Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Popeye
I stared down at Christina’s journal, at the words that had just destroyed what little balance I’d managed to find since opening the damn thing.
The rest is coming.
The words sat there, quiet and threatening, written in Christina’s careful handwriting as if she hadn’t just reached out from the grave and wrapped her fingers around my throat.
There was more. After everything I’d already read, after the men, the fear, the son she gave away, all the goddamn guilt she’d dumped on these pages—there was still more.
Something darker.
Something she hadn’t been ready to write.
Something she thought would make me hate her.
I closed the journal slowly and kept my palm pressed flat against the cover as if the secrets inside might crawl out if I let go.
My coffee sat cold beside me, untouched.
The bear claw Trudy had put in front of me had gone stale around the edges, but I couldn’t make myself eat. I couldn’t even make myself move.
I didn’t want to know.
That was the truth I didn’t want to admit, even to myself.
I’d spent years wanting answers, needing them, cursing Christina for running away and taking my daughter with her.
Now I had them sitting in front of me, tied up in worn leather and black ribbon, and all I wanted to do was shove the journal into the nearest trash can and light a match.
Because the more of this shit I read, the less I fucking knew her.
The girl I remembered had been quiet. Kept her head down, let her sister do the talking, watched the room like she was counting exits.
She’d fit against me at night like she was trying to disappear into my chest, her fingers running over my ink like she was reading braille.
Like she thought if she touched me enough, she could figure out who the hell I was.
Who the hell she was supposed to be with a man like me.
I’d thought I was her goddamn savior. Thought I was the answer to all her shit.
Christ, I was blind as a goddamn bat.
She’d been drowning the whole time, and I was too busy feeling like a hero to notice she was going under.
I looked toward the counter without meaning to.
Trudy was helping a customer, placing cookies into a white box with quick, practiced hands.
She glanced up at me once, and whatever she saw on my face made her movements slow.
She didn’t come over immediately. That was one of the things I’d come to understand about her.
Trudy didn’t rush in, trying to soothe a man’s feelings.
She didn’t flutter or fuss. She watched and she waited.
And that made her fucking impossible to ignore.
I dropped my eyes back to the journal.
You and our daughter were the best thing that ever happened to me. And I was the worst thing that ever happened to you both.
My jaw tightened. I hated that line. Hated every damn word of it.
Hated that she believed it. Hated that part of me had believed it for too many years.
I’d called her selfish in my head more times than I could count.
I’d blamed her for the years I’d missed with Grace, for every birthday and scraped knee and school dance I hadn’t been there to see.
I’d blamed her because blaming her was easier than admitting I’d failed too.
But this journal didn’t read like a woman who had run because she stopped caring.
It read like a woman who had spent the last years of her life bleeding out onto paper because she couldn’t carry the weight anymore.
She wasn’t asking me to forgive her. That almost made it worse.
She was asking me to understand just enough not to hate her.
And I didn’t know if I could give her that.
I didn’t know what the hell I could give anyone anymore.
The bell over the door jingled, and I flinched like someone had fired a gun. A couple walked in, laughing about something I didn’t hear, and Trudy greeted them with that smile I’d learned was mostly bullshit.
Friendly enough for customers, sharp enough to keep people from getting too close. I watched her for a moment, needing something real. Something alive. Something that wasn’t Christina’s ghost whispering regrets.
Trudy’s eyes found mine again.
This time she didn’t wait.
She said something to Pati, wiped her hands on a towel, and came around the counter. I watched her walk toward me, hips swaying, face set in that stubborn expression that told me she’d already decided something and God help the man who tried to argue.
“You look like hell,” she said when she reached my table.
I looked up at her, and for once, I didn’t have a dirty comeback ready. “Feel worse.”
Her eyes dropped to the journal. “Another bad one?”
I laughed, low and humorless. “They’re all bad.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
No, it wasn’t. That was Trudy. Cutting through the bullshit without apology. I leaned back in my chair and rubbed a hand over my face, feeling every year I’d lived and every one I’d lost.
