“They are effective.” He gave a sheepish shrug.
Leo really didn’t like Kurt. Not at all. He wanted to sell him the old sofa they were offering today for fifty bucks in hopes that it would give Kurt a dust allergy.
The elderly woman signaled Maddie. Leo felt a sense of loss as she left his side.
“I’ll give you her number,” he overheard Laura saying to Kurt as the two angled toward Laura’s hot chocolate table.
Leo remained alone and still.
He’d grown accustomed to aloneness, to the kind of aloneness that only another widowed single parent could understand.
For the first year after Olivia’s death, he’d been buried beneath a mountain of shock and grief and responsibility toward Charlie. He’d functioned at first in numbness. Then he’d been furious at the world and the driver who’d killed Olivia and at himself. Guilt over what he should have done or could have done differently had eaten at him. Sorrow had choked him.
During that time, people had often told him they didn’t know how he did it, how he managed to handle the loss of Olivia on top of the responsibility of taking care of Charlie. Before Olivia’s accident, if anyone had asked him whether he could handle his wife’s sudden death, he would have said no.
No.
But when he’d actually found himself in that circumstance, there’d been no choice other than to survive. He had a baby depending on him. He had to survive because he had to make sure Charlie survived.
People who experienced tragedy understood something that everyone else didn’t. They understood that God supplies exactly as much strength as is needed to get through each day. If a small amount is needed, He supplies a little. If a huge amount is needed, He supplies a lot. Leo made it through that first terribleyear by hanging on to God. At the end of that long, dark time, a tiny patch of hope had finally appeared.
It wasn’t that he’d ever be okay with what had happened to Olivia. He wasn’t okay with it. It was more that, eventually, he’d comprehended that Olivia was gone and that hecouldlive as a single father. It wasn’t what he’d chosen, but he could live this way. And some days—a lot of days—could be good. At first, he’d felt shame whenever he did have a good day, as if he didn’t have permission to enjoy anything after what had happened to his wife. But in time, he’d learned to accept the good days at face value, to appreciate them when they came.
When Leo and Charlie had been living in the house they shared with Olivia in Idaho, Leo had faced constant reminders of how things used to be, of the family they’d been before that tragic day in June.
But here in Merryweather, the slate was clean. He and Charlie had never lived here with Olivia so, in some strange way, it felt more bearable to go on without her here than it had in Idaho. At the same time, Merryweather connected them to Olivia in new ways. Her family was far more involved in their lives now that Leo was raising Charlie in the town Olivia had been raised in. The same streets, the same schools, the same natural beauty that had surrounded Olivia when she was young surrounded her son. Charlie’s mother’s town was now Charlie’s town.
At no point in the last two and a half years had Leo thought that he was ready to date again. He still didn’t think that. He definitely wasn’t looking for more things to add to his schedule beyond his job and his little boy.
What he’d felt for Maddie just now wasn’t something he’d arrived at the way he arrived at most things—through a great deal of research and forethought.
It had come out of nowhere and hit him across the head with the force of a bat.
He and Maddie had always had a great rapport, but in the months since he’d moved to Washington, Maddie had never given him a reason to think she felt anything more for him than friendship.
He reached both hands up and clasped them behind his neck. He needed to sleep on this. Maybe it had just been a random thing. Maybe he’d feel differently in the morning, and they’d continue the way they had been. Maybe he was even more lonely than he’d realized.
A picture rose in his mind from long ago. A woman’s profile in a theater. The blur of bright color on stage. The music ofLes Misérableschurning the air. Tears as shiny as diamonds on her cheeks.
He was connected to others. Life was hard, but life was good.
It would be crazy to ask out Maddie Winslow, his wife’s friend. Wouldn’t it? If so, then why did the idea strike him as so immediately right?
“Maddie, I finally found Susan’s genealogy research,” Grandma said over the phone the next night. “The papers weren’t in the hall closet after all. They were inside Hank’s desk.”
“Thanks so much for finding them for me.”
“There’s a whole raft of stuff here. Might be best if I just put it all in the mail.”
“Sure, that would be great.”
“I’ll take them to the post office tomorrow. Love you.”
“Love you, Grandma.”
“I hope you find whatever it is you’re hunting, Maddie.”
Chapter Five
