He ached to tell her she did. That he wanted to be the one she leaned on, the one she reached for when everything else was too heavy. But he didn’t know if he was strong enough to risk it because pushing her too hard might mean losing the only thing that felt right in his life for the first time in years.
And when she snuck another kiss in quickly before he left for the night, he told himself that maybe being patient was the way to play this all along.
“I thinkJayce might be seeing someone,” Stacy said later that night.
“You’re not going to ask him, are you?” her husband asked.
“I want to but won’t. I bet it’s Farrah.”
“You might be right, but you can’t push him if he’s not ready to talk. We are going to be seeing him at the office and then later at night. He’s thirty-four and not comfortable living here. We have to give him his privacy.”
She sighed. “I know. He knows he can come and go as he wants and I’ve got to just dial it back.”
“You’re doing a great job of it,” he said.
“You’re just humoring me,” she said. She knew her husband’s tricks. “I think he’s only hanging on now because he wants to move into Jocelyn’s place and it doesn’t make sense for him to rent an apartment for a few months.”
“Let him figure it out. He’s done a good job with his life so far.”
“If he had, he wouldn’t have come home the way he did.”
“Our children all have to figure life out themselves,” he said. “We did our job as parents, it’s time to be grandparents.”
“I’ll relax more once Jayce is settled.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m going to be that mom who meddles some more. I did it with the other two and it worked out. What could it hurt?”
“More than you realize, so be careful,” he said.
21
DIG SOME
“Mrs. McCarthy, it’s nice to see you,” Farrah said over a week later. “Not that I want to see you for being sick. You think you’ve got a UTI?”
Stacy wasn’t really interfering. This was the last place she’d do it if she wanted to, but it kind of fell into her lap.
If getting a UTI was a good thing falling into her lap.
“Yes. Pesky things that happen now and again. I know the signs. I took one of those home test things and it came back positive, so I knew enough to come in for antibiotics.”
“Let me see if your urinalysis is back yet,” Farrah said, looking at her laptop. “I don’t see it, but I’m sure it will be any minute. Let’s go through some questions and then we’ll do a quick exam.”
She answered everything that was asked of her, then lay back on the table while Farrah pressed on her stomach, winced a bit, then again on the side.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “I can tell by your face.”
“Have you ever had a kidney stone?”
“Not that I know of. I don’t have a lot of pain on my side, but some.”
“A kidney stone could cause a UTI. Or a UTI can spread to your kidneys. You’re tender when I press on your right kidney, which doesn’t normally happen with just a UTI.”
“Oh,” she said. “Now what?”
Farrah went back to her computer. “Results are in. You have bacteria in your urine. So there is an infection. I’m going to send over a prescription for antibiotics. You should start feeling better in a few days. I can send you for an ultrasound to see if there is a stone if you’d like.”