“She’s scared,” I said, the words surprising me with how rough they sounded. “Christina. In this entry. She’s dying, and she’s scared of what I’ll think when I know the truth.”
Trudy didn’t sit. She stood beside the table, arms crossed, waiting.
“She keeps talking about being a Dougal. Like everything she did was already written inside her before she ever had a chance to be something else.” I tapped the journal with two fingers, harder than I meant to.
“She thinks she was poison. Thinks she ruined me. Ruined Grace. Thinks I should’ve stopped loving her a long damn time ago. ”
Trudy’s expression softened, but only a little. She wasn’t the kind of woman who let softness take over when steel would serve better.
“Did you?” she asked.
I looked up. “Did I what?”
“Stop loving her.”
The bakery seemed to go quiet around us, even though it hadn’t. Pati was still talking to customers. Someone was still laughing near the front window. The espresso machine hissed behind the counter. Life kept moving around me while Trudy stood there asking a question I’d spent decades avoiding.
“No,” I said finally. “I hated her sometimes. But no. I never stopped loving her.”
Trudy nodded like she’d already known the answer. Maybe she had. Maybe it was written all over me every time I opened that damn book.
“That doesn’t mean I know what to do with this,” I continued, lowering my voice.
“There’s more. Something worse. She says it over and over without saying what it is.
‘The rest is coming, Stephen. God help me, the rest is coming.’” I swallowed hard and looked away from Trudy because looking at her made it too easy to be honest. “I don’t know if I can read it. ”
For once, she didn’t answer right away.
Then she pulled out the chair across from me and sat.
That got my attention. Trudy didn’t sit with me during business hours. She moved through this place like a general commanding troops, wiping counters, barking at Pati, boxing orders, pretending not to notice me staring at her ass. Sitting down meant something.
“You don’t have to read it right now,” she said.
“I do.”
“No, Stephen, you don’t.”
The way she said my name hit different. Stephen. She never used Popeye. Like she knew I needed to be a man right now, not a walking ghost.
I looked down at the journal. “If I don’t read it, it stays in there. Waiting.”
“Then let it wait.”
“Been waiting a lifetime already.”
“And another hour won’t kill anyone.”
My mouth twitched despite everything. “Bossy woman.”
“You already knew that.”
I did. Fuck yes, I did. And I liked it more than I had any right to.
I looked toward the window, watching people move along the sidewalk outside.
Diamond Creek was nothing like New York.
Too quiet. Too nosy. Too damn wholesome half the time.
Eight months ago, I’d thought I was only staying because of Grace.
Because she was here. Because my grandchild would be born here.
Because I had nowhere else I needed to be. Now things were different.
Now there was Trudy and her sharp mouth and soft hands. Trudy, who didn’t let me hide behind charm or sex or money. Trudy, who looked at me like she saw every ugly part of me and hadn’t decided to run yet.
“I spent years wanting the truth,” I said. “Now I’ve got it, and I want to throw it in the river.”
“I imagine that’s normal.”
I gave her a look. “You an expert now?”
“No,” she said. “But I know grief. And I know regret. And I know what it feels like to wish the past would stay where you buried it.”
Her words settled between us. I thought about Terry, the husband she still loved. Harold, the man who’d made her feel second best. Grace being taken from this very bakery while Trudy hid behind the counter and carried guilt that didn’t belong to her. She knew more about ghosts than I wanted her to.
I leaned forward, resting my forearms on the table. “She thought she was protecting me.”
“Maybe she was.”
“She wasn’t.”
“No,” Trudy agreed. “But that doesn’t mean she didn’t believe it.”
That was the hell of it. Christina had believed every terrible choice was love wearing armor.
She had convinced herself that silence was protection, that distance was mercy, that keeping Grace from me was the only way to keep her safe.
And now, reading her words, I could feel how badly she wanted me to understand even though she believed she didn’t deserve it.
