Page 85 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

“Get. Out.”

The words were dragged out of Jasper’s lips as if by force. My gaze flew to his face, but his eyes were still closed and his pallor too white for my liking. He was in good shape for his age, it was true, but sudden frights did strange things to our circulatory systems. A few weeks ago, a car backfired a few streets down from me, and I spent a full ten minutes searching my body for what I felt sure was the bullet hole.

“Hello to you, too,” I said as I reached for his hand. Even though his eyes remained closed, he snatched his fingers back before I could make contact. I clucked my tongue. “Well, now. Is that any way to treat an old flame? No wonder why you have this whole town in a quake. If you treat your old friends like this, I can’t imagine what you do to your enemies.”

He finally opened his eyes and fixed that oh-so-familiar gaze on me. He looked about as deflated as I felt, but the second those clear blue eyes met mine, it was as if the years fell away. I was no longer a retired book editor who was finding the sudden influx of time on her hands a little wearing, no more a devoted mother and grandmother somewhat consternated to find that she’d outlived her usefulness. In that moment, I was nineteen years old again, falling in love for the first time and recklessly plunging into the heady, all-consuming delight of it.

“You’re dead,” he said, still in that voice that sounded as though each word was being wrested from him by force. “You’re a ghost.”

I couldn’t help smiling down at him. “Is this where you’re goingto start quotingWuthering Heightsat me again? ‘I have a strong faith in ghosts; I have a connection that they can and do exist among us’and all that?”

Instead of continuing the quotation or even countering with one of his own, Jasper bolted upright and flung back the blanket I’d been careful to pull over him. He raised a hand and pointed it toward the door, his arm unwavering.

“Get out,” he said again, this time with more force. “I don’t know what you’re doing here or why you’ve come to break my heart again after all these years, but I want nothing to do with it. Or you.”

“Jasper, please,” I said. I knew that my coming back here would be a surprise to him, but I’d assumed the years would have mellowed him the same way they had me. That was what time did; it trampled on the dreams and wishes of youth, replaced them with the more substantial, if mundane, realities of life. In the past sixty years, I’d lived and done a lot of things. Some of them—my son, my grandson, my career—I was proud of. Others—the way I’d cut ties from my parents, the too-many hours I’d spent hunched over a desk, a few of my more spectacularly failed relationships—made me long for a do-over.

Regardless, they were all a part of me now. Good and bad, brave and cowardly, my decisions had been made. The only option now was to live with them.

“I know I should have called first,” I said, attempting a rueful smile. “Or at the very least, sent a letter. Or a book.”

“Chloe!” he called, ignoring me. “Zach! Unless you want to be responsible for my death, you’ll get me out of here.Now.”

The speed with which the door flew open seemed to indicate that the two young people had been waiting in the hallway for the first sign of distress. And the distance they placed between their bodies as they stepped into the room seemed to indicate that neither one of them had enjoyed the wait very much.

However, either Jasper didn’t prepare himself for how much theshock of seeing me and Zach in a room together would affect him, or he hadn’t put our relationship together until he saw us standing side by side, because he took one look at the pair of us and blanched.

“No,” he said. “Impossible. It’simpossible.”

“Hello again, sir,” Zach said with a slight smile. “Or should I say, Grandpa?”

It was the worst possible thing he could have said in that moment, but I could hardly blame him for it. When Bates had shown little to no interest in getting to know the man who’d sired him, I thought I’d dodged a particularly nasty bullet. It was much easier to close the door on my past than to leave it open a crack, where light and sound and memories could creep in.

But Zach had wondered. Zach had wanted to know. Now the door was thrown all the way open, and there would be no closing it again.

“Please don’t be upset with Zach,” I said, aiming for peace. It seemed the least I could do after he’d saved Jasper from breaking a hip back there—or worse. “He has nothing to do with my visit. In fact, he tried to talk me out of it, but you know me. The more I’m told not to do a thing, the harder I push to do it.”

Jasper ignored this with a tight clamp of his jaw. “A son or a daughter?” he croaked instead.

Now it was my turn to feel the world start to tumble around me. “What?”

“Do I have a son or a daughter?” he repeated, his voice balancing on a razor’s edge. “It’s a simple question. I’d like to know about the child.Ourchild.”

All at once, I felt as though I’d been sideswiped by a red Mustang going too fast down the road. I was all skinned palms and shaking knees, the wheels of my bicycle endlessly whirring, whirring as it fell on top of me.

Zach had his arms around me almost immediately, those strong,capable arms leading me to a rickety chair in the corner of the room, but that only made things worse. Those arms were the same arms that had once pulled me out from under my bike, his smile the same smile I’d once had to drag out of Jasper with all the wiles at my disposal.

“A son,” I said, gasping. Zach tried to soothe me with some kind of low-murmured nonsense, but I barely heeded him. “We have a son.”

Jasper closed his eyes. For the longest moment, I feared he wasn’t going to open them again, but all he did was draw a deep breath before blinking. “A son,” he said, and something almost like a smile hovered over his lips. “Okay. Thank you.”

Chloe reached out and touched his arm—gently, like someone touching a fragile piece of glass. “Can I get you a glass of water or something, Jasper? Milk? Coffee? A stiff drink?”

“What I want is for you to get them out of here,” he said, his voice oddly free of emotion. Then, with a sudden puckering of his brow, he added, “No. You know what? Leave them here. In fact, get that mother of yours to join us.”

“My mother?” Chloe echoed. “Why do you need her?”

“I don’t need her,” he said grimly. “I don’t need any of them, but if we’re going to start sharing our so-called truths, we might as well do it right. I’ll be damned if I’m going to slink away without saying what needs to be said. I did that once in my life already, and look where it got me.”