The glow from the instrument panel of the rental car reflected in his eyes.
“And work, turning wrenches for Will's father—good, hard labor, grease on your hands, the smell of petrol, and the rumble of a motorbike. He was like a surrogate father. Will and I earned just enough to keep ourselves out of trouble—most of the time,” he added with another sideways glance and almost a smile.
“He spent his earnings on cheap ale. Whatever I earned went into the bank account to help out.”
“Jam sandwiches,” she commented. “And Julie Hennessey?”
He shrugged. “A diversion, for a while. Then we were both on to other things.”
“Dickie Simson,” she replied. His had been college and then the military.
“It seemed that she might have regretted that one. They hit a bad patch.”
“Tried to get back together with you? A brief encounter when you were home on leave?”
“Aye, well, there were a few pints to take the edge off, then she went into how unhappy she was. It never went any further. We'd both changed.”
“Regret?”
God knows she had own—about her marriage, about things that she should have told her brother instead of the things she'd said.
“Regret is a cruel taskmaster.” His voice had gone low. “For things that never were, and never will be.” That shrug again.
“We'd both changed. We were in different places.”
“She didn't have that youthful glow any longer?” she teased.
“She had the glow, and some extra baggage—three little ones at the time. I wasn't into taking that on, and Anne was just getting her business off the ground. I took out a loan at the bank to help her get started.”
It explained the closeness between mother and son, the struggle of early years that she'd never experienced in her own family, never even thought about. Things that made a person who they were, that had shaped him, along with that trip to Lochaber—the protector, the guardian.
“It was best she and Dickie worked things out. They were meant to be together.”
Fate—things that happen for a reason.
She had that conversation once with Cate, who had experienced so much, seen so much, cheated death more than once chasing the story, and lived to tell about it and then write about it.
“Maybe there is some divine reason to all of it,” Cate had said late one night after the last stop on her latest book tour.
“Maybe I was supposed to experience all those things so that I could write the books. Why do some people die, and some live in situations against all odds?”
The conversation had turned philosophical then, in the way that a very fine whisky will do.
“Why is a young soldier sitting next to me in an armored vehicle killed, and I escape uninjured?” she continued. “I never really believed in God until that assignment, never gave it much thought. Maybe I was too busy, or too wrapped up in other things.
“But when that young man was dying and I held him in my arms and tried to stop the bleeding, he kept telling me not to worry. He wasn't afraid. With the vehicle disabled, gunfire all around us. And right there in the middle of all that blood anddeath, he smiled. Not at me, but at something else. I don't know how else to explain it, except that in that moment, I knew he was completely at peace.”
It had been one of her last assignments before she left the business—things that happened for a reason. Vilette would have said it was the path she was supposed to follow.
“Do you think Anne will marry Tom Jeffries?” Kris asked, remembering the conversation between mother and son when they were in Inverness.
“She should,” he replied. “She deserves to be happy, and Tom's a good man.” That sideways glance again, and that faint smile.
“But God help him if she says yes.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT
