Page 84 of Delusion in Death
“Or food.”
She looked back at her board.
“You can talk it through while we eat. I’m under orders to feed my wife.”
Her shoulders hunched, then released again. “He’s okay?”
“It’s hard—as you’d know better than most—to go back, look close at traumatic past events. He said more tonight about the horrors of his experiences than he has to me in all the years we’ve been together. I don’t know, not really, who he was before he saved me, took me in.”
“You never looked. You never looked at my past either, until I asked you to.”
“No. Love without trust? It’s not love at all.”
It upset him, she knew, worried him to see Summerset so frail, so tired. “I’ll get the food. We’ll eat.”
He ran a hand down her hair, brushed a kiss on her lips. “I’ll get it. Orders.”
She looked at the board again, sighed, then walked to the kitchen while Roarke programmed the meal. “Roarke? Whoever he was before, he was the kind of man who’d take in a young boy, tend to him, give him what he needed. He’s still a pain in the ass, but that matters.”
“I’m not sure, not at all, I’d have lived to be a man without him. I expect my father might have done for me, as he did for my mother, however slippery and clever I might have been. I’m not sure, had I lived, what manner of man I’d have been without him. So it matters, yes. It matters.”
She sat with him by the window at the little table, the spaghetti and meatballs she had a weakness for heaped on her plate like comfort.
Would they be here now, together like this, if Summerset had made another choice the day he’d found the young boy, beaten half to death by his own father? If he’d walked on, as some would, or had dumped Roarke in an ER, would they be here, sharing wine and pasta?
Roarke would say yes, they were meant to be. But she didn’t have his faith in fate and destiny.
All the steps and choices made life an intricate maze with endless solutions and endings.
“You’re quiet,” Roarke commented.
“He wanted something else for you. You’re his, and he wanted something—someone else for you. He deals with me now, we deal with each other. But he had a kind of vision for you. That’s what parents do, right?”
“Whatever he envisioned, under it he wanted me happy. He knows I am. And he knows, as he told me before I came upstairs, you’ve made me a better man.”
For an instant she was, sincerely, speechless. “He must really be feeling off.”
When Roarke simply shook his head, sipped at his wine, she wound pasta around her fork. “It just made me think, wind it through my head.” She held up her fork. “Like pasta.” She ate, wound again. “The abductees. They wanted kids under a certain age, when it’s likely they’re more malleable, more defenseless. Most of Red Horse would be, by the popular term, bat-shit crazy. But not all. It’s never all. There’d be kids there, too—sucked in or swept along. And women who felt they had no choice—scared. Men too weak-spined or weak-minded to do anything but go along.”
“Add the world was going to hell in a handbasket.”
“What does that mean? What’s a handbasket? If it’s a basket, you need your hands to carry it, so it’s a given.”
“It might be a bushel basket. You’d need your arms.”
“How much is a bushel?”
“Four pecks.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Now you’re messing with me. Peck’s what chickens do.”
He laughed. “I stand corrected.”
“What I was saying, before handbaskets, is some people would, given human nature, feel protective of the kids. And maybe bond with them, especially kids who were kept for a good chunk of time. They’d have to assign people to take care of them. The babies, say.”
“And there’d be that bonding. Yes, I can see that.”
“With the bonding comes the vision, the wants for the kid. The kid has to depend on you, for food, shelter, protection. Mira asked me questions today that made me think about that. I was afraid of Troy, and even as a kid, hated him on some level. But I depended on him. Not on her. I never depended on her.”