The kindness in his eyes was almost unbearable. She had to look away from it. He waited a minute before responding. “When something like this happens, it makes you go back and rethink everything you’ve ever done, doesn’t it? Trevor surprised me by asking some things about my parents, so I guess he’s doing the same thing. You can’t help thinking the ‘why’ of this isn’t an accident. It can’t be as simple as a horny teenage boy and a girl with a crush on him. There has to be something bigger. Something we didn’t teach them. Some cosmic reason we didn’t.”
“Someone didn’t teach Trevor to use a condom,” she said sharply, then closed her eyes tight in shame. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I swore I wouldn’t do this.”
“Hey.” His big hand covered hers on the table and squeezed before releasing her. “I set myself up for that one.”
She opened her eyes to see that he was laughing, and for some reason she did, too. “The real lesson is, teenagers do stupid things. With the best will in the world, we can’t stupid-proof them,” she said at last, feeling a thousand times better.
“No, we can’t,” he said, wryly enough to remind her that he’d gotten his own girlfriend pregnant when he was a senior in high school.
She opened her mouth to say, yet again, I’m sorry, but closed it.
“I keep thinking, what if I hadn’t knocked over the garbage. What would Cait have done? Would she have told me?”
“What were her options?”
Their lunches arrived, and they both pretended enthusiasm. He reached for the ketchup, making her aware of the flex of muscles beneath the crisply ironed shirt. And, oh, damn, his knee did slide against hers.
Molly angled her legs away. “I don’t know. Go to a clinic, I guess. Find a way to get an abortion without telling me? Run away from home?” she said when they were alone again.
“How likely is that?”
“Not likely,” she said. “We were good friends until she fell head over heels for your son and decided I was the enemy because I wasn’t really happy about her boyfriend.”
“Understandably unhappy.”
He steered her skillfully back to telling him about her life. No, she admitted, there was no man around, no pseudo-dad Cait might have turned to. She didn’t say, I can’t remember the last time I went on a date. Never mind the last time she’d slept with a man. How did single mothers do that on any kind of regular basis? Especially without any loving extended family to serve as babysitters and backup? And, heck, it was harder now than when Cait was little. How did she justify having a sex life when she was steering her daughter to not have one? She did admit she’d been only twenty-one when Cait was born.
“Yes, she was an accident. I was a junior in college, and almost as blown away when I realized I was pregnant as Cait is now.” For the first time she thought about the fact that she and Richard had both experienced much of what their kids were now. It seemed like an especially cruel slap from fate.
“How did you handle it?” Richard asked. He’d been eating and listening, somehow keeping her talking with a question here and there. “I gather you did marry her father.”
“Yes. And although it was really hard, I managed to stay in school. I went straight on to grad school, too. That was when…” Whoa. She waved a hand. “Irrelevant. The one thing I can say is, once Cait was born I never once regretted her.”
“No, I felt that way about Trevor, too.” His mouth quirked. “Until the past couple of months. I can’t deny there’ve been a few moments of ‘What the hell did I do?’”
Molly laughed, as he’d no doubt intended. “What about you?” she said. “I take it your marriage didn’t last.”
“Not forever. We stuck it out for six years.” He was quiet for a moment, a frown gathering his dark brows together. He wasn’t looking at her, and she suspected he was seeing another time and place. “I have a daughter, too. Brianna. We call her Bree most of the time. She’s still with her mother.”
“How old?”
“Fourteen. I was appalled when I first realized Trev had hooked up with your daughter because I’m thinking, Wait. Don’t you realize she’s barely older than your sister?”
“You sound like you miss her.”
“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Truth is, sometimes I feel like I hardly know her. I’ve had her for occasional summers, a few weeks over the holidays....” He shrugged. “You know how it is. The older she’s gotten, the more of a mystery to me she is.”