Page 22 of Shadow Target
“I do appreciate it.” She wanted to ask why he was trying to open up to her, but figured that was a question for another time, too. “Would you like some dessert?” She saw him brighten a little. The old chestnut ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’ had never been truer than with Shep. He liked his sweets.
“Sure.”
Rising, she said, “Normally, Ethiopians do not have dessert after a meal. They like the flavors of the main meal to stay with them. Before the 1960s, they’d never even used sugar in desserts; always honey.” She walked to the kitchen and opened the freezer. “I love my ice cream.” She turned to him. “Are you game? Would you like some? We get this flown in from the capital. Dev knows the chef from British Airways there and he’s sweet on her. He’ll give her ice cream and she’ll put it in our dry ice chest and fly it back here. We get all kinds of flavors.” She looked at the container. “Tonight, it’s chocolate with almonds.”
“Sounds good,” he said.
“Great.” Willow felt relief flowing through her. Shep had FINALLY opened up to her about his family. Granted, it wasn’t much of a step inside his young life, but it was better than nothing. She placed two scoops into each bowl and carried them to the table, a spoon in both. The glee in his eyes reminded her of a little boy being given some nice, big surprise and she smiled as she sat down.
“No secret to you, Porter,” and she gestured to his bowl.
“Oh, I don’t know. You always accused me of holding secrets, Willow.”
She dug into her ice cream. “You still carry secrets.”
“It always made me uncomfortable to talk about them.”
“It still does,” she agreed softly, not wanting to compound the pain he already felt.
“Yes. But I’ve learned the hard way that keeping secrets about my past doesn’t work very well.” Shep replied, enjoying the dessert.
“Were you uncomfortable when Luke read your entire personal history? He must have because he’s the head of security and he has to know the people he’s protecting.”
“I got that,” he admitted sourly, scooping his spoon around the melting edges of the ice cream. “It made me rethink my hiding from my early years because I saw that Luke didn’t treat me any different than before he knew about my family.” He slid her a glance. “Looking back on it? I was ashamed of what happened in my family. It wasn’t whole, like yours was. And the naked truth was that I wanted you to think well of me. Not that I came out of a busted household.”
Willow hesitated. His admittance was something she thought she’d never hear from him. Setting her spoon down, she held his gaze fraught with raw emotions. Gently, she said, “No family is perfect, Shep. I think you know that by now? Look at my own family, Ben, my older brother by two years? He was always in trouble, unable to sit still, always restless and moving around. Eventually, he was diagnosed with ADHD, put on meds which he took until he was sixteen, and then threw them away, saying they made him feel horrible. From then on, he was in trouble as a juvenile with the police. He started smoking marijuana, and then started selling it on the side.” She shook her head. “He was a mess. And my parents were stressed to the max, like I was. I love Ben with all my heart. We had been close growing up, but I could never help him, Shep. He was very independent of the family by the time he turned eighteen.”
Becoming somber, Shep said, “I remember. I was an only child, so I didn’t have the issues you had in your family.”
Willow nodded and whispered, “What I didn’t tell you, Shep? Talk about holding secrets, eh?” and she gave him an apologetic look. “My sister, Ella, died of leukemia when she was ten years old. I was twelve. Ben was fourteen. That’s when our family more or less imploded. Ben revolted when my mother left for the States to get Ella to a children’s hospital for help. I was caught in the middle between my brother and trying to keep the household going in my mother’s absence.” She saw his face fall, emotion clearly visible in his expression.
“Damn, Willow, I’m sorry.” He reached out, briefly touching her lower arm. “You never told me about this. That had to be devastating.”
Her heart swelled with so many feelings for him that she had to stop herself from throwing herself into his arms. Shep was a consummate lover. He knew how to hold a woman, love her, caress her, and then care for her. She didn’t know where he’d gotten that skill and understanding from. There was so much more to him than she’d ever realized, but their three years apart had given her distance and a new slant on their marriage.
Willow took a deep breath that came back out as a sigh and went on, “It was devastating. It tore our whole family apart. My father was in Turkey at the time with us, living on the U.S. air base. My mother had flown back to one of the premier children’s hospitals in the USA, living near it, hoping that Ella would survive. I was in Turkey with my dad and brother. Ben was running the streets of Istanbul with a gang, and I never knew if he was going to come home or not at night. I took the place of my mother by cooking, cleaning and trying to keep some kind of normality in our family.”
“And this went on for how many years?” Shep asked.
Willow looked him right in the eye and said, “Ella died a year later. Mom came back to live with us in Turkey after the funeral. My father had to keep flying with his squadron. He couldn’t just get up and leave the Air Force. But all that time before, when mom had been stateside, we’d had what I guess they term a broken home of sorts. Without my mom there, Ben revolted and took off on his own. My father wouldn’t be home for days at a time because of the duties he was responsible for. I was keeping the household stitched together the best I could, although it wasn’t good enough.”
“You were only twelve. How could you?” Shep asked.
She nodded sadly, remembering that time. “If Ben had been well, it might have worked. He was the firstborn, and should have taken over and been responsible, but he wasn’t. My father was at his wit’s ends and didn’t know what to do with him. We all loved Ben, but he divorced himself from our family in a way, with his choices. He’d rarely showed up at the English school in Istanbul, maybe attending classes once a week. I never knew if he’d be home for any meals. I was going to school. I made breakfast for us, made sack lunches, and then cooked our dinners at night. Sometimes, my father and my brother didn’t show up at all.”
“How did that affect you?” Shep allowed himself to wonder out loud to his ex-wife, even surprising himself in the moment.
Willow finished her ice cream and put the bowl aside. “At twelve I was just entering puberty, I had my own hormonal hell I was going through, weepy, crying at the drop of a hat.”
“And you didn’t have your mother there to help you at that time when you needed her the most?”
Stunned by his unexpected insight, she stared at him. A lump formed in her throat for a moment and she swallowed. “Yeah, I was an emotional mess with all those hormones coming online. I started my first period and she wasn’t there to explain to me what was going on. It scared me to death. I thought I was bleeding to death. My father had gone on an assignment for a week. Ben was off with his gang. I remember sitting there on the toilet, blood dripping out of me and crying. I thought I was going to die.”
Shaking his head, Shep muttered, “My parent never talked to me about such things.”
“Mine either,” she said darkly. “I went next door in our apartment building and talked to another American woman who was married to a pilot in my dad’s squadron. She was so kind and convinced me I wasn’t bleeding to death, that I was just having my first menstrual period. If she hadn’t been there, I don’t know what I’d have done, Shep. I was so scared and confused. She took the time to explain what was happening to me, and I stopped being fearful about it.”
“And your father was gone and couldn’t be there for you, either.”