My heart dropped to my stomach and I struggled to speak above a whisper, “What?”
“Grady would have liked him,” Trevor repeated finally meeting my eyes. “He never wanted you to be alone, Lizzy. He never wanted to leave you with everything. It’s been hard for me to come over here ever since he… died. Not just because everything in this damn house reminds me of him, but because watching you do this on your own killed me. I love those kids, as much as I’ve ever loved anything. They need a dad. You need help.”
“Trev, Ben and I aren’t serious.Not at all.I’m hardly thinking of him as a replacement for Grady.”
He smiled patiently at me, as if he knew something I didn’t. “But if you have to have a guy around, he’s a good one.”
“You don’t really know him.”
“Are you trying to convince me not to like him?” Trevor laughed. He ran two hands through his tussled hair and took a deep breath. “When Grady first told me about you, I was still in high school. He called me up to tell me he was going to bring a girl over to meet mom. I was too young to know that might mean anything, so I made some off-color joke that he didn’t like. I remember that he got serious, right away. He didn’t yell at me though or lecture me. He just said, ‘When you meet Liz, you’ll get it. She burns bright, Trevor. I need that kind of light in my life.’”
“Trevor…”
“He didn’t want that to end with him, Lizzy.”
Through a thick throat, I said, “He said something like that to me near the end.”
“He always thought of you first.Always.And he always wanted what was best for you and the kids. That’s why he worked so hard. That’s why he built what he did. He just couldn’t even imagine giving you something less than he thought you deserved. He was the best guy I have ever known.”
“It’s hard to imagine settling for anybody else. I think whoever they are will always feel like second best. Or second string or whatever.”
Trevor barked out a surprised laugh.“Yeah, maybe.But whoever they are will have a lot to live up to. So maybe don’t worry about that. Maybe just keep doing what you’re doing and trust that it will all work out.”
“When did you get so wise?” I looked at my brother-in-law from across the kitchen and saw him differently. He’d grown up over the last year. He wasn’t the same immature kid that followed his brother around, desperate for guidance and Grady’s approval. He was a man. And somehow he’d become a good man. Grady would have been so proud of him.
Trevor ran his hand through his hair again and shrugged one shoulder. “Guess my brother convinced me to grow up after all.” He blew out a long breath, “Damn, I miss him.”
“Me too.”
I walked him out to his car and said goodbye, promising him that I would text soon about having him over for dinner. I watched his car pull out of the cul-de-sac and stood there wrapped in my towel for a long time, thinking about our conversation.
When I finally turned back to Ben’s house, I realized it was the first time Trevor and I had ever talked about Grady when I hadn’t cried.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I don’t know why I agreed to this.” I looked at the well-manicured, two-story house that Ben grew up in and felt sick to my stomach. What had I been thinking?
“Are you nervous?” Ben settled back in the driver’s seat of his Lexus and watched me fidget.
“Of course, I’m nervous. It’s never easy meeting someone’s parents.”
“They already love you,” he reminded me. He had been telling me this for weeks as he tried to get me to agree to this dinner. I had avoided it for as long as I could before I started to irritate him. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“It just feels so… final, you know? It’s what people do in serious relationships.” I played with the hemline of my flouncy navy blue skirt and refused to look at him.
A chill filled the car when he said, “Liz, what is it that you think we’re doing?”
My heartbeat picked up, but not in a good way. “Ben…”
“We’re serious.”
I sucked in a quick breath.This was the wrong place and timeto have this conversation. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean then?” His hand reached over the console to intertwine with mine. “What doyouthink we’re doing?”
“Making out a bunch?” I dragged my gaze up to meet his and watched his lips twitch.
“That is not what we’ve been doing,” he disagreed seriously. “We’re not fifteen anymore.”
