He eventually took them and wrote his information before pushing them back across the table to her. “How long have you been with them?” he asked.
She sadly smiled. “Technically, I’m not with them. It’s a long story. Part of that story has to do with Jack never getting over what happened. So if I want a chance to be with them, I think Tim and I need to force Jack to face his past and move on.”
Tim arched an eyebrow at her upon her return to the room. They said good-bye to Helen, and when they reached Tim’s car, he didn’t bother starting it. He turned to her. “Spill it.”
She told him the story. When she finished, he closed his eyes as he shook his head. “Dammit,” he whispered. “Fucking hell.”
“What do we tell him?” She didn’t tell him she’d gotten Pete’s information. She wasn’t sure if Tim would approve of her plan or not and didn’t want Jack to blame him if it blew up in her face.
He opened his eyes, but he sat back in his seat and stared out at the parking lot. “I don’t know the right thing to do here, babe.”
She told him about her conversation with Jack after their arrival. Then she reached out and touched his arm. “Tim, I don’t know if he can get past this unless he deals with it. I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering if he loves me because of a ghost or not.”
He shook his head, and she didn’t miss how his eyes looked moist, as if close to tears himself. “I know, sweetie.” He started the car and began backing out of the parking space. “I know.”
She found Liam on the upper deck, the one leading from the living room. He wore sunglasses, a pair of baggy beach shorts, and flip-flops. He’d staked himself out a cozy work area under the patio table umbrella.
She sat at the table. He looked at her and pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead. “Spill it, Gee.”
For the second time, she repeated what happened, except she revealed that she’d gotten Pete’s contact information. As she told the story, Liam chewed on his lip and looked out over the valley. “I don’t have any advice to offer,” he said, “except this. If you guys decide on an intervention, it could force Jack into a corner where he tells you all to go to hell. Everyone deals with shit that emotionally kicks their asses in their own way. Some people use anger. Some bury themselves in their work. Some people use hiding in their house and taking an alphabet’s worth of antianxiety meds.” He smiled. “Some move in with their sister.”
She finally smiled. “Not helpful.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have any advice. Can you love Jack for who he is, now, today, knowing he’s got issues? Can you love him the way he is? And here’s the other thing.” He leaned forward and clasped his hands on the table. “Let’s say for the hell of it he does have a confab with this guy. What does it solve? Does it answer the question for you, or does it leave you with more questions? And again, what if he opts not for healing himself, but taking a nuclear option and walking out on both you and Tim?”
He softened his voice. “I love you. My priority is you. I’m not making a judgment call about you and them, because I can see where, if this works out like one of your books, that you could be happy. I want that for you. But you’re first and foremost my little sister. That means it’s up to me to warn you that while it’s obvious Tim’s probably on board, I don’t want you getting your hopes up just to get them crushed again.” He winked. “I don’t think going to jail for beating up a cop because he broke my sister’s heart—again—would look good on my résumé.”
“So I just sit around and always wonder what the hell’s going on inside his head?”
He shrugged. “I’m going to play Devil’s advocate. What right do you and Tim have to force him to talk to this guy?”
Eventually she sighed and turned her gaze to the valley. “None,” she softly admitted.
“Exactly. The question is, where do you go from here? I think Jack really loves you. At some point you’ve got to be able to trust someone about what they say. If you can’t trust him to speak the truth, then can you really give him your heart?”
“I love him,” she said as she felt tears prickling her eyes. “I love both of them. And I missed them so damn much, you know that.” She stood and walked over to the railing and stared out over the valley. “I don’t know if I can trust like that anymore. Not after Dickweed, and not after what Jack said to me that day. I have to be sure before I can make the commitment. Every time I put my heart out there, I get hurt. I’m sick of it. Part of me wishes I’d never gotten involved with them because it hurt so fucking much.”
She turned to him. “Don’t take this the wrong way, bro, but I’d rather spend the rest of my life alone with you than spend it with them and wonder every day if Jack really means what he says.”
Below them, on the lower deck, Tim stood with his eyes closed and his heart pounding as he listened to her and Liam talking. He knew it was wrong to eavesdrop, and he hadn’t meant to, but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t lose her again. He damn sure didn’t want to lose Jack.
If it took forcing a showdown between Jack and Pete to bring this festering boil to a head once and for all, that’s what he’d do. If it backfired…
Well, he hoped Liam and Gwen would find room for him in the RV.
Chapter Sixteen
Gwen retreated to the safety of the RV to work. She put on her headphones, the expensive noise-cancelling ones Liam had given her that Christmas, plugged them into her iPod, and hunched over her laptop at the table. She lost herself in her work, finally escaping into her latest fictional world where maybe she couldn’t totally shape things to her liking if the characters rebelled, but it allowed her a chance to quit thinking about Jack and Tim and Pete’s eternal grief and guilt.
That’s why she screamed when she felt a touch on her shoulder several hours later and looked up to find Liam standing there, and surprised to see it was nearly dark.
Heart racing, she slid her headphones down around her neck. “Jesus H. Christ, you scared the crap out of me.”
“Sorry. Tim said dinner’s almost ready.”
She glanced out the window and realized Jack’s truck now sat in the driveway. “How long’s he been home?”
“About an hour.”
She stewed. “Nice of him to not come say hi,” she muttered.
Liam slid into the other side of the booth. “Okay, quit that, right now. Stop the passive-aggressive bullshit. That’s the kind of stuff Mom likes to pull. He asked me if it would be okay if he came out here, and I told him I thought you were working so maybe he should wait until you took a break so he wouldn’t interrupt your work.”
She wanted to get petulant, grouch back at him, but knew he was right. “Sorry.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell him sure, go ahead and interrupt her, but I thought after the morning you had you needed to blow off some steam.”
She switched off her headphones and her iPod and slid them across the table, out of her way. “What do I do? Do I tell him about Pete?”
“I can’t tell you that. I don’t know. This is one thing I wish to hell I could fix for you, sis, but I can’t.” He reached over and grabbed her hands and squeezed them. “Believe me, if I could wave a magic wand over it for you, I would. I hate like hell seeing you hurting. At some point, you have to quit being scared to take a chance and go for it. That’s what you told me, isn’t it?”
“I took a chance and it got my heart broke once already by him.”
“Yeah, and he’s apologized, right?”
Part of her wanted to avoid the risk of getting hurt again. Just hide out in the RV for a few days and then leave when Jack and Tim were at work. Not say good-bye, just put them in her rearview mirror as a “lesson learned” chapter of her life.