“You’re willing to take a chance on me making pancakes?” he asked dubiously.
“I’ll leave the recipe on the counter for you,” she said sounding unconcerned. “And don’t stick one to the ceiling.”
“No promises.”
She smiled at him. It was small and tired, but it was real as she was. It carried him down the hall to bed wrapped in a feeling of his heart being safe with her as surely as the flour handprint on his chest.
He didn’t brush off the handprint when he hung the shirt in the closet.
He lay in the dark with one hand under his head and listened to the cottage settle around him. Marshmallow padded in and jumped up onto the bed.
The accusing voice that had lived in his head for three years was silent tonight, and he wasn’t sure what to do with himself in its absence. Instead, he thought about what Grace had said.
Was he, at worst, only partially to blame for Perry’s suicide? Was it possible he’d had nothing to do with Perry’s decision? Logic said he would never know. In his final moments, only Winston Perry would ever truly know why’d he’d taken his own life.
He turned his thoughts to the other thing Grace had said. That she couldn’t forgive him, and only Susannah Perry could do that. It wasn’t as if he was going to track her down and ask for it, though. It was wildly not his place ever to do that. Maybe all he could do was forgive himself one day. This was not that day. But maybe it was a goal to strive for someday.
With that thought came a measure of peace had hadn’t known in a very long time. Since well before the Perry trial. Maybe since he’d left home and gone off to college, chasing the naïve dreams of his youth.
Grace was the reason for this peace deep, deep down inside him.
It dawned on him that a switch had flipped inside him. It might not be Dillon’s parenting switch, but it was another equally important one. With sudden clarity, he knew something all the way down to his bones.
Grace was the One. He’d found the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
He must have been figuring it out for a while, but when it finally bubbled up to his conscious mind, he knew it to be incontrovertibly true.
The only he reason he didn’t march down the hall and wake up Grace to tell her was because earlier she’d asked him to think before he said anything. And he’d been raised to do what a woman asked him to do.
He lay there in the dark, thinking about it, and the longer he thought, the more certain of his feelings he was. Particularly because he felt no rush to act on them. He was in this with Grace for the long term. His feelings weren’t going anywhere. He could be patient and steady. Take his time. Give Grace all the space she needed and wait until she felt the same way about him.
And then . . . forever.
14
Grace woke up a few minutes before her alarm and lay there thinking about last night.
As Reno’d told her his painful secret, his voice laced with guilt, his hands clenched on his knees, shed wanted so badly to reach for his hands and hold them. But first, she’d told him she wasn’t the person who had to forgive him. She didn’t mean it to be cruel or unfeeling. It was simply a statement of fact and had needed to be said.
She’d also told him he was honorable and decent and good. That, too, was a fact and not generosity. She hadn’t been kind to him on the porch. She’d been honest.
And if he was the man she thought he was, that would matter more to him than any kindness or compassion she could’ve shown him last night.
As her thoughts drifted to Susannah Perry, compassion and understanding filled her. They’d both lost husbands, but Susannah’s loss felt worse to Grace. At least Liam died being a hero, doing something good. But Susannah’s husband had chosen a cowardly death that only made his list of bad deeds longer.
That poor woman. How on earth did she answer her children when they asked what their father had been like? And how would she shield them from the truth as they got older? What would she say to them when she could no longer protect them from the truth?
Grace sent up a prayer for a woman she’d never met to find the strength and wisdom she needed when those questions got asked of her.
She thought of Reno’s steady careful presence as he watched over her and Lily. Of him crouched at Lily’s eye level explaining manners. She pictured him standing in her kitchen yesterday with a flour handprint on his chest he quietly chose not to brush off. And she saw the pain on his face when he said in a hollow voice that believed every word, I’m a man who drove another man to suicide.
She thought, very clearly, That’s not the man I kissed.
No, she’d kissed a man who sent a widow checks every month and did it anonymously because he didn’t want to cause the widow any pain.
She was right about him and he was wrong.
Her alarm clock jangled, and she got up, interested to see how Reno’s pancakes turned out.
