The Protector (25 page)

There was a balm for the searing truth of his observation in those last words. “So…Jack’s giving you a hard time about me.”

“You don’t need to sound so amused about it,” Cole replied, pushing a napkin toward her to put under the straight pretzel sticks she was stacking into a log cabin square. “Start being more open with him. God can use openness on your part to touch Jack’s heart.”

“Cole, I understand your point, but I don’t know if I can.”

“No one ever said witnessing was easy. You’ve got to step back and get your priorities straight. It’s wrong to flirt and mess up Jack’s head only to draw back later because you can’t marry someone who’s not a Christian. Be a true friend and convince him about Jesus.”

“I can’t change his mind.”

“Try.”

She made a face at him. “Easier said than done.”

“You got through the last eighteen months because the option was to give up and you refused to do it.”

“Yes.”

“So just decide to do it and don’t give up. Jack’s got that kind of crisis coming. It would help him if you’d let him learn from what you’ve been through.”

“I’m not wise about how to cope just because I’ve been forced to do it.”

“Yes, you are. You sat outside in the cold because what you most wanted on your own bad days was someone to talk to, so you instinctively gave that to Jack. That’s wisdom learned from experience.”

Cole reached across the table. “Watch your square of pretzels.” He pulled a lower one out. The pretzel wall shifted, then held because the side walls held them in place. “As the pressure builds, Jack’s going to be reaching for strong things to brace himself against. And I do expect him to look toward God because that’s who Jennifer is resting against.”

“The O’Malleys will close ranks. They’re doing it with the conference call tonight; they’ll do it through the holidays.”

“Yes.”

“I envy them that.”

Cole smiled across the table at her. “Jack would be glad to share. There are times having four sisters drives him absolutely crazy.”

“If that’s where Jack is at, what about Rachel? How’s she handling this?”

Cole pushed aside his coffee mug.

“Cole?”

“Unlike Jack, Rae is impossible to understand.”

“She’s gracious, thinks about others, helps in practical ways, is there to do whatever she can in a crisis—what’s so hard to understand?”

Cole didn’t answer her, just looked at her, let her think through what she had said. Cassie knew she was getting tested, but she just didn’t see what he did. She shook her head slightly, not understanding.

“What’s she leaning against to get herself through this?” Cole asked quietly.

The truth hit like a brick through glass. Rachel was leaning against herself. “Cole—”

He shook his head. “She’s my problem.” There was a grimness to that statement. “I’ll deal with it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I have no idea.”

Twenty-seven

R
achel pushed her car door closed and wiped at the tears that made her eyes burn. The tears would simply not stop. She’d cried all over Cole. Cried all over Jack. Was still crying. She was losing Jennifer, and the grief had grabbed hold and shook her so hard she could not get it subdued. She headed into the apartment building.

The phone call—one simple little trigger and the wall holding back the tears had burst. It wasn’t Jennifer’s fall that was the entire embarrassing reality of tonight. Jack had even lost his ability to offer a joke to help lighten the moment because she’d so flustered him with her tears. She dealt with too much grief in her life already through the tragedies of others, she simply didn’t have the strength to face it on a personal level. Not grief this overwhelming.

She had denied what was happening with Jennifer since July, denied the reality of what it could lead to. She knew it, could clinically see the pattern of denial she so often counseled against in others. She knew this break in the wall holding back the tears was inevitable, and yet when it happened it caught her by surprise.

The entire family had seen her lose it. Five months of bottled-up tears were all getting shed in one night. The conference call had lasted so long because everyone in the family had been trying their best to offer reassurance that Jennifer would be okay. Jennifer was home. Even if the remission was ending, the doctors had not exhausted treatment options.

Rachel had been in Florida early in July when Marcus had sent the initial emergency page about Jennifer. She caught the next flight out in the middle of the night, learned the news about the cancer diagnosis very early that next morning, and by that afternoon had been on a plane to Baltimore to join Jennifer at Johns Hopkins.

It had been so easy to simply do what she did professionally. To step into the role of helper. To be there. To do whatever needed done. To not only help Jennifer get through the chemotherapy and radiation, but on Jennifer’s behalf to also undertake the complex job of implementing wedding plans in Houston so that Jennifer would have that upcoming day of joy to focus on rather than be forced to delay it. Rachel was grateful there was a way to help; it had been her gift to her sister. To pull it off she spent hours on the phone, had made several round-trip flights between Houston and Baltimore.

The wedding had been a wonderful day. And her relief that it was over had been real.

Jennifer in remission, the wedding over, Rachel had been looking forward to a chance to step away and catch her breath. Instead, she had walked into the situation with Gage and rearranged her plans.

Now this.

She simply did not have anything more to give. She was given out.

And now the tears would not stop. She walked up the stairs in the apartment building, sorting through her keys. She struggled to get the key into the lock.

“Rachel.”

She leaned her head against the door. Not this. “Go away, Gage.”

Behind her on the stairs going to the next floor, Gage stood. “Cole called me.”

Cole had called Gage…no need to wonder what impression she had left with that man. She pushed the key into the lock. “Come on in,” she whispered. She was too tired to fight anymore and he’d come in regardless.

Gage caught the door before it could close on him. “You should have called a cab.”

She ignored the comment and tossed her keys into the dish on the table in the entryway. Her home was an eclectic place that Gage rarely visited, not because he wasn’t welcome but there was barely room to turn around and he hated the lack of space.

