Between You and Me

She cocked her head to the side, apparently considering his words. “Wait a second.” Tess leaned in, her eyes narrowing. “People do depend on you. You still help people, you just—”

“I don’t have their lives in my hands, Tess,” he said firmly. “Yes, I still help people. But it’s nothing like what I was doing before. At the end of the day, I leave my work at work. No one’s hungry, sick, homeless, desperate . . . and I don’t take the work home with me. In here.” He tapped his temple, then scratched at his beard and shifted in his seat.

“What about your ex-wife?” Tess asked.

“What about her?”

“Do you know where she is now?”

“Yeah. She moved to California. Has her own private practice. Remarried a few years after she left me. Has two kids. A good life. She deserves that. Why not.” He fiddled with the fork beside his plate. “About a year after I got out of rehab, I wrote her a long email. Wanted her to know I’d gotten sober, moved back to Colorado, and took my life back. Also, I owed her an apology. I also needed to rail at her a little, but mostly, I needed to own what I’d done. And to get some closure. She answered me . . . we went back and forth for a few weeks. But that was it. That was years ago already.”

“Did you get that closure?” Tess wondered aloud.

“I did. We addressed a lot of things that needed to be addressed. But . . . I’ll never get married again. I don’t, uh . . . I don’t do relationships.” He tried for a wry grin and a lighter tone. “I prefer to be alone now. Surely you, of all people, can understand that.”

She blinked at the parallel he drew. “I do, but . . . wow, it’s different. I want a family so much, but I never found the right person to do that with. You had the person. You were married, you . . . Did you want all that before the bottom fell out? A family, that kind of life?”

“Before? Yeah.” His voice was gruff. “After? No. Too much loss.”

They sat in heavy silence for a minute. Then he sighed and said, “See? Warned you. That’s some dark stuff.” He shook his head raggedly. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Stop that,” Tess commanded. “I asked because I wanted to know. I’m glad I know.” She reached across the table for his hand and squeezed it, sending a streak of electricity up his arm. “You’re still my friend. I don’t think any less of you. If anything, I think even more of you.”

He gazed at her in muted awe, this beautiful, amazingly empathetic woman. “Are we friends now?”

Her shapely brow lifted. “Yes. I’d like to think we are. Aren’t we?”

He couldn’t hold back the smile that spread on his face. “Yeah. We are.”

“Good.” She rubbed the top of his hand with her thumb, so soft, before she pulled her hand back. “And the truth is, knowing some of that? There are things about you that make more sense now.”

His brows shot up. “You say that like . . . you were trying to figure me out.”

“Maybe I have been.” Tess changed the subject with a hint of a grin. “So I gather your mother—who sounds like a badass, by the way—doesn’t like your loner mentality and thinks she’s going to get you to change your mind somehow?”

His eyes caressed Tess’s features. Damn, she was clever. Pulling him out before he fell too far down the hole. Grateful, he nodded. “Something like that. I just think she wants more grandchildren. My brother has kids, but he’s too far away.” Logan smirked. “I hate to burst her bubble, but I don’t want kids. After what I’ve seen . . . I can’t bear it. The idea of something happening, or the potential of more loss . . . It’s too much. No family for me. End of story.”

Tess gaped at him. Finally, he saw a lick of something like pity in her eyes as she murmured, “Wow.”

“Wow nothing. Fewer ties, fewer chances for me to fuck up again, or to lose something so big that the next time, I won’t get back up again. It’s pretty simple, really.” Logan suddenly ached for a beer and grabbed his glass. It was almost empty. He sucked an ice cube into his mouth and chewed on it, anything for distraction.