*Cam blinked. What just happened? Turning in his seat he saw the door closing behind Harper. He caught Dot Higgins’s eye, but she merely raised her brows, clearly as puzzled as he was.
The crowd had gone unusually quiet, so when Noah spoke, his voice carried all the way to the back of the diner. “He should go after her, right?”
Dot shushed him, but he half-stood and pointed to Cam. “Go after her, son.”
“You should,” Judge Harry Evans agreed from a couple of tables over. “Go catch her.”
Several other diners murmured in assent and Sue, who’d come over with the water pitcher, nodded and gestured with a shake of her thumb. “Go. I’ll keep your table open.”
Cam pushed out of the booth, shrugging into his jacket as he exited to the sound of clinking silverware and hushed conversation. In the dim evening light of early December, he saw her standing less than a hundred feet away staring at the display in the big window of Clyde Schwimmer’s Antiques & Uniques. Arms wrapped around her waist, she was swaying ever so slightly as he drew closer.
Her eyes were closed, and her lips were moving. “Sorry … sorry … oh, Drew, I’m so sorry,” she crooned as he approached, the rubber soles of his running shoes barely making a whisper on the sidewalk.
He reached out a hand to touch her, then dropped it. “Harper?”
She started and whirled around, her eyes huge. “Why are you following me?”
“I was worried about you.” He peered down into her tear-stained face. “What … what happened? Did I say something to upset you? Whatever it was, I didn’t mean to.”
“Not you,” Harper choked out and plopped down on the old bench that Clyde had placed under his lighted window and decorated with red and green ribbons, pine boughs, and holly. She swiped at her cheeks with her palms. “It’s not you.”
Cam sat down beside her, carefully bracing his feet because he didn’t want their combined weight to tip the wooden bench. It held. “What is it then?” He gave her an encouraging smile. “Because your mousse cake is melting back there.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He wondered if she needed a hug, a friend to soothe whatever it was that was causing her such distress that she’d fled the diner in tears. But he didn’t touch her; he didn’t have the right to do that, and the last thing he wanted to do was frighten her. “Don’t be. Do you want to talk about it? I’ve been told I’m a pretty good listener.”
She took a shuddering breath. “Sometimes I think I might be going crazy.”
“We’ve all had that thought.” Cam chuckled, then caught himself. “I mean we’ve all had that thought about ourselves, not about you.”
The shadow of a smile appeared through her tears. “I knew what you meant.”
“Why do you think that today?”
“I talk to my dead husband.”
“Okay.”
“Out loud.”
“I heard … just now.” Cam was flying by the seat of his pants here. He had no idea what the appropriate thing to say was, and he was terrified of saying the wrong thing. “Maybe that’s not unusual when you’ve lost someone you love.”
“He’s always in my head.” Harper’s words were so soft he had to lean down to hear them.
“Is that what happened back there?” He lifted his chin toward the diner. “You thought of your husband?”
“I was happy, enjoying myself with you and the food, and excited about the possibility of an apartment and—” She closed her lips in a tight grim line.
“Okay.” Cam furrowed his brow, trying to understand. What was wrong with being happy and enjoying herself?
“How is that fair? He’ll never taste Mac’s delicious mushroom fettucine or Carly’s torta or see the river at sunset or celebrate another Christmas or—” She stopped again, sighing. “I know all the right words you’re gonna say. Drew would want me to live my life. He wouldn’t want me to be sad forever. He’d want me to be happy, to move on. But how do I know that? What if he doesn’t? What if he’s … he’s just right here, watching? Listening? Hating me?” She pointed out in front of her, and God help him, Cam looked.
He closed his eyes for second to banish the vision of a tall, brawny soldier that had started to form in his head. A man who looked a lot like so many of the exhausted reservists he’d worked with—tired and filthy and nearly ready to drop over. Of course, no one was there. It was only the chill night air, the circle of light from the streetlight.
“I-I feel so guilty if there’s a moment when he’s not at the center of my thoughts.” She turned to Cam, her expression forlorn. “I don’t know how to release him, Cam. I don’t know how to move on.”
