it now. She said it slowly, calmly, aware that Sam was now very still
again, not eating, listening, but she had no choice. She said, “I’m
truly sorry if you’ve misunderstood, Tyler. You and Sam are my
very dear friends. I care about both of you quite a lot. I’ve appreciated
all you’ve done for me, the support you’ve given me, the
confidence you’ve had in me, but I can’t be your wife. I’m very sorry, but I just don’t feel about you the way you want me to.”
Sam continued to sit there on two thick phone books, still and
silent, the half-chewed pork rib clutched in his small fingers.
She forced a smile. “We should probably have this talk after
Sam’s gone to bed, don’t you think?”
“Why? It concerns him. He wants you for his mother, Becca. I
told him that was why you were coming back. I told him you were
going to fix everything and you’d be here for him forever.”
“We should speak of this later, Tyler. This is between us. Please.”
Sam looked down at his plate, his small face drawn, pale in the
dim kitchen light.
“All right then,” Tyler said. “I’m going to put Sam down with a
blanket in the living room, on that real comfortable sofa. What do
you think, Sam?”
Sam didn’t tell them what he thought.
“I’ll be right back, Becca.”
He scooped Sam up off his phone books and carried him out of
the kitchen. She shivered. The house felt uncomfortably cool. She
hoped Sam would be warm enough with just one blanket. She
hoped Sam had gotten enough to eat. She wished Tyler had wiped
Sam’s fingers off better.
What was she going to do? Was she the one off base here? Had
she given Tyler the wrong impression? She’d known he was jealous
of Adam, and that’s when she had pulled back from him, even cooling
her friendship toward him. But still he’d misunderstood, still
he’d come to believe that she wanted to be his wife. How could it
be possible? She’d said nothing, done nothing, to give him that
idea. And he was using Sam, which was despicable of him.
Sam. What was she going to do? There was something very
wrong, triggered, she supposed, by Krimakov’s kidnapping of him.
She heard Tyler walking back toward the kitchen. She had to clear
this up, quickly and cleanly. She had to think what she could do to
help Sam.
She’d gotten the name of a really good child psychologist in
Bangor from Sherlock. She would start there.
But she didn’t have a chance to start anything because Tyler said
from the doorway, “I love you, Becca.”
Chapter 32
to, Tyler, no.”
Tyler just smiled at her, an intimate smile that chilled her to the
bone. “I’ve loved you from that first time I saw you in Hadley’s
freshman dorm at Dartmouth. You were looking lost, wondering
where to find a bathroom.”
She smiled at that, no recollection at all of that meeting. “You
didn’t love me, Tyler. You dated lots of girls in college. You married
Sam’s mother, Ann. You loved her.”
He came into the kitchen and sat down across from her. “Sure I
loved her for a while, but she left me, Becca. She left me and she
didn’t plan to come back. She was even going to take Sam, but I
didn’t let her.”
What was he talking about? Of course things couldn’t have been
smooth between them, since Ann had ended up leaving him.
They’d faced off about it? There’d been a confrontation? But that
didn’t concern her now. She said, “I’m really sorry if you’ve gotten
the wrong idea, Tyler. Please believe me. I am your friend and I
hope I always will be. I would like to see Sam grow up.”
“Since you’re going to be his mother, of course you’ll see him
grow up. You’ll make him well again, Becca. He’s been silent and
withdrawn ever since his mother left.”
“Would you like some coffee?”
‘Sure, if you’re going to make some.” He watched her measure
the coffee into the machine, then pour in the water. He watched