Worth Fighting For

But he didn’t want Patrick to know anything about him.

She hesitated as if to say she didn’t believe him but then she nodded. “Okay. But if Patrick goes missing, I’m an eyewitness. I’ll testify.”

Jonah blinked, stunned slightly by the legal vernacular.

“Get going,” Patrick said, bodily turning the girl around and giving her a push toward the lodge.

Josie sighed heavily and stomped off, leaving Patrick and Jonah alone. Jonah realized this was the moment Patrick had been waiting for since he’d arrived.

Josie hadn’t been the only one haunting the outside of his cabin.

“Josie and her mother were in a scrape with the law last winter,” Patrick explained. “She saw and heard some things she shouldn’t have and spent some time in court this spring testifying. She caught on to the lingo.”

Jonah watched the girl go until the door of the lodge shut behind her.

“Why don’t you come on out?” Patrick said. “I’ll give you a tour. Take you down to the river.” His tone seemed casual, but he couldn’t control the hope that rolled off him, nearly suffocating Jonah.

“I’m working.”

Patrick sucked in a quick breath but kept his smile intact. The man wasn’t going to budge.

“Your mother—”

“Don’t try to use my mother to get me to do what you want me to do,” he said. “It won’t work. In fact, it will make me like you less. Not that it’s possible.”

Jonah tried to shut the door but Patrick got his hand in there before he could. Jonah was stunned briefly by the sudden sharpness in the old man’s eyes, the sudden anger.

“I didn’t know about you,” Patrick said. “Your mother never told me. If I had known, I would have done anything to get you back.”

Jonah knew that, of course. His mother had made very sure that he understood that Patrick had not rejected Jonah. He’d only rejected his wife. Banished her from her own family.

“Is that supposed to make me forgive you?” Jonah asked.

“I don’t understand what you are angry with me for.” Patrick truly looked lost. Clueless and that told him even further what Iris meant to this man.

“I’m angry,” he said clearly, making sure nothing would get misunderstood or forgotten, “because you never signed those divorce papers. You kept her chained to you for thirty years like she didn’t matter. You broke my mother’s heart. I’m angry because I grew up with a mother who every day tried to hide the fact that she was unhappy.” Patrick’s face crumpled, his fire extinguished. “And, no, there is nothing you can do to make me forgive that.”

With that, before the old man could say anything more, Jonah shut the door in his face.

PATRICK STARED at the closed door.

Heartsick, he battled nausea and chest pains. Confusion and grief made his head fuzzy and light.

What am I supposed to do?

He watched Max walk out of the lodge into the woods and thought about calling out to him. Trying to talk to him about this mess with Jonah. But his boys weren’t invested. They wanted him to protect himself, not get involved. Gabe in particular wanted him to let it go.

Even Max, last night, had said if Jonah wasn’t interested in bridging the gaps then maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

Patrick couldn’t believe that this family wasn’t meant to be.

Against all odds, Jonah was here. In cabin five.

Patrick simply needed to figure out how to get Jonah out of cabin five.

He knew that if he asked Iris to help him, to force the boy’s hand since he’d do anything for his mother, some of this heartache would be avoided.

But Patrick didn’t want her help. He wanted to feed the small fire of his grudge against her.

What she’d done was unforgivable. Despite the fact that he understood the whys and the reasons, he couldn’t forgive her.

She’d left them, him and the boys. Walked away in the middle of the night thirty years ago and had stayed away for three months before writing Patrick a letter asking to come home. He’d told her no. He’d been angry. Spiteful and hurt and he had no way of knowing that she was pregnant and her terrifying erratic behavior before she left had been caused by depression brought on by the pregnancy.

She wrote again, nine months later when Jonah must have been a few months old. By that time Patrick had his life in a rhythm. Something that worked. It wasn’t perfect and often it wasn’t pretty, but he was raising his boys and he’d decided that life was easier without her.

He’d been wrong, of course.

When he’d sent those letters to her, telling her not to come, that they were doing fine without her, he’d been thinking of himself and the boys.

He’d been thinking about Iris’s depression and the way it could make his life terrifying.

Happiness—hers, his, the boys—he hadn’t thought of. Now he wished he had. Staring at the door of cabin five and knowing his son was in there, blaming Patrick for things that weren’t all his fault, he wished he could have seen the future. In order to prevent this itchy heartache in his chest, he wouldn’t have kept his wife away.

He could have had his son.

Like a magnet, he found himself pulled in the direction of Iris. He wanted to remind her of the mistakes she’d made, the mess she’d made of their lives—the years they’d wasted.

It was, after all, her fault.

He’d been trying to keep his distance from her since her return a few weeks ago. He liked to pretend that he didn’t know this woman who looked like an older, sadder version of the woman he’d fallen in love with on a vacation to the Jersey Shore. He wanted to pretend that the years and the betrayal had changed their core.

Now, however, he walked to the gazebo where he knew she’d be.

And there she was. Bouncing, loving and generally hogging baby Stella as she had since her arrival.