His name on her lips sent a disconcerting spark through him, but he didn’t act on his instinct to reach for her, hold her, comfort her. Instead, he continued staring out at the businesses across the street. At Earthbound Trading, Poppy Jenkins’s colorful Christmas lights lit up her window display, while at Hutchin’s House tavern, a group of folks stood at the entrance laughing and chatting.
Finally, he said, “Stay right here. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.” He stood up, careful not to jiggle the bench too much and disturb Clyde’s basket of Christmas. “Okay?”
Her brow furrowed, but she nodded.
He zipped back into the diner, dropped money for his meal on the table, and grabbed the drawings, her cash, and the desserts, which Sue had thoughtfully already boxed up and placed in a to-go bag with napkins and forks. He didn’t stop to talk, but he noticed the approving glances from Noah, Dot, Ryker, and Kitt, and the thumbs-up Harry shot him as he passed his table.
She was still on the bench as he practically skidded to a stop beside her. He thrust the cash at her. “Here. Your meal was on Mac, remember?”
Harper shoved the bills into her pocket. “I’m sorry about ruining your dinner.”
“You didn’t.” With the drawings rolled up and safely tucked inside his jacket, he held up the bag. “I’ve got our desserts. It’s still halfway warm outside for December. Want to go down to the River Walk and eat them?” He offered her his other hand.
*
For a moment, feeling adrift in the dim evening light, Harper simply stared at Cam’s proffered hand. It was a familiar feeling—the untethered disconnect—almost comfortable, but to her surprise, she realized she wanted his hand, his company. For tonight at least. Portfolio slung over her shoulder, she slipped her fingers into his and allowed him to pull her up from the bench. He released her after she rose and she appreciated that. A lot of men would’ve taken advantage and kept her fingers clasped in theirs, but Cam clearly wasn’t most men.
Shoulders almost touching, they walked down Broadway, past Hutchin’s House, frame houses and brick cottages, all lit up for the holidays—old buildings dating from the early eighteen hundreds that had been renovated and turned into shops, offices, and other businesses. As they crossed Warner Drive, Harper ran lightly ahead to watch a barge chugging up river with a load of timber.
Cam came up beside her, set the sack down, and rested one hip against the concrete wall. “Never gets old, does it?”
She glanced up. “What?”
“The river. Watching the barges.”
“Haven’t been down here much,” she admitted. “It’s … fascinating.”
“My brother and my cousins and I used to spend every day after school here, on skateboards or bikes,” Cam said, fondness clear in his memories. “We’d always stop to watch the barges full of coal or timber or ore. Sometimes even trash.” He chuckled. “Once we saw a barge full of old crushed cars. Counted at least forty stacked up on top of each other.”
Harper smiled at the image of car bodies filling a barge. Suddenly, she turned to him. “It’s exhausting,” she blurted, then snapped her mouth shut.
Why did she feel the urge to confide in this guy?
His gray eyes darkened under the streetlights that lined the River Walk. “I can’t even imagine.” Somehow, he knew instinctively what she was talking about—again, something most men wouldn’t have caught without some more information.
“It’s why I left Michigan … ran away. I-I thought—” She swallowed hard, grasping for words. “I thought if I left everything behind, I could stand it, maybe even let go of him.”
“Why do you have to?”
Cam’s question took her by surprise. Most everyone—her parents, the aunts, her friends at school, the women in the grief group she’d attended once—had encouraged her to move on. Not to forget Drew. Never that. But to tuck him into her memory and go on with her life. Her mom had even encouraged her to take her road trip and had texted little boosts each morning while she was on the road.
And there was the rub. Going on with her life. Her life had been Drew, and now he was gone and it felt like her life was over, too.
She frowned at Cam. “It’s what widows do, isn’t it? Release their dead husbands and move on?”