The rooms were stuffed with furniture. The hallway was lined with pictures. There were enough pillows tossed on chairs and the couch to outfit a small hotel. She liked it this way. Her apartment in Washington was more functional. This was her nest. Not that she would defend it that way to Gage.

He paced past her into the living room and tossed his jacket on the couch. “What’s going on?”

“I’m tired.”

He shot her a frustrated look. “Shall I interpret tired or do you want to get a little more expansive on the language?”

She pushed aside his jacket so she could sink into the cushions on the couch. She was very aware Gage would have already grilled Cole for the details. “You’re the writer,” she muttered. “Tired: as in go away so I can go to bed.”

“As if you would. I know you too well, Rachel LeeAnn. You grieve by turning on the T V, curling up on the couch, eating ice cream, and staying up to see the dawn. Where do you keep the aspirin?”

“I already took some.”

“I haven’t.”

It nudged enough sympathy she thought about the question. “Try the bathroom cabinet.”

He reappeared minutes later, shirtsleeves shoved up, a glass of ice water in his hand. He tossed pillows to the floor and dropped into the chair across from her. “Tabitha used to say crying her eyes out was incredibly therapeutic.”

Rachel opened her burning eyes. “She was lying.”

Gage chuckled, albeit forced.

He was studying her with a frown on his face, and she could almost hear him thinking there was so much coiled energy apparent just in how he sat. She was a problem to be solved and he was figuring out where and how to begin. He had a habit of probing everything in a way that would strip a subject bare, although he rarely did it to her. Under the abrupt exterior there was still a softer Gage loath to hurt her feelings.

“You held Jennifer’s hand through weeks in the hospital, stepped in and planned her wedding, provided a shoulder to your family for the last five months. Now you’ve got to find the strength to get through Christmas with Jennifer’s health failing. Forgive me for being astonished by your habit of assuming you are strong enough to deal with everything.”

She was startled at the amount of raw emotion in his words. “I’ve got no choice but to deal with it.”

“You could have called me; you could have talked to me.”

“And say what?”

“How about something honest like, ‘Gage, I’m scared’?”

She wiped at tears and didn’t answer him.

He let the silence stretch out for minutes. “Did you think I wouldn’t understand?” There was so much tenderness in those quiet words.

“I feel like a fool.”

“Been there, done that. You live through that one.”

She smiled at his prompt reply, knowing he was speaking from experience. There had been days around the anniversary of Tabitha’s birthday when she wondered not if he would make it, but if she would, after the all-night sessions on the phone when she refused to hang up because Gage was prowling like a caged lion. Months later he had sent her roses in memory of those evenings. He’d survived. It just didn’t always happen without a few scars.

She leaned her head forward into her hands, heavy of heart, weary, and honestly not sure what she should do in the next few minutes, let alone the next day. Just the idea of facing tomorrow was beyond her at the moment.

“Where are the sleeping pills?”

“You know I dumped them,” she muttered. It would be so simple to reach for sleeping pills to push away this stress, to smother it. Gage had turned to alcohol to numb his grief; she couldn’t afford to go back to using sleeping pills.

They had been a blessing at first, recommended by her doctor. But they had begun to cover the stress of her job and make her think she was dealing with it when in fact she was relying on the pills. And the day had inevitably come last year when she’d scared Gage, scared herself. He’d called in the wee hours of the morning and she answered the phone for all practical purposes incoherent.

Severe jet lag from a delayed flight home from Los Angeles followed by a sleeping pill had been a mistake. She’d spent three weeks dealing with the fallout of a suicide pact among four high school football players and she just wanted to get some sleep. She’d gotten it. She managed to answer the phone, mumble an answer, and drop the phone without hanging it up. She’d gone immediately back to sleep only to be aroused shortly thereafter by Gage pounding on the door.

She’d dumped the pills.

“Go to bed and put in one of your favorite tapes: the ocean waves one that makes you seasick or the one of those crazy loons on a pond.”

His description of the relaxation tapes she had once made the mistake of loaning him drew a smile as she knew he had intended. “I’ll compromise with the radio station.”

“If I leave, you promise to go to bed?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll call if you can’t sleep?” There was no question there was an edge of skepticism in the pointed query.

She pushed herself to her feet. “I will.”

He pulled on his jacket. “I want a call when you wake up.”

“Gage—”

He hugged her, taking her totally by surprise. She not only was swallowed up with her face pressed into his jacket, her ribs got squeezed until her breath was lost. “Don’t scare me again,” he whispered. “If you want to cry, do it on my shoulder. Don’t ever again do it alone.”

Years of friendship boiled down and focused to one point in time. She’d always wondered if he understood her core concern for him. He had; he was mirroring it back to her. “Thank you,” she finally whispered.

“Crying alone is a waste of good emotion.”

She rubbed her cheek against his jacket and hugged him back. “Go home.”

“I’ll go home.”

She was smiling as she locked the door behind him, the relief of his visit real.

She turned out lights, confident she’d be able to sleep.

The bedroom was chilly as the wind had picked up, and she had not yet put up weather stripping to better seal the window frame. Last week she had added extra blankets and changed to flannel sheets. She slid under the weight of the blankets and wrapped her arms around a pillow.

She owed the relief she felt to more than just Gage. A brief battle over that fact ended when she reached for the phone. She punched in a number.

“Yes?”

“Cole…thanks.”

“Rae.” She’d surprised him but clearly not woken him up.

“Calling Gage was a nice thing to do.”