Monroe whose name he couldn’t remember.
She shook her head. “I was going to tell the rest of the Monroes after Penny was born, but then Bryce died and…”
“You didn’t want them to judge you,” he guessed.
“No…yes.” Life returned to her body in a passionate toss of her arms that forced him to step back. “I didn’t want them to cast me aside. I didn’t want to lose my family in case something happened to me.”
“Why not just make a will and designate Sophie as Penny’s guardian?” He’d noticed how well those two women got along.
“Sophie and I are close now because we both have young children and attend all the family functions. But if we drift apart…” Her gaze swept her daughter’s face. “If for whatever reason I stop going or being invited to Monroe family functions and become more of an acquaintance… I never want Penny to be a taken in by a stranger, be it a Monroe or someone in the foster-care system.”
Because that had been her fate.
“You’re afraid.”
“Like you aren’t,” she snapped back at him, fire in her eyes. “At least I can admit it. And I don’t shy away from labels. Orphan. Widow. Single mother. You think those don’t make me die a little inside to admit? Every one of those labels is a sign of failure.”
“That’s not true. You didn’t fail at marriage or choose to be orphaned.”
“What does it matter how any of it happened?” Ella chopped the air with her hand. “It feels like failure to me.” She glared at him. “What label are you using to define yourself?” Her expression turned fierce. “And don’t you dare say failure.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” he lied.
She raised her eyebrows, demanding the truth.
“Okay, I was going to say that. It’s how I feel. Same as you.” And, same as her, he’d earned it through no fault of his own. He cursed and ripped the latex from his hand, stinging his scars. He thrust his damaged appendage toward her. “Here. It looks like a pirate’s hook. And it’s about as useful.”
“It looks like a hand,” Ella said matter-of-factly as she stared at it. Her fingers hovered over his. “May I?”
She wanted to touch him? The beast?
Ella robbed him of breath. It took him a moment to nod.
Her fingers traced over the length of the scars. Three that traversed from the phalanges to the small metacarpals, fingertip to wrist. Her touch made them tingle. “How did your therapy go?”
He drew his hand away.
She searched his face. “You didn’t do therapy.”
“What would be the point?” Anger was rising from the ashes of loss. “I can’t ever perform surgery again.”
Ella chewed on his answer for a few moments as the wind howled outside. “Not all doctors are surgeons.”
He made a noise that refuted her statement. “All I ever wanted to do was perform complex operations to heal people.” With a skill that was looked up to.
Egotist, thy name is Dr. Noah Bishop.
“Oh, geez. You’re one of those.” Ella crossed the room to stand by the front window. Then she rubbed her arms and moved closer to the woodstove.
“One of whats?” He had to ask even though he was afraid he knew.
“One of those doctors who consider themselves godlike because they have skill superior to their peers.”
Bingo. The accuracy of her barb cut open his chest, just over his heart. There was no defense against that.
“You know…” Ella flinched and then posed with her hands on her hips. “Sometimes Penny wants ice cream. She’ll stand in the middle of the kitchen and scream, her entire body rigid because I’ve opened the freezer and she’s seen the container.”
“What a little angel,” Noah murmured.
Ella went to sit next to her daughter and Woof on the couch. “And I’ll try everything to distract her, including offering her a small cup of yogurt.”
“Ice cream,” Penny murmured, her sleepy eyes searching for the treat.
Noah made himself stare at his wounded hand. “You’re saying I have the emotional maturity of a two-year-old.” Good things. These were all good things. He wanted the intense glances they’d exchanged to end, the feeling of connection and attraction to go away. He wanted to be the useless, lonely beast.
“The world seems perfect when you eat ice cream, but it doesn’t last. Nothing ever lasts.” Ella rubbed her arms again.
He walked over, took the yellow-and-brown afghan Odette had crocheted from the back of the recliner and wrapped it around Ella.
Ella thanked him and pulled it tight across her shoulders. She was solid, independent, pragmatic. After every emotional blow, she’d pulled herself up and gone on with life.
It was shaming, really, to stand and face her when he was, by turn, a coward, like Woof.
“Think about it,” she said in a quiet voice. “You can’t trust ice cream to be there every day.”
“Ella.” It was the first time he’d said her name out loud.
She raised those blue eyes to his face. There was wariness in her gaze, but also something else. A feeling he couldn’t quite name.
“Ella,” he said again, relishing her name on his lips. “Why do you have ice cream in your freezer, if you won’t let Penny have some?”
Ella brushed a stray curl from Penny’s forehead. “She gets ice cream plenty of times, but she has to learn she can’t always get what she wants.”
Noah nodded.
That was a lesson they’d both learned the hard way.