“I’ve only known a couple of widows in my life. My gram, who lost Grandpa after he’d been sick for a long time, and my buddy, Conor Flaherty, was a widower. Lost his wife several years ago. Cancer. He’s remarried now, and has two more kids with Sam, his second wife. But he was sad for a long time. So was my cousin Eli, when his fiancée died suddenly. We all worried about him.”
“See? People I love are worrying about me.” Harper raised both palms up in a what do I do gesture. “It’s not that I don’t want to move on, but it’s like I’m … stuck. Wading through cold molasses. No matter what I do, it reminds me of Drew, and if I’m not reminded”—she dropped her hands to her sides and curled her fingers into tight fists—“like tonight, the guilt that I’m not reminded overwhelms me.”
Cam’s eyes widened, and it hit Harper that she’d way overshared with a man who was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger. She couldn’t open up to her dear aunts, to her parents, to her friends, but this guy? Something about him made her want to pour out her heart. She shifted her gaze to the river again. Lights were coming on across the wide expanse, twinkling among the changing trees.
“Look!” She pointed to a bright light that suddenly came on at the top of a hill on the Kentucky side of the river. “What is that?”
Cam chuckled. “That’s Scott’s Peak. A few years ago, the old guy who lives up there built a tower, and every night at dusk, he turns this giant spotlight on the river for about ten minutes. His grandfather died fifty-odd years ago. His tug capsized and got swept over a spillway in a flood. The light honors him and all the other people who’ve lost their lives on the river.”
Harper was intrigued. She’d never really thought about people drowning in the Ohio River, although growing up near the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, and Lake Erie, she knew plenty about lives lost to storms and high waves. “Does that happen very often?”
“Not around here so much, but it happens. People who don’t know the river currents. You can get washed downriver pretty fast, especially if the river’s up.” Cam nodded toward a nearby bench. “Wanna have dessert? Seems a shame to waste all Carly’s hard work.”
Harper accepted the container and fork and settled onto the bench. The torte really was delicious—especially eating it out here on the waterfront where the air was crisp with early winter and the stars were beginning to come out. And the company was nice. Cameron Walker was a truly kind man.
They ate in comfortable silence for a few minutes before Cam suddenly said, “Tell me about Drew.”
Harper swallowed the bite of torte she’d taken and tilted her head to peer at him. He’d finished his dessert and put the container back in the sack between them. He sat comfortably, one arm slung over the back of the park bench, the other on the armrest, his expression open, friendly, truly curious.
He really wants to know.
She’d avoided discussing Drew for so long, she wasn’t sure where to start.
Cam must have sensed her uncertainty because with a gentle smile, he asked, “Where did you meet?”
The question was exactly what she needed. “In chemistry class in high school. I was so lost in that class and so was my lab partner, Theo, who happened to be my best friend.”
“Theo? Your best friend was a guy?”
“No.” She snickered. “Theo is Theodosia Carr—named for her grandmother and her great-grandmother. We met in art class in seventh grade and have been best friends ever since.” She sobered. “She’s been doing art restoration work in Paris for the last two years.”
His blond brows shot up. “Really?”
“Yeah. She came back for Drew’s funeral and begged me to go back with her, but I had a contract with the school and—” She closed the dessert container on the last few crumbs of torte and dropped it in the bag. “Anyway, neither of us had a clue what we were doing. Drew and his friend Travis were at the table behind us, and at first, I think they thought it was funny, how much we struggled. But as we got deeper into the semester, I started to panic. Theo didn’t care whether she got a B or a D; all she cared about was passing. Art classes were all that mattered to her.” Harper chuffed a small laugh. “I needed at least a B to keep my average up, but even though I tried, I simply couldn’t grasp it, you know?”
Cam nodded. “Totally get it. I was that way about language classes—just didn’t click and I needed a foreign language credit to get into UK. During high school, I tried Spanish, French, German … finally settled on Latin. My senior year was the last year they even offered Latin at River’s Edge High. I managed a C in it.”
Harper had never known anyone who’d taken Latin classes. “You speak Latin?”
