Keeping Caroline

Matt stood. “I thought we could walk around the house today. You can show me what you want done so I can get together a list of the materials I’ll need.”

They strolled through the house, intimate strangers, discussing pulling up musty carpeting and restoring the hardwood floors beneath; replacing windows warped shut; modernizing the kitchen and enlarging the laundry room. At the staircase, he started up.

Caroline tugged on his sleeve. “No. The upstairs isn’t too bad. It’s just my living quarters, anyway, and the nursery.”

Matt stiffened instinctively. “Nursery?”

“One of my little charges is an infant, almost five months old. I moved the nursery upstairs so she’d be away from the noise and the dust when you start working.”

Nodding so that he wouldn’t have to talk around the lump in his throat, Matt followed her. God, a baby. He didn’t know how Caroline did it. It hurt him just to think about a tiny, dependent life lying up there.

Caroline led him to the worst part of the house, the old den and semi-enclosed back porch. “This will be the center of the day care. If we knock out the wall here.” She pointed to the back door. “And enclose the outside but leave lots of windows, it would be like a big solarium. A bright, sunny playroom.”

Matt pushed on one of the porch’s corner posts. Rotted wood crumbled beneath his fingers.

“Kids need sunshine,” she said hopefully. “But you know how the weather is out here, half the year it’s too hot to go outside and the other half it’s bitter cold. Can you do it?”

“This wood is in bad shape,” he said. “It would have to be completely reframed.” Then, seeing her crestfallen expression, he sighed. “But I’ll figure out something. I’m going to need to borrow your car to get some supplies from town. And I’ll need tools.”

“Everything I’ve got is outside in the shed. You can buy whatever else you’ll need. I’ll give you some money.”

He gave her a look that said not in this lifetime and headed out.

“Matt, wait.” Propped against a lopsided screen door, she chewed her lower lip. “Have I ever given you reason to think that I blamed you for…what happened?”

The slumbering beast he’d caged deep inside himself rumbled, stretched in slow awakening. “It was a long time ago. What does it matter now?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“What do you want to hear?”

“The truth. I want to know if you thought I blamed you when Brad died.”

He shrugged and started to turn away. She stopped him, her fingers digging pits in his biceps.

“Matt?”

“Except for the years I was away in the army, I’ve looked out for you since you were twelve years old. I’ve made sure nothing ever hurt you.”

“And?”

“And when Brad was sick, sometimes you looked at me like you couldn’t understand why I wasn’t looking out for you then. Why I wasn’t protecting both of you.”

“It was leukemia, Matt. No one could have protected us from that.”

He could have contacted more doctors, Matt wanted to argue. Found one with a treatment none of the dozens of others he’d contacted knew of. He could have taken his son to another hospital. He’d flown with Brad to St. Jude’s in Tennessee—the best of the best when it came to treating children’s cancer in the U.S.—but he could have taken him to one of the research centers in Europe. He was his father. He should have been able to do something.

Matt wanted to tell Caroline she was right to hold him accountable, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t speak at all. His jaw had hardened to the point he thought it might shatter.

Caroline dropped her hand from his arm. “I’m sorry. I never meant to make you feel responsible.”

Without a word, he pounded down the crumbling back steps, hardly noticing the sag of weakened boards beneath his weight. Deep within his chest, the beast—the truth—clawed toward the light.

It didn’t matter whether or not Caroline blamed him for Brad’s death.

He blamed himself.

Matt hacked at the weathered boards on the back wall of the house with the claw end of his hammer, tearing out the old wood so it could be replaced with new. High clouds over the sunset gave everything around him a watery gray tone. He’d have to quit soon; there wouldn’t be enough light to continue. Maybe tomorrow he’d buy some halogen lamps at the Feed and Lumber in town. The more hours he worked, the sooner he’d be done. Free to get on with his life, such as it was.

And the harder he worked, the less time he would have to think. But busy hands didn’t necessarily mean a busy mind, he’d learned. If anything, the repetitive swing, dig, pull of the hammer allowed his consciousness to fade back from his task, let his thoughts wander where they would.

Which was right back to Caroline.

He’d spent the better part of the week ripping off the face of the old house, carefully placing new supports and joists as he worked. The plastic construction fence he’d strung around the work area kept Jeb out of his way. The roar of power tools drowned out the cries of the baby from upstairs, and his wife kept the twins pretty well corraled. But no amount of sweat or noise could contain his memories. His mind insisted on traipsing through the minefield that was his past.

He and Caroline had lived together in marriage for over a year after their son’s death, hardly talking, certainly never discussing things like blame. Yet now, practically on the eve of their divorce, the feelings and words rushed forth like water over a swollen dam. If one week here could leave him this beaten and bruised, how would he survive a month?

He’d decided the best approach would be to stay away from Caroline as much as possible. He refused to call it hiding out. It was just a…strategic withdrawal.

He felt a presence behind him. His stomach lurched and he looked over his shoulder, expecting to see Caroline. But instead of his wife’s soft caramel eyes, he met a sharp black gaze.

A teenage girl stared at him—more accurately, at his posterior—with huge, dark eyes. Her hair, just as dark, hung limply to her shoulders, brushing the straps of her clingy midriff top.

For a second she looked impossibly young, innocent. Then she hooked her thumbs into the pockets of her hip-hugger jeans, pushing the waistband well below the gold hoop piercing her navel, cocked her hips and puffed out her B-cup chest. Her gaze skimmed up the length of his legs, pausing importantly about waist level before slowly grazing over his bare chest and shoulders. By the time her eyes met his, she looked twice her age.

And Matt felt older than dirt.

He scooped his T-shirt off the ground, pulled it over his head and went back to work on the wall, sinking the hammer’s claws deep into rotten wood and ripping backward until the boards splintered satisfyingly. Behind him, he heard the girl shift closer and gritted his teeth. He’d been a cop long enough to have seen hundreds like her on the street. Every one of them was named Trouble.

“Whoever you are, go away,” he said. “I’m working.”

She sidled around him until he could see her out of the corner of his eye. Her lashes fluttered like the wings of a baby bird. “Gem Millholland,” she said. “And I’m pleased to meet you, too.”

“Fine. Now run along.” He didn’t hear footsteps. Bad sign.

“You’re Caroline’s ex, aren’t you?”

Matt tossed another rotted board onto the rubbish pile. “Not yet.” Not until he finished this damn house and she signed the papers.

Apparently Gem Millholland didn’t concern herself with legal details such as divorce documents. “Wow. That means you’re a free man.”

“More like an indentured servant,” he said, sounding more disgruntled than he meant to. “I have to earn my freedom.”

Gem clucked and sidled a step closer. Damn, he shouldn’t have encouraged her.

“Yeah, I heard she’s making you fix up the house.”

He ignored her, and to his surprise, she left. But thirty seconds later she was back, pressing something cold and wet between his shoulder blades. His back arced reflexively.