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Juliet shrugged. “I didn’t fit in.”
“It was high school. Who really thought they did?”
There was that, so she had to nod. “Still, on top of the usual teenage angst, when I was thirteen I developed a huge schoolgirl crush on Wayne.”
He straightened in his chair. “What?”
“It was all on my side. I told you I was a romantic bookworm and when I met him…it was like meeting a movie star or royalty, you know? He fueled enough innocent daydreams to get me through high school without dates or boyfriends.”
“What did your parents think about your feelings for him?”
She ventured for her coffee again, and because Noah didn’t protest, figured it was safe to cradle in her palms. “If they’d known about it, I suppose they would have figured I’d grow out of it. Which I did. He wasn’t the only man I ever went to bed with. He was the man I fell in love with, though, really in love, when I was twenty-three.”
Noah busied himself collecting his own cup from the tray. He took a sip, then stared down at it. “What would your parents have thought about that?”
“Hmm.” Juliet tasted her drink. Black, with lots of sugar, just as Noah had promised. “That’s tougher to answer. They were older, quiet, very conservative.”
“And they never told you about the circumstances of your conception?”
“Not a peep.” A movement behind Noah caught her attention, but it was only Jacques Cousteau changing seats. Now he was across the room from them and fiddling idly with his big camera. “It’s hard to say if they would have told me at some later date. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about that.”
Noah took another swallow from his cup. “Are you angry they kept the truth from you?”
Even for those few days when she’d been capable of emotional highs and lows, she’d not been angry. Not exactly. But… “I hate secrets,” she said. There was that nagging sense that Wayne had held something back from her, and now there was this. “It bothers me more, I think, because of what happened to them.”
“What was that?”
“My parents got this big idea of crossing the country in an RV. They weren’t experienced, and during their first cold night, they were having trouble keeping warm. Someone lent them a portable gas heater and it didn’t work properly. The carbon monoxide poisoned Mom and Dad in their sleep.”
“Sudden and shocking, then.”
“Yes.” Looking down, she saw her fingers tighten around the coffee cup. “They were in good health and in good spirits. So I was unprepared…and devastated to find myself without family. We were close, I was an only child, my college friends were far away. But if I’d known the circumstances of my conception, I would have known I still had sisters.”
She watched, surprised, as liquid plopped onto the back of her hands. When she touched her fingertips to her face, she came away with more wetness.
Tears. She was crying and yet she still felt nothing.
Jacques Cousteau was on the move again, choosing another table, and she grabbed up a napkin to blot her cheeks. Nevertheless, the tears continued.
“Juliet?”
She saw Noah’s arm reach across the table and his hand find hers. Then she watched his fingers flex, tightening around her own, but she could only see the action, not feel it, not with that brittle barrier between her and the world re-established. When Wayne had died, she’d appreciated the protection.
But now it worried her that though Noah was just inches away and leaning across the table with a look of concern in his eyes, he seemed as far from Juliet as the creepy guy in neoprene across the room. And if she couldn’t change this, she knew with sudden certainty, then she would never achieve closeness with anyone.
Even her newfound sisters wouldn’t be able to reach her—or she them. If nothing else, if no one else, she needed to be able to connect to Nikki and Cassandra, to reach out to them so that she wouldn’t be alone in her empty rooms with her cold heart forever.
There had to be some way to break free again…and she thought she knew what that way was.
Afraid to leave time for second thoughts, she pushed back her chair. It screeched against the floor, but even the sound seemed muted. “I need to do something,” she told Noah. “I need to do something right now.”
He set his cup on the table. “Tonight?”
“Yes.” It had to be tonight. Immediately. “Will you come with me?”
It never occurred to her that Noah would refuse to comply. He’d been her ally, her companion so often on this journey that she couldn’t imagine taking these particular steps without him.
