“What ‘her?’ My ex? Are you jealous, Rossetti? You were just engaged.”
“No,” she insists. “I’m just curious.”
I sniff in a breath. “Sierra. Knew her since we were kids. Reconnected when I was back home between college and grad school.”
Darcy’s listening so intently that I’m not so sure it’s just curiosity. “What ended it?”
“She wanted marriage and babies, and I wanted grad school. I didn’t want a long-distance relationship distracting me.”
She lifts a brow. “You not the marrying kind?”
“I am. Just wasn’t the right time.” I stir the pasta.
“Do you still love her?” Darcy’s voice is more tender, like she’s afraid of the answer. Her hand speeds up where she pets Stormy, which Stormy grows sick of and leaps off her lap. I hear the subtext in her question:Are you going back to her?
I lift a shoulder. “Love’s a strong word. I don’t harbor any ill will. Last I heard the guy she was seeing was about to propose. I hope she gets what she was looking for.”
Darcy nods, seemingly satisfied with my answer. “When do you finish grad school? Do you know what you’re doing after?”
“Twenty questions,” I tease, but I’m glad she wants to know more about me. “I finish in December, assuming my robot works. And I don’t know.”
“Going home?”
I cut a knob of butter into each of our bowls and get out a shaker of Parmesan cheese. “Probably not. I don’t really get along with my stepdad. He’s kind of like your Rob, controlling. After my dad died, my mom was a mess.”
“You’d kind of expect that, right?” she asks.
“Well, yeah. But we weren’t expecting to lose him.”
“Right,” she says, pain in her eyes.
“But anyway, Mom still wanted me to go to college like we planned, even though she was stuck running the farm and raising my little sister by herself. I originally planned to go to medical school, did the EMT thing to try it out. But I could never get past the car crash calls. I got sick every time, shaking, puking.”
Darcy reaches for me across the kitchen island, her thumb stroking over the back of my hand. “Sorry.”
I nod, enjoying her touch. “Thanks. But yeah, that’s how I ended up in engineering. A little drier, and it still helps people. And the person I want to help most is my mom, so I did robotics?—”
“For a fruit picker,” Darcy finishes.
“Yep.”
She shakes her head. “You’re a helper, Jake. A fixer.”
Yeah, well, when your dad dies when you’re a teenager, you feel some responsibility for everything to go well for everyone in your family.
I drain the pasta over the sink, holding my face away from the steam cloud. I mix the pasta with the butter and sprinkle cheese on top, adding salt to up her electrolytes. I stick a fork in each bowl and sit a couple of stools away from Darcy.
“What are you doing after this summer?” I ask. “Do you want your old marketing job back?”
She sits with that for a minute, her expression darkening. “His whole thing in blocking me from getting the promotion was that I didn’t like that job anyway. And that he’d pay for everything after we were married. But I did like the job, until it was clear how hard it was going to be to get promoted.”
I shrug, spearing a pasta bow tie. “You could do what you want if he was going to bankroll you, though.”
She rubs her lips together. “That’s not really the point. The point was him controlling me, never consulting me. I was just a passenger in his life, an accessory.”
I plant my knuckles on the counter, then glance at her. “Hmm. Yeah, I guess I didn’t see that. Sorry. I didn’t mean to diminish what you’re going through.”
“Thank you,” she says, seeming stunned. “I’m not used to human males admitting fault.”
