He couldn’t hide his smile as he imagined what a shock that must have been. “How did she come to live with you? Is she a shelter rescue?”
He was further delighted when Samantha Fremont settled on the bench beside him, much as her dog had.
“That’s a very long story.” She gazed out at the water. “I suppose you could say it started when my mother died unexpectedly in January.”
She probably wasn’t even aware of the thread of sadness twisting through her voice. He heard it, though, and fought the urge to hug her as compassion seeped through him like water through limestone.
“I’m sorry. That must have been difficult.” He adored his parents and couldn’t imagine his world without their supportive presence.
She accepted his sympathy with a nod. “Thank you. She died in her sleep. For her, I suppose it wasn’t a bad way to go, but I’ll admit, I haven’t been handling it well. My father died when I was young and for most of my life it’s just been me and my mother. Living without her has been an adjustment.”
“I can only imagine.”
She sent him a swift look. “I’m sorry. That probably sounds pathetic to you. I’m a grown woman. I understand that losing my mother, while difficult, is not the same as you losing a wife and Amelia and Thomas losing their mother.”
Guilt pinched at him, as it always did when someone showed him sympathy. “I’ve learned on this journey that you can’t compare your pain to someone else’s. We all have hard things.”
“But I didn’t lose the love of my life.”
Neither did I, he wanted to say, but swallowed the words. “I would never tell you that I had more right to grief than you do,” he said instead.
“My mother made a sampler when she was a girl that said, If all our troubles were hung on a line, you’d take home yours and I’d take home mine. It’s still hanging in her bedroom.”
What if they all simply left their troubles hanging on that line and let the wind eventually carry them away? He was tired of wearing his, like a too-tight hat always pressing against his skull.
“It sounds as if you were very close to your mother.”
She released a sigh, pulling her dog onto her lap, and said nothing for a long time while small waves licked against the dock.
“I wanted to be close to her. I suppose we were in a way since we only had each other to lean on after my father died. But my mother was a...difficult woman.”
“She and my ex-wife had that much in common, then.” The words slipped out before he could stop them.
She stared at him. “Ex-wife? The children’s mother was your ex-wife?”
Instinctively, he wanted to jump up and hurry back to his house, feeling horribly exposed.
Why had he told her that? Ian never talked about his marriage with anyone. It was the reason he went along with the fiction the world had created about him, a man who had lost the love of his life.
Now that he had brought it up, he found he wanted to tell Samantha the truth.
“Her name was Susan and she left me for another man months before she was diagnosed with cancer. We had just signed the papers when she found out she was ill.”
“I thought you were a grieving widower.”
This time it was his turn to sigh. “It’s easier than trying to explain the whole story.”
“She left you.”
He found her shock rather gratifying, he had to admit. He was certain it was his imagination but he thought Samantha sounded as if she couldn’t quite understand why any woman would do such a thing.
“We were never a good fit,” he admitted, something he had come to see early in their marriage. “She taught at Oxford, as well. Psychology. We met when we were both graduate students.”
They had dated only a few times but had slept together one night when they’d both had too much to drink after a party with friends.
She’d become pregnant with Amelia. While he had used protection and she had told him she was on birth control, he suspected she had lied.
He wasn’t necessarily much of a catch, a too-serious biology student obsessed with his research. But his family was wealthy and not without influence and she had adored that part of their life far more than the quiet world of an Oxford professor.
She had never said so outright but he suspected that wealth and influence was the main reason she had dated him in the first place.
“We tried to make it work for the children’s sake,” he said now to Samantha. “Whatever else I could say about her, she was a good mother who loved her children. We might have stayed together and figured out a way to cobble together a happy life but three years ago she fell passionately in love with a visiting guitar instructor from Spain.”
“Oh, no.”
Samantha sounded so distressed he had to sigh. “My heart wasn’t broken, I promise. At least not for myself. Divorce is always hardest on the children. Thomas was young enough he didn’t really know what was happening but Amelia was struggling to process all the changes. We were figuring things out together and then Susan was diagnosed with cancer after a routine mammogram.”
“What happened to her guitar instructor?”
“He decided radiation and chemotherapy weren’t what he signed up for and went back to Barcelona.”
“I would say that’s just what she deserves but that seems a little cold since she was dealing with such a hard diagnosis.”
He had thought much worse than that, he had to admit. “Susan was devastated, of course. On both counts. By then I was mostly numb. My brother had died a few months earlier and Gemma was seriously injured in the same accident. Our family was still reeling from that.”
Again, he couldn’t believe he was telling this woman