“I’m angry,” I admitted.
“You should be.”
“I’m sad.”
“You should be that too.”
“I miss a woman I’m not even sure existed.”
Trudy’s eyes flickered with something painful.
“She existed,” she said. “Maybe she wasn’t all you thought she was. Maybe she was more broken than you knew. But the woman you loved existed. You don’t love someone for thirty years if there wasn’t something real there.”
My throat tightened. Fuck.
“You trying to make me feel better, darlin’?”
“No.” Her mouth tilted. “If I were trying to make you feel better, I’d tell you to eat the bear claw before I shove it down your throat.”
A laugh came out, rough and broken. It wasn’t much, but it loosened something in my chest.
“That’s more like you,” I said.
“Good. I was worried all this emotional maturity was damaging my reputation.”
I shook my head, still almost smiling, then looked back at the journal. The smile died fast. “Whatever comes next is bad.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know enough.”
I nodded slowly. She did. So did I. Christina had confessed to giving away a son, to trading her body, to lying to Grace, to running, to dying with secrets packed so tight inside her they might as well have been another tumor.
If there was something worse than all of that, then I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet the woman who had written it.
“I’m afraid I’ll hate her,” I said.
Trudy didn’t flinch. “Maybe you will for a while.”
I looked at her sharply.
“What?” she asked. “You want me to lie?”
“No.”
“Good, because I’m not going to. Maybe whatever she wrote next will make you hate her for a minute, or an hour, or a day. Maybe it should. I don’t know. But I don’t think hate is what brought you back to this table every day.”
I glanced around the bakery. My table. Her place. The journal. The cold coffee. The life happening around me while the dead tried to explain themselves.
“What did?”
Trudy’s voice softened. “Love.”
The word hit me like a brick.
I loved Christina. Still. Against all fucking logic, I did.
Even with all the anger, all the grief, all the rage at what she’d done...
I loved her. But I also wanted Trudy with a hunger that had nothing to do with ghosts.
I wanted her sharp tongue and stubborn spine.
Wanted her hands on me. Wanted her laughter, her anger, her fear, her hope.
I wanted to sit in this bakery and have her threaten to force-feed me pastries because I was too damn wrapped up in the past to remember my body needed food.
I reached across the table and took her hand before I thought better of it.
She looked down at our joined hands, then back up at me.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Read the rest. Be Grace’s father. Be whatever the hell I’m becoming with you. Stop being angry. Keep being angry. All of it.”
Her fingers tightened around mine. “Then stop trying to do all of it today.”
Simple.
Fucking impossible.
Just like her.
I let out a slow breath. “You make it sound easy.”
“It’s not. But you’re old. You should pace yourself.”
This time the laugh came easier.
“There she is,” I murmured.
She tried to pull her hand back, but I held on. Not hard. Just enough. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t really fight me.
“I’m taking a break,” I said.
“From the journal?”
“Yeah.”
“For how long?”
I looked at the closed book between us, then at her. “Long enough to drink fresh coffee, eat whatever you’re threatening me with, and watch you pretend you don’t like me sitting here.”
“I don’t like you sitting here.”
“Liar.”
Her cheeks flushed, and damn if that didn’t make something warm stir in my chest despite the weight sitting on top of it.
Pati called Trudy from behind the counter, and the moment broke. Trudy stood, but I didn’t let go right away. She looked down at me, and for once, neither of us hid behind much of anything.
“You’ll be okay for five minutes?” she asked.
“No.”
Her face softened.
“But I’ll still be sitting here when you get back.”
She nodded once, then squeezed my hand before pulling away.
I watched her walk back to the counter, watched Pati glance between us with too much interest, watched Trudy snap something at her that made the girl grin. The bakery noise came back slowly. Cups, voices, the bell, the hum of ovens from the kitchen.
I looked down at the journal again.
The rest was coming.
But not yet.
For the first time since opening Christina’s journal, I let the past wait.
And I reached for the bear claw.