Yet here was love. Here was her miracle.
“I don’t know what to do now.”
“We’re doing fine.”
She breathed in, out. Even that felt different. Freer. Fuller. “I want to heat up the food. I want to teach you how to use chopsticks, and have dinner with you. Can we do that? Can we just be for a while?”
“Sure, we can.” If she needed a little time, he could give it. “But I’m not promising anything on the chopsticks.”
“You changed everything.”
“Good or bad?”
She held on another minute. “I don’t know. But you changed it.”
21
Dealing with the meal settledher down—the simplicity and routine. He didn’t pressure her for more. That, she understood, was his skill and his weapon. He knew how to wait. And he knew how to change the tone, to give her room, to help her relax so her thoughts weren’t tied up in knots of tension.
His clumsiness with the chopsticks, though she suspected at least some of it was deliberate, made her laugh.
She’d laughed more since he’d come into her life than she had in the whole of it before him.
That alone might be worth the risk.
She could refuse it, ask for more time. He would give it to her, and she could use it to research another location, another identity, make plans to run again.
And if she ran again, she’d never know what might have been. She’d never feel what she felt now, with him. She’d never again allow herself to try.
She could—would—find contentment, security. She had before. But she’d never know love.
Her choice was to take the rational route—leave, stay safe. Or to risk it all, that safety, her freedom, even her life, for love.
“Can we walk?” she asked him.
“Sure.”
“I know you’re tired,” she began, as they stepped outside. “We should wait to talk about…everything.”
“Tomorrow’s as good as today.”
“I don’t know if I’ll have the courage tomorrow.”
“Then tell me what you’re afraid of.”
“So many things. But now, most of all? That if I tell you everything, you won’t feel the same about me—and for me.”
Brooks reached down, picked up a stick, threw it. Bert looked at Abigail, got her signal and chased after it. “Love doesn’t turn on and off like a light switch.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been in love. I’m afraid to lose it, and you. And this. All of this. You have a duty, but more, you have a code. I knew a man like you, more like you than I realized at first. He died protecting me.”
“From whom?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Okay. Did he love you?”
“Not the way I think you mean. It wasn’t romantic or sexual. It was duty. But he cared about me, beyond that. He was the first person who cared for me.” She pressed a hand to her heart. “Not for what I represented or what I accomplished, or what I was expected to be. But who I was.”
