“Like promise to call?” Katie asked with an empty laugh. “Well, he did, and he was sweet, but it didn’t help. Or maybe he should swear he’ll be back when he won’t? Like give hope where there is clearly none? He’s right about one thing—once I get beyond this, I’ll be better off. Because I need a lot more in a man than someone who has no faith in his own ability to stick around. Loser,” she added, wiping a tear away.

“Um…why are you in the tub?” Leslie asked.

“The boys. They’re all rough and tumble and bad unless I cry, something I almost never do. It really bothers them if they see me cry. They’re such typical little men. They want to make it better.”

Leslie laughed. “I’ve given Conner a couple of test cries, usually associated with ovulation, and you’re right—men can’t just listen and comfort. They need it resolved in five minutes. You’re getting kind of pruny. Do you have a lot more crying to do?”

“I might, yeah. But maybe not for right now.”

“Katie? Has there been anyone since Charlie? I mean besides that dentist back in Vermont…”

“No,” she said, shaking her head and unplugging the tub drain with her toe. She reached for the towel and Leslie passed it. “I was considering the dentist because there wasn’t much chance he was going to make me cry like this. You have to have a real emotional investment in a man to cry your heart out when he dumps you or…or deploys. The dentist did make me cry for Charlie, though. The blandness of my relationship with the dentist made me long for the commitment and passion Charlie always had for me. I mean, Charlie definitely had his character flaws, but there’s just no substitute for knowing your man belongs to you completely. Oh, God, I missed that passion Charlie had for me.” She stood up and wrapped the towel around herself. “Be careful what you pray for.”

“Well,” Leslie said, standing up and reaching for the robe on the door hook. “You’ll forget Dylan in no time,” she said hopefully.

“Sure,” Katie said doubtfully. “Of course.”

Leslie held the terry robe for Katie and for a moment, in wordless communication, they shared the same thought—it didn’t matter if it was two weeks or two years. If the chemistry was powerful, if the heart shattered, healing was going to take time.

“Please take Conner home,” Katie said. “Thank you for letting me talk, but will you please get him out of here? And tell him I’m just not ready to go over this with him. Not right now.”

“Sure, I understand. You know, he only wants to help.”

“Yes, I know. And he’ll have a terrible time understanding that there’s nothing he can do for me.”

“Sure. Absolutely.” Then Leslie gave her a hug. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Please, call me if you need me sooner.”

“Of course I will.”

They talked softly for just a minute more, then Leslie left Katie alone.

Leslie found Conner pacing in the living room, a very agitated expression on his face. The second he saw her he pointed at the newspapers and said, “Are you going to explain this?”

“Yes, Conner. We’re going to leave now and I’ll tell you about it. Boys?” she yelled. Two little heads popped over the loft rail. “We’re going home now. Be nice to Mommy and stay out of her hair.”

“She crying some more?” Andy asked, his little eyebrows scrunched in concern.

“Not so much,” Leslie said. “But she might need quiet time. Be very sweet to her. Will you?”

They both nodded obediently and it made her smile. Those boys were going to grow up to take good care of their mother.

Once in Conner’s truck, the first order of business was to explain that Dylan Childress was no ordinary biker or pilot. He was an ex-star who’d built himself some kind of life in Montana, away from the cameras and press.

“Then what was he doing here?” Conner wanted to know.

“I’m not sure,” she told him. “Katie said he was looking at small airports around here to see if he could learn anything that would help his charter business, but she didn’t mention he was leaving here to return to movies until after he was gone. I think it was his sudden departure that came as a shock, even though he’d been warning her that he had to go soon. And she really liked him. And here’s the thing about women—we always say we’re up for that fling, that we don’t need commitment, and we’re always lying to ourselves.”

“Bull, I had flings…”

“I didn’t say you men were lying to yourselves…”

“I never heard from women that they were all upset!” Conner said defensively.

She looked at him sharply. “Don’t you have an ex-wife still pestering you from time to time?”

“Oh, her—well, that’s not the same thing. She never said she didn’t need commitment and she has problems.” He shook his head. “Katie is completely normal.” He glanced at Leslie. “Isn’t she?”

“She is,” Leslie confirmed. “And your completely normal sister kind of fell for the guy. It wasn’t part of the plan, but stuff like that happens. I guess he didn’t fall for her or maybe it wouldn’t have turned out the way it did.”

Conner growled.

“Really, Conner, I want to hate him, too. But as Katie said, it was an honest relationship—he never misled her. We didn’t get into it, but I don’t think she has any regrets. She’s just having the hurt right now. You have to let her get through it. You can’t fix it.”

“I could punch the bastard in the face,” Conner said.

“Hmm. Very sensitive. But somehow I don’t think that’s going to make Katie feel a lot better…”

He gave a deep sigh. “All I wanted for my sister was happiness. She’s had such rotten luck, you know? Not just bad guy luck—but losing our mom and dad, losing Charlie when she was pregnant with the boys, being stuck with a brother as her only security, losing the hardware store, our inheritance… I just wanted her to have a real life. A good, stable, happy life. You know?”

“I know, Conner. I know.”

“After Charlie, I couldn’t call her after eight at night,” Conner said softly, almost mournfully. “It used to break my heart. She’d go to bed when the kids did, because staying up and having a whole long evening alone, it was too lonely. She said she was never too lonely in the early morning or the afternoon, but the nights were always hard. She missed going to bed with her man at night. It never got easier to go to bed alone, she said. It’s kind of hard to get used to the idea that your beautiful little sister has that kind of loneliness.”

“Even though you’ve had some serious loneliness of your own?” Leslie asked him.

