Dressed in a wrinkled DC Comics Suicide Squad shirt, chino shorts, and Adidas slides, Julian cups a hand alongside his face and peers through the glass. “This looks good. Let’s eat here,” he says in Spanish, blatant defiance to James’s request they speak English. School starts in two months, so they’d better get used to speaking the language regularly.
“No,” James snaps. It’s late morning and he’s starving, too. But under no circumstance will he set foot inside the café.
Julian scowls and clamps his ever-present headphones over his ears.
“I’m hungry,” Marc whines in heavily accented English.
“Me too, bud.” James reaches for Marc’s hand and almost stumbles in amazement when his son’s smaller hand clutches his.
“I can’t see the menu from here.” Julian slips inside the café.
“Julian!”
Marc tugs his hand free and follows his brother.
James swears, glancing down the street toward the diner where he planned to take the boys. Now what? Does he wait here on the sidewalk like an idiot and hope the kids come back out when they realize he didn’t follow? Or does he suck it up and go inside?
Through the glass he sees Julian placing an order.
“Shit.” He sucks it up.
James yanks open the door. The bells overhead swing in a wide arc, hitting the wood-framed glass. Heads turn in his direction, exactly the attention he doesn’t want. He gives the diners a clipped nod and freezes. A montage of photographs, stencils, and paintings cover the far walls. His paintings.
She kept them, after all these years. He stares at them until his eyes dry out—scenes of rustic barns in the foothills and meadows covered with morning dew overlooking the ocean, forests with sunlight breaking through a canopy of trees or moonlight reflecting off the waterfalls of Yosemite. He pushes a long, steady stream of air through his lips and his hand slides into his front pocket, fisting the ever-present engagement ring like a lifeline.
“James?”
The tendons around his ears tighten at the sound of his name. He slowly turns around and faces a woman with a distended belly. She gazes up at him as though he returned from the dead, and in a twisted sort of way, he has. Her lips part on a gasp at the same time she falls back a step, eyes growing large. He’d recognize those cornflower blues anywhere.
“Kristen,” he rasps. She looks the same, yet different. Seven years has matured and enhanced his best friend’s beautiful wife.
“It’s you. It’s really you.” She launches herself into his chest and folds him in her arms, holding him as tightly as her pregnant stomach allows.
It’s the first hug he’s received in longer than he cares to remember. James’s face tightens as he fights a sudden well of emotion, and ends up holding himself back. He doesn’t return the hug, but awkwardly pats Kristen between the shoulder blades.
She leans back to look up at him. “Nick told me you were coming home and I didn’t believe it. Then I could hardly wait until you got here. And now you’re here.” Tears spill over her cheeks. A silly grin stretches her lips wide; then she excitedly jumps up and down. “Oh my God, you’re here!” she squeals.
James cringes. His gaze jumps to the swinging door that leads to the kitchen, then to the hallway in back before returning to Kristen. She’s still jumping and squealing. A smile fights its way onto James’s face. No, Kristen hasn’t changed much at all, except for her stomach. He stares stupidly at her belly. “You’re pregnant.”
She snorts. “Again. I know.”
Nick visited him once in Puerto Escondido. When he couldn’t reach Aimee, James had called Thomas. Nick’s number was the third one he dialed. He had to hear from Nick that everything Thomas told him was the truth. Unlike the lies Thomas had been telling him for years, the one he’d hoped was a lie, that he’d been abandoned in Mexico, was the absolute, horrifying truth. Nick confirmed this with one sobering statement. “Yes, it’s true, all of it.”
Within a few days, Nick was with him in Mexico, filling him in on the six and a half years missing from his life. James learned about Aimee, how she never gave up on him, eventually finding him, only to let him go so he could live his life as Carlos. Nick then sat him down, because he’d been pacing the length of his living room like a crazed man confined in a prison cell, and gave him the cold, hard facts about Aimee. She’s in love with another man. She’s married and has a daughter. Of all the news he heard, that was the most heartbreaking. It nearly destroyed him.
James had thrown his glass of scotch against the wall, where it shattered into slivered fragments, just like his heart.
Now, Nick’s own wife is pregnant with their third child.
Kristen rubs a circle around her stomach. She grimaces. “Four more months to go.”
“You look good,” he tells her honestly.
“So do you,” she says, her exuberance from a moment ago gone. “It’s good to see you. I never thought—”
Pots bang in the kitchen. Voices reach them, drawing his attention. His heartbeat accelerates. “Is she . . . ?” He looks anxiously at Kristen. “Is she here?”
Kristen shakes her head. “She didn’t come in this morning.”
He makes a noise in the back of his throat. She’s not here, which is for the best. When he does finally see her, he doesn’t want an audience.
James feels a tug on his shirt hem. He looks down at Marc. “May I have a doughnut, please?”
“We’re not eating here, Marc.”
“Anything else for you, sir?” the cashier calls over to James. His older son, standing at the head of the ORDER line, tosses James a challenging look.
“Julian,” James barks. So much for not eating here. He glares back at his son.
“What? I’m hungry.” Julian holds out his hands, silently asking what’s the big deal. His expression morphs into feigned innocence as he walks past him and Kristen. Kristen’s brows reach her ponytailed hairline as they both watch Julian meander his way through the maze of disordered tables. He flops into an empty chair.
Kristen smirks. “I see I’m not the only one who has my hands full.”
James grunts, but the corner of his mouth tugs upward at their shared connection. Parenting.
“Why don’t you join us? We just sat down.” She points out a table near Julian where a toddler in a high chair exuberantly eats her oatmeal. Another girl with jelly-tinged lips stands in her chair humming.
“Sit down, Nicole,” Kristen orders.
The girl sinks onto her chair.
“I’m so happy this one is a boy.” She pats her stomach.
“Boys aren’t much easier,” James admits, thinking of the circles Julian and Marc run around him.
Kristen sighs. “Just different, I guess, right?” She tilts her head toward the counter. “Go order and come eat with us.”
Marc scans the dining area. James nudges him in Julian’s direction. “Sit with your brother. I’ll get your doughnut.”
At the counter, James scans the menu and orders a coffee and omelet. Trish, according to the chalkboard-style name tag, repeats back his order. Anger crawls up his throat as Trish rattles off the items. “That’ll be ninety-five fifty,” she concludes.