The answer shocked me, and my lips twitched. Then I made a mental note to ask her mamma if the connection we shared ever irritated her. I hadn’t thought to ask before. “Why, my heart?”
“It…I mean, if he’s in a bad mood, frustrated about something, it distracts me from my focus. I want to make him feel better—because somehow, I knowIcan.”
Jesus, this was like talking to a second Scarlett. Except Scarlett had learned how to live with me rushing around in her veins—all my moods, and she could handle hers and mine while she danced. If something went seriously wrong, though, it shocked her back into reality, she had said.
I moved onto other disturbing discoveries after those thoughts.She could make him feel better.The thought alone almost sent me after him. One of the glass panes was screaming his name.
“Papà?” Her face had gone pale again. She was feeling me. “Please. Don’t.” She let out the breath she must have been holding. “I don’t want you to hurt him. I don’t want to feel whatever thisthingis that exists between us. It’s an inconvenienceto me!”
She turned from me again, but she couldn’t hide. The room was filled with mirrors.
Her eyes met mine, quick, before she turned them again.
“Is this what love is?” she whispered.
Hell. Where was her mamma? And if it was love?
Chest pains. I was almost convinced a heart attack was coming for me. It had been creeping over the years, thanks to her mamma—the miniature version of her would finish me off.
“Papà?” she whirled, rushing over to me. “Are you sick?”
She tried to move my hand away from my heart, but I waved her off.
“Give me a minute,” I said.
“Should I get mamma?”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice hoarse. But then grabbed her shoulder before she could rush off. “No. I’m all right. This is all…” Words failed me.
“I understand,” she said, nodding. “I feel you, too,Papà.” She stiffened when she admitted the words. “But not in the same way.”
Touching her chin, I forced her to look at me. “I still don’t know whatitis,” I said, answering her question truthfully. “Somehow, for me and mamma, love doesn’t seem like enough. A word doesn’t exist that comes close.”
“I understand that too.”
I tapped her chin. “What did mamma say about all of this?”
She shrugged. “Nothing, really. She told me that she knew. That I was still too young to understand. I didn’t have to talk about it, though if I wanted to, she’d always be there. She could tell me, when the time came, but I’d have to figure it out myself. No two people are alike, so our journeys are all different. There was no rulebook. Oh, and that she was watching, always watching us. I took it as a threat—to him. Mamma feels us, too. Her kids, I mean. It’s hard to hide anything from her. She justknowsus.”
My wife was so much better at this than I was. My first instinct was to kill, to eliminate the threat. Hers was to talk, to understand.
“I don’t like it,” she said, shaking her head. “Why me?”
As much as I hated to admit the fact that this was happening at all, it did make me wonder why she hated it, besides the fact that she felt it intruded on her focus from time to time.
“I don’t feel…free,” she said, reading me. “I’m drawn to something, to someone, and it never leaves. I wake up, there it is. Before I go to sleep, there it is. Alongbreak would be nice.”
“Yeah.” I grinned at her. “Or not at all, ah?”
“Yes! Can I break it? Like a bad habit?”
I could for break it for her, but I kept that thought to myself.
“My heart,” I said, taking her by the shoulders. She tried to wriggle out of my hold, but I held steady. We had other things to discuss, other things that I felt led into this. “You’re still mad at me for leaving.”
Her cheeks turned a deep crimson, but out of anger this time.
“Tell me the truth.”
