He stepped backward out of her reach. “There is no right time.”
She flinched. “You have every right to be angry.”
“I’m not angry.” Not anymore. In those first weeks after she left, he’d cried himself to sleep every night. His heart had felt like a raw wound in his chest. He hadn’t known it was possible for anything to hurt that much. The anger hadn’t come until later, and he’d directed it at his various foster families first. He’d yelled, pushed them away because they weren’t his real family and he’d so foolishly believed his mom would come back for him.
He’d waited for her for so damn long. By the time he’d finally realized she wasn’t coming back, he was an angry kid no one wanted, furious with the world and everyone in it. Eventually, though, even his anger had faded. And then, for a long time, he’d felt nothing at all.
Until Jess.
“You should be angry,” Sharlene said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “I wish I could say that not a day has gone by when I didn’t regret what I did, but that’s not true either. For a long time, I thought I’d done the right thing for you, that you were better off without me.”
“I was better off without you.”
“Yeah.” Her face fell. “Maybe you were.”
A weighted silence fell between them.
Sharlene fidgeted with the strap of her purse. “Your face.” She reached up as if to touch the scar on his cheek.
He gave her a warning look, and she withdrew her hand. “Haven is my home now, but it’s not yours. You don’t get to just come back after all these years and pretend we’re still a family.”
“I know it won’t be easy, but I’ll do whatever it takes.”
He shook his head. His heart pumped ice through his veins, leaving him cold. Numb. “There’s nothing you can do. It’s too late. So do what you do best and leave.”
***
Jessica kept her eyes closed, despite the sleep mask that she wore at Mark’s suggestion. She wore special MRI-approved headphones that filled her ears with a playlist of all her favorite spiritual music. And while she could hardly meditate right now, she could almost forget—almost—that she was lying on a narrow board inside a big metal tube that clanged loudly enough to be heard over the flute music playing through her headphones while a machine took detailed 3-D images of the inside of her brain.
Not freaky at all. Nope.
Not going there. Sunshine. Rainbows. Puppies. Mark kissing every last thought out of her head night before last…Okay, strike that last one because Mark was a jerk and also thinking about kissing him made her horny, which was absolutely inappropriate in her current situation. Still, it kept her mind off her predicament, and really, anything that kept her mind off the fact that she was inside this tube…
Her eyes popped open, and thank God for the mask. All she saw was the faintly pink darkness it provided. Not being able to move was unnerving. Of course, she had an itch on her toe she was dying to scratch. The fingers on her right hand were starting to get tingly from lack of circulation. Her head ached. And now that she was taking stock of her discomfort, she needed to pee too.
She needed to move…couldn’t breathe…oh God, get me out of here!
She fingered the button they’d given her, the one that would stop the MRI and get her out of this tube right now. But if she pressed it, she’d have to start the MRI all over again another time, and she had to be at least halfway through already. She wasn’t a quitter, dammit. Squeezing her eyes shut, she drew in a slow breath and focused on her music, the calming notes of the flute…Mark’s lips on hers, his big, strong hands on her body, his iron shaft pressing into her belly. Andphew, was it getting hot in here?
It was. It definitely was getting hot in here. Sweat beaded on her brow and trickled down into her hair. She wanted to wipe at it. She wanted tomove, dammit.
And then she was moving. The board she was on was moving, she was almost certain of it. Sure enough, a few seconds later, she felt fresh air blow across her skin and then a hand touched her arm. Someone lifted the mask from her eyes, and she blinked up into the smiling face of the nurse who’d put her into this torture device some thirty minutes earlier.
“Okay?” she asked as she helped Jessica sit up.
“I am now.” Even if she was still gulping air like a fish out of water.
“You can get dressed now. Dr. Ledinski will call in the next day or two with the results.”
Jessica swallowed over the burst of butterflies in her stomach at what he might find. “Okay.” She climbed down off the table and headed for the changing area.
Ten minutes later, she was on her way to the spa. She hadn’t put in nearly enough time here this month. Between being sick and everything involved in finalizing the sale of the land, she’d been absent too much and not fully focused when she had been here. Luckily, her staff had been doing an awesome job in her absence, but it was past time for her to pick up her own slack.
“The numbers are in, and we had our biggest year yet,” Dana said as Jessica walked through the lobby. “Over five thousand dollars raised for the children’s wing.”
“That’s amazing.” Jessica paused, a smile on her face. The fact that her annual Halloween party also helped the pediatric wing of the hospital was just the icing on the cake, and five thousand dollars would buy a lot of new supplies for the kids. She could hardly wait to call her mom and tell her the good news.
“Everything go okay this morning?” Dana asked in a lower voice.