Cam laughed and shook his head. “Maybe I could find a bathroom in ancient Rome, but no, not much of it stuck.” He gave her an encouraging lift of his chin. “So you sucked at chemistry and he didn’t?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Turned out, Drew was a chem student tutor. One day, after a particularly tough class where Theo and I damn near blew ourselves up, he offered to tutor me.” Her chest tightened at the memory of Drew carefully taking lessons apart and parsing them into smaller pieces she could understand. The two of them sitting in a booth at the DQ sharing fries and laughing as she struggled with the periodic table and formulas. “He finally ended up giving me a couple of Mr. Rae’s old tests—God knows where he got them. He didn’t say and I didn’t ask. He told me to memorize them, so I did, and it got me through the class. He was amazing. Kind and funny and smart and so caring. It was … magic. Like we were fated, you know?”
Heat rose in her neck, and she was sure her cheeks were rosy with embarrassment. She’d only meant to share the facts, not get all mushy. “Sorry. Anyway, that’s how we met.”
Cam didn’t seem at all uncomfortable. In fact, he pressed her. “When did you get married?”
“After I graduated from UM. He was recruited senior year and went to Fort Leonard Wood for basic and stayed there for Engineer School. Lotta gas money driving to meet each other halfway in Bloomington, Illinois, if he could get a weekend pass. FaceTimed, mostly, and texted and talked on the phone, and I wrote him long emails.” Harper sighed, remembering endless nights in her bed, filled with longing, seeing the same hunger on Drew’s handsome face. “He got sent to the depot in Warren after his AIT, working on ground support, but when he got deployed, it was usually to the Middle East.”
Cam shifted on the bench, turning so he was facing her more directly. “Did he go away very often?”
A chill ran down her spine, so she tugged her jacket closer and zipped it up to her collarbone. She thought about the question, realizing that she and Drew had spent more time apart than together during their nearly five years of marriage, but that had never seemed to affect their closeness. They were connected by an invisible thread whether he was on base in Warren or deployed overseas. “Not all that often, really.” She sighed. “He’d just decided not to re-up after he finished his eighth year. Wanted to start a family, work at his dad’s home security company. We’d bought our house and renovated it. We were pretty sure Kuwait would be his last deployment.”
For the first time since Drew’s death, Harper was able to tell the story without that sharp stab of pain in her chest. Without breaking down or choking or getting so mad she wanted to scream. Did that mean she was starting to heal? She had no idea because the ache for Drew still filled her soul, but the anger at him and at God seemed to be subsiding a little bit.
She smiled, probably wanly, but as real a smile as she could muster. “Thank you for listening, Cam, for being interested. You’re a nice man.” She stood up. “It would’ve been great to have had a big brother like you.”
“Yeah, that’s me—always the nice guy.” Cam sounded a little downcast as he crumpled the top of the bag and stood as well.
So she offered a real smile because he deserved it and she needed to give it. “It’s not a bad thing, Cameron Walker. Nice guys are rare, and we all need a big brother.”
His pause seemed full of anticipation, but she had no idea of what. No matter how kind he’d been, how easy it had been to open up to him, she still had nothing to offer him. “C’mon, I’ll walk you home,” he said as the long moment of silence began to grow awkward.
She shook her head. “You don’t have to do that. I can find my way.” She hoped he wouldn’t insist.
She wanted to leave this evening with the quiet almost friendship they’d forged in place. Besides, she needed some time alone before facing the aunts. Dot would surely have let Mary know what happened at the diner, and they would be full of solicitous questions.
Cam nodded, and crunching the cardboard containers in his strong fingers, he wadded the brown bag from the diner into a ball and tossed it into a bin about fifteen feet away. It went in with a swoosh of paper against plastic liner.
Grinning, he pumped his hands over his head. “He shoots, he scores!” With that, he backed away from her with a short, “See you,” then turned and jogged up the River Walk.
Still smiling, Harper watched him for a few seconds before turning in the opposite direction to head back to Aunt Mary’s, her heart at ease and anticipating checking out the apartment that Carly had recommended.