“Actually, he divorced me.” I tried to smile. “Left and moved in with another woman.”
Cooper shook his head, his indignance uncharacteristic on his typically nonchalant expression. He huffed, the sound tinged with annoyance. “He sounds like one stupid son of a bitch to do that to someone as nice as you.”
My heart warmed at Cooper’s unintentional compliment. “Thanks, Cooper.”
In the following quiet, he pushed us a little harder on the swing. I tucked my foot under my thigh, letting him do all the work. That’s when I realized he wasn’t wearing a spandex sleeve on his left arm. The top of his forearm had no obscene tattoo or anything cover-worthy. For a few minutes, we swung in comfortable silence, feeling the breeze, and watching the girls play on the porch. Finally, he nodded at my book. “That any good?”
I pluckedWhere the Crawdads Singoff my lap and clasped it to my chest. “Oh yes. This is my third time reading it.”
“Must be some book.”
“It is. The main character in this story kind of reminds me of you.”
His steely grey irises melted with curiosity as his eyebrows lifted.
I explained, “Her name is Kya. She was abandoned by everyone in her family, and she grows up all alone next to a swamp. The people in the nearby town look down on her for how wild and uncivilized she is. But she’s very intelligentand”—I cast him a sideways glance—“she loves birds. She just needed someone to give her a chance.”
Cooper frowned slightly. “That doesn’t sound like me at all.”
I laughed.
“Except for the bird thing.”
“Do you read? You can borrow it if you’d like.”
“I hate reading.” He paused. “What happens at the end?”
“That, Cooper, is called a spoiler.”
He rolled his eyes with a light scoff. “I’m never gonna read it anyway.”
I smiled, wondering why Cooper felt dear to me. Even before his hospital stay, a sisterly kinship drew me to him. “She ends up finding someone who loves the birds just as much as she does and isn’t afraid of her reputation.”
He grimaced. “So it’s a romance.”
“Only slightly. It’s also a murder mystery. I gave you a pretty bad explanation.”
“Speaking of birds…” He pointed toward the red and yellow hummingbird feeder I’d set up on a shepherd’s hook about fifteen feet from the front porch. I grinned, happy he’d noticed his welcome-home present. “Did—did you set that up?”
“Yeah, I did.”
His throat worked hard on a swallow, his palm opening then squeezing his thigh. His voice strained, now a gentle rasp. “Why would you do that?”
“I thought you would like it.”
“It was a waste of your time. It’s—too late in the season to get hummingbirds. They’ve already settled around their food sources.” He tried to reason, but his voice cracked with emotion. “I—I don’t know why you did that.”
I watched his face as a million unspoken feelings crossed his expression. His eyes shuddered between light and dark, pain andhope. I answered as matter-of-factly as I could. “Because I am your friend. And you like hummingbirds. Maybe we’ll get some late-comers this year.”
“That would take a miracle.”
“Well”—I bumped his elbow with mine—“you’ve already gotten one, right?”
His eyes fell to his lap, the sorrow in his words unmistakable. “I won’t be here to see them anyway. I…I have to go to rehab.”
I stiffened my legs, forcing us to stop so I could hear him more clearly. “Rehab?”
He nodded, his throat working hard again. “In Austin. It’s…a six month program. But I can stay up to eighteen months if I want.”
