As though she didn’t want to curl up in a ball right there on the pathway.
But, somehow, she kept going. The silence a deafening howl between them.
‘Hey, buddy, is that Nana and Gramps just ahead?’ Logan stopped a few moments later as a car pulled up just by the park entrance.
Relief rushed through Kat. Surely the timing couldn’t be more opportune, she decided as Jamie dropped their hands and begin to careen ahead of them across the grass to his grandparents.
Tentatively, Kat tried to breathe again.
Out. In.
‘She didn’t mean anything by it,’ Logan said quietly, as she snapped her eyes open to realise he was watching her carefully. ‘That woman, I mean. She couldn’t have known that we aren’t a family.’
And even though, logically, Kat knew that he was trying to make her feel better, it only made the pain sear all the hotter inside her.
We aren’t a family.
The words echoed even louder as Jamie shouted a final goodbye and waved alongside his grandparents and Logan waved back.
The fact was that Logan, and Jamie, and the little boy’s grandparents were a family. She was the only outsider here. The one who wasn’t part of them. The one who didn’t have a family—at least, not one she saw any more.
Through her own choice. And not, as she’d always pretended, because they were scattered all over the globe. They were living their lives. Having families of their own. And she hadn’t been able to bear it after losing Carrie.
A fresh lance of pain stabbed through her, almost crippling her. Reminded her how utterly broken and lost and defeated she’d felt when the little girl had been taken from her.
For the little girl’s sake, she’d clung to the hope that Carrie finally had her own, true family back. But for her own sanity she’d decided that she could never again go through that torture of loving a child so deeply, only to completely lose them.
But rather than protecting herself, was she really just hanging onto the pain?
Kat wasn’t sure that she could tell any more. Confusion threatened to overwhelm her.
‘I know that woman didn’t mean anything by it.’ She would have preferred it if her voice didn’t sound so clipped, so distant, but it was better than giving in to the emotion she was only barely keeping at bay right now. ‘Still, people should watch what they say, and not make assumptions.’
He eyed her again and she tried not to squirm under the scrutiny.
‘Do you really hate the idea of kids that much?’
Her chest kicked. Hard.
How could he read her so well in one sense and yet not at all in another?
‘I don’t hate kids at all.’ She reached tentatively for each word.
‘I didn’t say you hated kids,’ he corrected calmly. ‘I’ve seen you deal with plenty of children in the hospital, and you’re a natural. I asked if you hated the idea of them.’
She wanted to answer but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even think straight.
‘You’re wonderful with Jamie, too. But there’s something...guarded about you. I can’t figure it.’
How was it that someone who had known her for barely a couple of weeks could read her better than the colleagues she’d worked alongside for months?
It was simultaneously thrilling and daunting.
It made some secret, mutinous part of her want to stop desperately trying to contain all the bubbling emotions that seemed intent on spilling out all over her, and just...talk.
She could feel the logical, superior part of her brain battling to smother it. To regain control. And it was succeeding.
But not before her tongue let loose for a moment.