Page 89 of Knox
Gerri pulled another roll of dough from the pan and set it on the board. “We’re all wounded, Kelsey. But it’s our wounds that allow us to have compassion for each other. It’s how God shows us He loves us too—through the way we reach out and hold on to each other.”
Maybe. Like Ham reached out to care for her after the attack. And Dixie and Glo, when she moved to Wisconsin, and…and Knox.
How Knox had wrapped his arms around her, kept her from falling.
“But of course, we have to be vulnerable. Share our lives with others if we want to connect. And then maybe people will share theirs with us.” She looked up and winked at Kelsey. “Sort of like you do in your songs. What’s that one—‘One True Heart’?”
“That’s Glo’s song. I just sing it.”
Gerri dusted cinnamon onto the dough. “You do it beautifully. It’s so…”
Fake.Kelsey kept her smile, but…yeah, Glo had written a song from her soul and Kelsey turned it into a performance. Something she could cocoon around her, make her seem authentic and honest and…
Frankly, it had probably been only a matter of time before the stage exploded around her. Before her performance cracked and people saw through her.
Dix, Glo, Carter, and Tate had saved her from that moment.
“It sounds like Glo wrestled through a dark night of the soul with that song. So honest and raw and…it makes me cry every time.”
“I’ve never heard it,” Ruby Jane said.
“It’s about lost love and the fear of starting over,” Gerri said.
“Glo lost the love of her life in Afghanistan,” Kelsey said quietly. It wasn’t really her secret to tell, but it just spilled out. “She said she gave David her whole heart and has decided she’ll never fall in love again.”
“I felt that way, too, until…” Gerri didn’t finish that sentence, but instead she pushed the rolls toward Ruby Jane. “That’s the last pan.”
The second buzzer went off and Gerri went after it. Retrieved the pan and set it on a cutting board to cool. “Maybe that’s why I love that song so much… I understand how it feels to lose everything and be afraid to love again, having had so much of it the first time.”
Ruby Jane looked up, gave her mother a sad smile.
Gerri squeezed her daughter’s hand. “Ho-kay, do you think we have enough here to feed the brute squad?”
“Who are you calling brute?”
The voice came from behind them, deep and gruff, as if it had been whisked from the wilds of some northern Montana wilderness.
“Reuben!”
Ruby Jane grabbed a towel for her hands as she rounded the counter and headed for the big man at the door.
They just grew them bigger and bigger up here on Marshall land. Reuben seemed the size of a small buffalo, with hulking shoulders, a trim waist, and arms that could tear a tree from its roots. He caught Ruby Jane up and twirled her around. Kelsey slid off the stool, taking in the petite redhead who came in behind Reuben. Her aviator glasses were perched on her head, and she carried a backpack over her shoulder.
“Gilly!” This from Gerri who had also crossed the room. She pulled the woman, dressed in army-green cotton pants, a T-shirt, and a jean jacket, into a hug.
Knox pushed past them both, and Kelsey’s insides released a little. Apparently, she’d been holding her breath again.
He came over to her as Wyatt emerged from the den and caught Reuben in a hug.
“That’s my brother Reuben and his fiancée, Gilly. He’s a smokejumper on a base northwest of here,” Knox said.
Reuben looked like Paul Bunyan, as if he could put out a fire with one breath of his mighty lungs.
“C’mon, I’ll introduce you.”
But she didn’t move under his nudge.
“What?” he said softly.