Their first grandchild. The thought caught him in the throat and he couldn’t breathe. He just watched Iris with Stella and ached.

It was a milestone they should have celebrated together—arm in arm, in love, proud and happy.

She robbed him of that.

She didn’t hear him approach, thank God, all of her energy focused on the pink bundle in her arms.

A tiny hand came up out of the blanket and patted Iris’s mouth, reaching for the dangling earrings she wore.

“Pretty soon, Stella,” she cooed, touching her nose to the baby’s. “Pretty soon you’ll have your hands on everything.”

The hot mix of emotions built in him, filling his chest and his head. He couldn’t make sense of them. Couldn’t put a name to everything that made him want to grab her and shake her. Touch her.

Oh God, how could he want to touch her so bad when she’d lied to him? Kept his son from him? Why did he want to hold her and ease the pain he saw in the weary set of her shoulders, the bowed curve of her neck as if the whole world was pressing on her?

It didn’t make sense. But anger made sense. Anger worked. So he concentrated on that.

He started to put words together, hurtful words telling her exactly what she’d done to him.

“Patrick,” she said, interrupting his mental tirade, not even turning to look at him. “I was wondering when you’d come looking for me. Things aren’t going well with Jonah?”

He shook his head, the mix of emotions making words impossible. I’m mad, he wanted to howl.

“You want to take that out on me?” she asked. “Yell at me? Make me feel worse than I already do?”

Yes!

Finally she looked at him, her black eyes a well of hurt. Of regret. But she would let him do it. She would let him yell and rage and blame her for all the misery at the inn. But it wouldn’t add to the pain in her eyes. The burden she carried on those strong, elegant shoulders.

I can’t make her feel worse than she does, he realized.

“No,” he whispered. He shook his head, weary suddenly as the emotions that had fueled him dissipated like fog in the sun.

Stella fussed, a little cry that turned Iris’s attention to the little girl. “Hello, there. Hello, little love,” she whispered and he felt that bit of nonsense, that soft breath of air from his wife’s mouth enter his tortured self and calm him down.

He and Stella both stopped fussing.

“She’s a lot like Max was as a baby,” Iris said, with the familiar ribbon of the Hudson River behind her. A careful truce was offered in her eyes, the merest hint of a question. Will you let it go? her eyes asked. Please, for both of us, let it go. “He didn’t like sleeping, either. Wanted to be in the middle of the action all the time.”

Patrick felt the memories creep through him. Images of the boys’ early years when they were a family—memories he’d sequestered and quarantined.

I can’t do this. I can’t pretend everything is okay. I can’t.

But he wanted to.

“Remember?” she asked.

Don’t make me let go of my resentment.

“He was a busy guy,” he said, giving in, knowing it was a useless battle. He let the memories out. The happiness of those days. The peace and kindness whirled through him. “I thought he’d never sleep through the night.”

“Unlike Gabe,” she said. “He slept through his first six months.”

“Six months? More like six years.” Patrick smiled at the memories.

“Slept and ate, that’s about it. Remember when we went camping that summer?”

Patrick laughed, knowing exactly what she was thinking of, the incident conjured up by her voice as if it had happened yesterday. “He slept through that big storm.”

“Not just the storm,” she said, swaying slightly when Stella began to fuss. “He slept through the tent collapsing and all of us running around trying to fix it.”

Iris brushed her fingers over the little girl’s face and Patrick could feel that touch as if it were his flesh Iris stroked. These feelings entered with the memories, unwanted hangers-on.

“I pulled in as much of the tent as I could and ended up balling up the rest and sleeping on it.” Patrick cleared his throat and stared at his hands. “One of the worst nights of sleep I ever had. I was sore for months.”

“Remember in the morning, Gabe woke us up to tell us the tent fell down. Like we didn’t know.” Iris laughed. “Oh my Lord, that boy could sleep through anything. Jonah was the same way.”

At the mention of their youngest son’s name, the air between them changed. Became heavier, darker.

“He’s not talking to me,” Patrick murmured. “He won’t even come out of the cabin.”

“Jonah doesn’t want to be here,” Iris told him what he already knew. “And he can be very stubborn.”

“What do I do?” Patrick asked, sitting in one of the wrought-iron chairs. His bones felt sore, taxed to their limit just by holding him up.

“You be patient with him,” Iris said. “He’s stubborn but his heart is so good.”

“The Dirty Developer?” Patrick asked, the name tasting gross on his tongue.

“If I explained his business to you, he would never forgive me,” she said. He glanced at her and he could see her strength. Hard-won in Arizona, raising a boy without him. She was like bedrock and she wasn’t going to budge on this.

Admiration—one more thing he didn’t want to feel for her—seeped into the mysterious whirl of feelings he was trying to ignore.

A breeze came up from the Hudson and sent her earrings into motion and Stella reached again for the silver. “But you have to trust me—”

He laughed. He laughed before he could help it. He was sore and raw and he did trust Iris. He could see what the years had done to her, the regret she lived with.

But he laughed because he hurt so much and he wanted her to hurt a little, too. It was cruel. And sick.

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