He shrugged. “I always thought I’d have kids someday. To be honest, I’ve never really thought about not having kids.”
She wasn’t sure what to say to that. She’d bandaged their skinned knees and nursed them through colds and teenage melodrama, but making a decision not to be a father was something a man had to do for himself.
“I love her.”
That did warm her heart, no matter how twisted up he was because of it. “Does that make it easier or harder?”
“Both.”
“I wish there was an easy answer I could give you.”
He smiled, looking a little more like his usual self. “I do, too.”
“What I can do is serve up some slices of that chocolate cake.”
“We haven’t had dinner yet.”
“Sometimes you have to have dessert first. Besides, I’m not letting Dill and Matt leave here without having some.”
“I might have two slices and say screw dinner altogether.”
“That’s not the worst plan I’ve ever heard.” She started to laugh, but it triggered another damn coughing jag.
“You okay? You’ve been coughing a lot lately.”
“’Tis the season. Grab some plates and let’s get that cake cut before those guys escape.”
*
On Wednesday morning, Hailey called Lauren at work. “I’m going to piss everybody off and close the library for an hour lunch today at one. Can you get out of the office? We can go to the diner and harass Paige and eat too many French fries.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Nope. I just haven’t seen you or Paige hardly at all since her wedding and it looks like this is the only way I can schedule myself into your lives. But let’s call it an emergency if it makes Gary feel better.”
Lauren’s boss had a fleeting moment of panic when she said she was taking off an hour for lunch, but he recovered quickly. She was allowed a lunch break but, more often than not, ate something from home at her desk. He was smart enough not to complain on the rare occasion she actually left the office.
When one o’clock rolled around, she flipped the answering machine to a prerecorded “closed for lunch” message she rarely used but which saved her from having to scour for messages on Gary’s desk, and then reminded him she was leaving.
Hailey was already at the diner when Lauren got there and she was surprised to see Paige sitting at a booth with her. Paige rarely even stood still at lunchtime, never mind sat down.
Then Lauren saw a young woman in a Trailside Diner T-shirt step out of the kitchen, and she got more confused. How did she not know Paige had hired somebody new? And it was Whitford. How did she not know the somebody Paige had hired?
Hailey spotted her and slid over on the bench, waving her over. Lauren hung her coat on one of the hooks near the door and joined them.
“Who is that?”
Paige looked over her shoulder. “That’s Tori Burns, Jilly’s niece. Gavin’s cousin.”
“Did I know Jilly has a brother?”
Paige laughed at her confusion. “Probably not. Jilly’s originally from Portland, remember? Mike met her at college and brought her home. Tori moved here a couple of weeks ago because her parents are divorcing and it’s pretty ugly. They keep trying to put her in the middle of it, so she packed up and moved into one of the apartments over the bank.”
“She looks like she’s twelve.”
“She’s almost twenty-five, actually.”
Lauren scowled, feeling old. “So now that you’re Mrs. Kowalski, are you becoming a lady of leisure?”
“That’s what I asked her, just before you walked in,” Hailey said.
“I’d go nuts,” Paige said. “Tori’s very part-time. It’d be nice for me to not get up at four-thirty in the morning every single day, especially when Mitch is home, and there are times Ava wants to do something in the evening. With only two of us, it’s really hard to cover each other’s shifts without dropping from exhaustion. Tori works from home and just wants to pick up a few hours here and there to get out of the house and meet people.”
“What does she do for work?” Lauren asked.
Paige shrugged. “She didn’t say.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
“No.”
“Did you have her fill out an application? Did she write down her current job?” Lauren asked.
“No. She’s Jilly’s niece and she’s willing to work odd hours for little money. I had her fill out the IRS forms and that was that.”
“It’s so sad.” Hailey shook her head. “Two years you’ve lived here and you still haven’t figured out how to be all up in everybody’s business. Fran needs to give you some lessons.”
“The person whose business I want to be all up in is Lauren’s.”
Lauren looked at Paige and laughed. “Since you’re married to a Kowalski and spend a fair amount of time talking to Rose, I’m going to take a wild guess and say you already know more about my business than some people.”