Page 57 of Worth the Trouble

“Jason.” She had both hands on the arm of the chair now. “You are not putting your business on a shelf for me. I didn’t walk out of my father’s suite to move into somebody else’s sacrifice.”

“I know it.”

“Do you?”

“I said it to him. I didn’t say it to you.” He held her eyes. “There’s a difference. He needed to hear that I would. You need to hear that I won’t have to.”

She turned that over. She didn’t like it and she couldn’t find the crack in it, which was the most Jason thing she’d ever heard.

“Then the envelope,” she said.

“Capital,” Jason said. “Enough to start right. And all I had to do was walk away from you and tell you my feelings had changed.”

The fire popped. Somebody at the desk laughed at a phone call.

“What did you do?”

“Left it on the table.” He turned the hat over on his knee. “Then I came here.”

She’d known. She’d known in the stairwell and on the trail and before that, at a round pen rail with a silver truck pulling out of the drive. That didn’t stop what went through her when he said it. It wasn’t relief. Relief was for when you weren’t sure.

“Did you want it?”

He could have said no. He looked at her instead, and took his time, and she loved him for the time more than for the answer.

“For about a minute,” he said. “I thought about the rooms over the Bloom Shop. What it’d be to hand you a key.” His jaw moved. “Then I thought about the day you’d ask me where the money came from. And I’d have to say his name.”

Her eyes stung, and she let them. She’d spent eight years being the one who didn’t.

“He told you about my mother.”

“A little.”

“He’s never told me. Not once. I know she left. I know the date. I’ve never heard him say it out loud.” She looked at the fire.

“I happened to be sitting there while he got something off his chest.”

That got a laugh out of her, wet and unlovely, and Jason’s hat stopped turning.

“I’m going up,” she said.

“I’ll come.”

“No.” She stood. She put a hand on his face, and he turned into it, and she left it there long enough for one breath of his under her palm. “This one’s mine. You had yours at dinner.”

“I’ll be here.”

“I know.” She bent and kissed him, in the lobby, with the girl at the desk pretending very hard to read. “That’s the part I keep counting on.”

Her father answered the door in his shirtsleeves with the tie gone and the top button open, which she’d seen perhaps four times. Behind him the suite was exactly as he kept every suite, a laptop squared to the desk edge, a glass on a coaster, nothing out of place.

The envelope was on the desk. Folded once down the middle, sitting on top of a stack of bills. So the Aviary had found him.

“Cecelia.”

“He told me.”

“I expected as much. He said he would.” He stepped back to let her in, and he didn’t sit, and neither did she. “He’s an honest man, your cowboy. I’ll give him that. Honest men are expensive to be around.”