Wife by Design
Rubbing Maddie’s back, she asked, “What do you mean wait for you?”
“After his afternoon therapy he waits outside of Angelica’s room and I finish the day care playtime and Kara and I go to Angelica’s and Darin walks us home.”
Ah.
“You know his brother is working here full-time this week, right?” she asked, feeling like a traitor to this woman who trusted her implicitly.
“He’s making a new Garden of Renewal,” Maddie said, enunciating as purposefully as always, as though she had to stop between thinking the words and saying it so that her brain could tell her mouth how to say it. “He took away the gazebo. I have to keep Kara away from there until the yellow ribbon is down around it.”
“That’s right. And you know that Darin works with his brother in his business, right?”
“Darin can’t do much right now. He can’t bend over or lift things that are heavy. So he does some work that he can do.”
“Well, right now, with Grant here all day, Darin has to go right out to the garden to work after his therapy.”
Maddie’s big eyes opened wide as the woman looked at her. “Are you sure?”
“I’m positive.” She also knew that Grant was collecting Darin from therapy so that his older brother wouldn’t have any time alone with Maddie. Angelica was texting him five minutes before Darin was through.
She could feel Maddie’s shudders beneath her hand. “Okay?” she asked the sweet woman.
With a big sigh, Maddie fell against Lynn, burying her head against her, and Lynn sat back, her arm around Maddie. “Okay,” Maddie said.
She hiccupped. “I like him, Lynn.”
Lynn ran her fingers slowly through Maddie’s hair, like her mom used to do when she was a kid and thinking the world was going to end over some crisis or another. “I know you do.”
“He would never hit me.”
“No, he wouldn’t. But neither would most men.”
“Darin smells good.”
She hadn’t noticed.
“And he doesn’t make fun of me.”
“He’s a nice person. So is Grant.”
“I like Darin.”
They were in trouble. Darin was showing signs of completely recovering his left-side motor skills but was nowhere near ready to cut back on his therapy.
And Maddie…once she understood something, it was hard for her to understand it in a different way. She’d believed her ex-husband loved her and she still believed it. In spite of all the years of beatings at his hands.
She also believed she liked Darin. In a boy-girl sense. They weren’t going to convince her otherwise.
Which meant certain heartbreak for the sweet woman. They’d avoided it that night. But it would come again.
Lynn had no idea what to do about that.
So she did what she could. She stroked Maddie’s hair. And when the other woman fell asleep, she sat there, cradling her, wishing she could promise Maddie, and Kara, too, a world where hearts didn’t have to hurt.
A world where hearts weren’t vulnerable to the vagaries of other people.
* * *
GRANT WAITED UNTIL Darin was in his room with his door closed before heading to his own room Wednesday night.
But just barely. He was like a panting dog, rushing to the water bowl. A panting something…
He’d been thinking about Lynn’s jaunty little wave to him all evening.
Lynn got calls at all hours. Hopefully ten o’clock wasn’t too late.
“Hello?”
“I’m sorry it’s so late.” He didn’t bother to introduce himself. She’d have seen his number on the caller ID. It was the third time they’d talked on the phone since he’d first visited her at the shelter.
The second since she’d made him aware of the Maddie/Darin situation on Monday.
“It’s not too late,” she said now. “Maddie just left.”
“How’s that going?” Lynn was hoping to distract Maddie from thinking that she was romantically interested in Darin. Sara was trying to help the other woman recognize the difference between being friends with a man and being his girlfriend.
“It’s not.”
Not the answer he’d been hoping far.
“How’s it going at your end?” she asked.