“What did he say?”
“That it was one of those high school things and everyone was friends and dated someone else.”
“And you don’t buy that?” he asked.
“Not really.”
Her husband shook his head. “I think you’re too fixated on trying to fix whatever is wrong with him. He’ll tell us when he’s ready.”
“I hate seeing him like this,” she said. “He’s always been the happy joker of the family. Now he’s just quiet or moody.”
“He’s been moody for a good year,” Jim said.
“But never quiet and he is. I’m not pushing.”
“No matter how much you want to. So take my advice—let him have his space. He’ll come to us when he’s ready. He came home, that’s the first step.”
Her husband was right. But she’d never been one to sit still and the lightness in her son’s eyes when he talked about Farrah just now was something she hadn’t seen in years.
She’d be damned if she was going to wait for it to happen again. Not if she could nudge it along herself. Even if that meant engaging in meddling help from some friends.
4
PERSONAL DILEMMA
Farrah was on her way to the next patient’s room when her phone rang in the pocket of her lab coat. She pulled it out quickly to make sure it wasn’t the school calling about Archer, saw her ex-husband and hesitated a brief second before she turned the corner and put her back to the wall to answer it.
Since his schedule was so chaotic and having time to talk about anything never happened, she better answer now.
“Hi, Tucker. What’s going on?”
“Farrah,” he said. Asshole couldn’t even say hi to her. “I’m going to have to cancel in two weeks with Archer.”
“What?” she asked. Her voice rose higher than she had planned, but this wasn’t good. “You only see him three times a year. What is going on?”
It just pissed her off that her had ex moved.
Nope, didn’t piss her off. She was kind of happy he wasn’t at Duke anymore where she’d risk seeing him. That was how they met, when she worked in the orthopedic department. She’d moved departments a few times at Duke since. Working with a guy she was dating wasn’t good, even after they were married.
Once they divorced, it was much worse.
“It doesn’t matter what is going on, I can’t do it,” Tucker said. “I’d like to reschedule for a different week. Maybe just take him two weeks over the summer. I should be able to get a week off and a sitter for another.”
Which meant leaving her son with some stranger for a week.
Not ideal.
She wanted to argue but knew she had no say in it.
Tucker all but walked out of their life. For her, she didn’t care, but for her son, it was devastating for his father to leave.
Not that they were close, and they might never be if Tucker continued with only wanting to see his son for week-long periods, claiming the two-hour drive and back was too much in one day for them to visit on the weekends.
She’d even offered for them to meet halfway, so it was half the time.
She did the right things. She was accommodating when everything in her wanted to tell him to get the hell out of their lives and stay that way.
If it weren’t for her son, she would have said it. She didn’t need his money, nor the house she got in the divorce.