“Even though. So when I met that Dylan character, I tried not to count on him too much, but there was no missing that her eyes were brighter. Her smile was pretty loaded, like she had one helluva secret. She was happy. And I’ll admit, I hoped this was something that would work out for her.”

“She did, too,” Leslie said.

“She’s okay now?”

“Conner, she might be a little emotional for a while. You have to let it go, let her grieve it in her own way and time.”

“Yeah,” he said grumpily. “You’re probably right… So, did she say what she’s going to do tonight? Since we left her?”

Leslie looked at Conner sympathetically. “She said she’s going to bed early.”

Grrrr came from the driver’s side. “I’m going to have to beat the shit out of that son of a bitch.”

Twelve

The phone didn’t ring again for Katie, not that she expected it to. She did have this wild and uncontrollable wish that Dylan would call her every day or several times a day, to have him say he’d been a fool to leave her as he had, to promise to be back to see her because he couldn’t stay away. She wouldn’t even consider it, of course. She would say, Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… That she wanted to see him, that went without saying. But she wouldn’t take that chance again. It couldn’t possibly make the whole thing hurt less.

She had a few shameless problems over the following week. She couldn’t stop herself from going to the grocery store in Fortuna and lingering in the magazine aisle and at the checkout, looking for a familiar face. He was still an item, it appeared, though there didn’t seem to be any more kissing on the front pages. It was hard not to buy those papers, bring him home with her, but she resisted valiantly. Still, she kept the ones she had, tucked away in the trunk that held other keepsakes.

She had read and reread the articles, however. It was so like twenty years ago when her Teen magazine was shredded from use. One story said that Dylan had been living on his famous grandmother’s Montana estate. Wow. You’d think he could afford jeans without holes in the knees, right?

She cried some, but not malignantly. She knew her twinkle was gone. In fact, she just didn’t feel quite right—the whole ordeal had robbed her of appetite and unsettled her eating and sleeping patterns. No big surprise there—that’s why the term divorce diet had been invented. Katie really didn’t have weight to spare, however. If Dylan made her gaunt and thin in addition to everything else he’d done, she was really going to be pissed off.

She tried to push herself to spend a little more time with people, even if they did want to know what was wrong. Jack Sheridan always asked if she was feeling any better, which implied he knew all the reasons she wasn’t feeling that great. She forced a smile and said, “Much. Thanks.”

She sat with Leslie and her young neighbor, Nora, on Leslie’s front porch and talked about everything from bad haircuts to having children and she found she could open up to Nora. Though young, she seemed so worldly. She had two little girls, nine months and two years, and was not only a single mom but a never-married single mom who had escaped a brutal relationship. Even though Katie had lost her husband to a war, she was not oblivious to the challenges Nora had faced. And it was Nora who said, “Reverend Kincaid really helped me get on my feet after I’d been dumped here without a dime to my name. Now I have two part-time jobs and can take my kids to both of them if I have to—I work at the clinic with Mel Sheridan and at the school with Becca Timm, the teacher, and some other mothers. But the most important thing is how practical and nonjudgmental Reverend Kincaid has been. I was very reluctant to go talk to a preacher after all the horrid things I’d done to get myself into my own mess.”

Even with that glowing endorsement, Katie didn’t feel inclined to seek counseling from the church. She was a little concerned about how the good minister might react to the fact that one of the things she grieved was the best sex of her life.

“I see him with his wife,” Leslie said. “I have a feeling he’d be sympathetic. He looks at her like a starving man looks at a rib roast.”

Katie giggled.

“You look like you could use a little milkshake or something,” Leslie suggested. “Has this whole thing caused you to lose weight?”

“Possibly a pound or two, but don’t worry. I’ll gain it right back.”

“Aren’t you eating?”

“My appetite is a little off, but what do you expect? It’ll come back. Soon, I think, since I’m starting to hate him.”

“Really?” Leslie asked with a bit of excitement.

“Yes, really. What the hell was he thinking, telling me he doesn’t date women with children because he’s never going to be a family man, then not only dating me but shtupping me all the time. Did he really think I was taking him seriously? Wouldn’t any woman think he’d shifted his thinking? What a fool!”

“Fool?” Leslie asked.

“If he’s not going to get involved, maybe he shouldn’t get involved. Hmm?” she asked, lifting a brow.

“Novel concept,” Les agreed with a grin.

“Someone was thinking with his dick,” Katie said, bringing a burst of laughter from both Leslie and Nora. “I was pretty hurt and lonely but I’m getting angry.”

“I think I like where this is going,” Leslie said.

“He ought to be ashamed of himself. At least I was sincere on all fronts. In for a penny, in for a pound. The jerk.”

“You have a lot of your brother in you, Katie,” she said. “Hungry?”

“Actually I am a little hungry. You have any cookies?”

Even a little bit of man-hate didn’t completely restore her appetite. But then, fretting and feeling emotionally gutted didn’t connect up to that good old robust habit.

It was a relief to see how well Conner and Leslie fit into the town; they had clearly found their place. And that helped Katie see this as a good place to raise her sons, even without a husband.

The second week in July passed and the weather was about as steamy as it was going to get in the mountains—a hot eighty degrees. After driving the boys to summer program, she headed for Fortuna. First she went to the grocery store’s news rack and, thank God, Dylan Childress wasn’t groping anyone for the paparazzi today. Then she went to the pharmacy aisle where she grabbed a pregnancy test. She didn’t think it possible, but she just hadn’t felt well and couldn’t imagine it was all grief. She picked one up. Fifteen dollars? she thought in amazement. And who knew how accurate it was. She picked up a second for twenty-one dollars. And a third for seven and a fourth for twelve and a fifth for nineteen. “I’ll send him a bill,” she said aloud, and she walked to the checkout, head held high.