“Cancer.”
“I’m so sorry.” Even though Burke and Kay had moved away, she was surprised she hadn’t heard. It was shocking how many people in her circle were dealing with cancer and other serious conditions. “What happened?”
“Did you remember that she had cancer when our kids were in college?”
Fiona nodded.
“It stayed in remission for several years. But when it came back, it came back with a vengeance.”
Kay had been pensive and studious. Basically, nothing like Fiona. “That’s terrible. I wish I could take a machine gun to cancer and just mow it down.”
“I wish you could, too.”
“How are you and your kids doing?”
“It’s been a hard two years, but we’re doing all right. How are your sons?”
“Jeremiah has amnesia and doesn’t remember me.”
His eyes rounded.
“I know,” she said. “Who gets amnesia? And who tells their mother a version of ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you’?”
“It’s hard to believe that anyone couldn’t remember you,” he said with a perfectly straight face.
“Precisely. Also, Jeremiah’s enamored with the woman who served as his caregiver and may or may not be a con artist. In my opinion, she wears too little makeup to be a con artist. But one can never be too careful.”
“Ah.” His light brown eyes were warm and sweet as cinnamon rolls.
“Jude got a law degree from Columbia. He worked for the DA for a few years, then decided to become an FBI agent. I’m still stupefied by that because who takes a law degree from Columbia and decides to earn peanuts with it working for the FBI?”
“Public servants?” he proposed mildly. “People who have family money?”
“My son falls into both categories. I just . . .” She flung up her hands. “A law degree from Columbia, Burke.”
He shrugged like,There’s no accounting for what our kids do now that they’re adults.
She’d been so proud when her boys had become adults.Look, she’d thought,I’m sending excellent and independent men out into the world!
But then those excellent men had provensoindependent that they rarely came to stay with her here. Nor did either one seem inclined to fulfill her dream of becoming a young grandmother still active enough to dazzle her little grandbabies.
There’d been a season, after Jeremiah had married Alexis, when she’d believed the dream of grandchildren was within her grasp. But Jeremiah and Alexis had no children before their marriage ended with Alexis's death. She prayed every day that the Camdens would not go the way of the Kennedys—stricken by tragedy after tragedy.
“Neither of my sons,” she announced, “are doing anything to ensure that I become a grandmother before I’m in a wheelchair and wearing bifocals.”
“Shame on them.”
“Yes! Thank you.” She was remembering why she’d always liked Burke. They had an easy rapport. Sometimes her personality rubbed up against other people’s personalities like sandpaper. But not with him. “Did you come to Groomsport for a visit?”
“I moved here about a month and a half ago. I’ve been wanting to come back to be near my kids and grandkids. I finally made the jump.”
“You were always the consummate family man.”
“Is that a compliment or a criticism?”
“A compliment. If I sound bitter saying that, it’s only because my husband was so much the opposite. Which is exactly what I loved about him at the start and loathed about him at the end.”
She’d been raised in a lower-middle-class family. In her early twenties, responsible men, exemplified by her father, had seemed boring. She’d wanted thrills and glamour and everything that glittered. She’d gotten exactly what she’d wanted, and, in the end, it had ripped her heart out. “Are you going to pick up where you left off, working for yourself?”
