Her jaw loosened as a little shiver of surprise ran through her. “Declan.”
“That hasn’t changed, has it?”
“No, but…thanks for remembering.”
He tipped his head as if to say, How could I forget? Which only sent a second shiver through her. So, time for a third shiver, she supposed, ready for whatever he wanted to discuss.
She put her elbows on the table and dropped her chin on her knuckles. “So. What did you want to talk about?”
He flashed a split-second deer-in-the-headlights look at her. “Um…” He shifted in his seat. “What was that thing the vet tech mentioned? Myopic…dysfunctionia?”
She laughed from the belly, the way only Declan could make her laugh. She’d forgotten how much she loved that feeling. “Myotonic dystrophia. I headed a study on it at NC State. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”
“It’s really impressive,” he said softly, leaning back and looking at her.
“Nah, the study had a terrific team, and all I did was give orders.”
“I meant your whole career, Evie. I knew you were going to do well, but wow, you’ve knocked it out of the park.”
“Oh please, just because one student knew my work.”
“Don’t be modest. You’re amazing.”
A thread of a memory wound its way around her heart. To your unparalleled amazingness.
She brushed it away, more from habit than anything else, and then the waitress returned with their order, including what looked like a quarter of a pecan pie.
“A four-Kleenex crust,” Declan joked as he picked up his fork and broke off a bit of the piecrust. “Anyway, your career is what you always hoped it would be. You never let anything stop you. That’s…something.”
“I guess,” she said, stirring the extra splash of cream into her coffee, trying to figure out where he was going with this. For some reason, it wasn’t what she expected. “I’ve always been focused.”
“Laserlike,” he agreed. “Nothing ever made you want to get off that track?”
She looked up at him, not sure why he’d ask that question. Why was he dancing around that wretchedly overdue conversation?
“Not really.” She curled her fingers around the warm mug and studied him while she lifted it to her mouth. “Did anything ever make you want to stop being a firefighter, or get off the track toward captain and, ultimately, chief?”
He shook his head. “It’s different for a woman.”
She damn near dropped the cup. “Do you need a time machine to get back to the 1950s, or can you make it all by yourself?”
He smiled and stabbed his fork into the pie with a little too much force. “I’m not trying to be some kind of chauvinist. But I do see this in firefighting. A lot of women have to, you know, make a choice. Work or…” He gave her a pleading look, but she was not helping him out of this hole he was digging harder than he was poking at that pie. “You know. A family.”
She lowered the cup without taking a sip, looking down at the table, knowing it would be easy to give him grief about the old-school mind-set and keep the topic off her personally. Did he really not know why she never married and had a family? Did he really think it was because of work?
But how could she look across this table and say, Work was my consolation prize.
He gestured toward the plate. “Come on. Have some cry pie.” He lifted his brows as if he expected at least a smile for that attempt.
But she couldn’t smile or eat. The subject was too raw. And was he never going to mention that he’d created a twenty-year gap that might just be the reason they were having this conversation in the first place?
“I will.” She finally took a sip of coffee, then set the cup down and leveled her gaze on him. “Why haven’t you had a family, Declan?”
He shifted his attention to the pie. “I think I just told you. Arm’s length and sabotaged relationships, or so says Dr. Smella Mahoney, my personal psychiatrist.” He gave a soft laugh. “She’s smart, though, and probably right.”
“Why wouldn’t that be true for me, then, too? Why would you assume it was work?”
He studied her for a moment, collecting his thoughts like he so often did. “I figured you wanted kids.”
“I figured you did,” she fired back without hesitation.
“I have oodles of nieces and nephews, and the way things are going, I’ll have more.”
She accepted that—and the fact that if she was going to get an explanation or apology, she’d have to ask. And she just didn’t want to do that.
After a moment, she finally took a piece of the sweet and sticky pie. “I…tried,” she admitted as she angled her fork into the crust. “Didn’t work out for me.”
He studied her intently, a hundred questions in his eyes. Did he want to know about exhaustive and stressful donor insemination attempts? About the tests that showed absolutely nothing was wrong except bad timing? About how she filled out a mountain of paperwork to adopt, but gave up after a sleepless night of sobbing because she absolutely did not want to do that alone?
Should she detail how every time she turned around, another year had passed, and she was still single and childless, but her career was skyrocketing? Or about how every time she dated someone or got intimate with a man, she ended up feeling weirdly empty and scared and lonely because that man wasn’t…who she wanted him to be?
No. That was all too much angst for pie and coffee the second day they were together after a twenty-year freeze that he wouldn’t even acknowledge.
“I’m a working-woman cliché,” she said simply, finally bringing the fork to her mouth. “No kids for me.”
“But you’re the end of the line,” he said quietly.
Damn it, was she never going to taste this pie without choking?
She put the fork down without taking the bite. “Now you sound like my grandfather.”
“It’s a noble line, that Bushrod-Hewitt family. I’m sure he wants to continue it. And
