Page 87 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

“It’s all yours, Theo,” he said. “I never cared for that sugary garbage anyway.”

“Yesss!” Theo’s eyes lit up as he hooked his finger in the jug and carried it to the table. Trixie stopped in the middle of laying out the forks and knives to stare at Jasper. He didn’t appreciate such intense scrutiny from a girl who spent as much time in the bathroom as that one, but hecould hardly say as much out loud. These dratted children latched onto a weakness faster than a shark following a trail of blood.

“If you don’t like sugary garbage, why do you have it?” Trixie asked.

“It was on sale,” he lied.

She peeked at the bottom of the jug. “The price sticker says fifteen ninety-nine. That doesn’t sound like much of a sale to me.”

“That’s because it’s the Canadian price,” he responded, thinking fast. Then, because he could see from her look of doubt that she was about to ask about exchange rates and the costs of shipping, he narrowed his eyes and growled, “Do you always argue this much when someone makes you dinner?”

“Yes,” she replied. “It’s why I do debate. Otherwise, people just think I’m annoying.”

That startled a laugh out of him. If someone had asked him, standing across from Catherine a few hours ago, if laughter was a thing he’d ever consider himself capable of again, he’d have thrown them out of the room. The thing about these dratted Sampsons, however, was that youcouldn’tthrow them out of the room. Not for long, anyway. They just kept coming back, and so eagerly that you had no choice but to let them.

Even though Jasper had never admitted it out loud, he liked to imagine that his own brothers and sisters had grown up like this—getting by on the little they had, aware of how unfair their sacrifices were, but still able to find happiness in one other. From the few interactions he’d had with them over the years, he suspected they had.

Not always, obviously. Harriet died during a flu outbreak when she was only twenty-two, and their mother hadn’t been too far behind. Uli crushed his hand in a logging accident a few years later, but both he and Olly went on to attend college, so he must have been able to get by without it. Bobby never traveled much further than Aberdeen and, as far as Jasper knew, still lived there in a sad, lonely house like Jasper’s, but Tina married young and had a huge crop of kids. He sometimes gotcards from a parcel of great-nieces and grandnephews he’d never met. They were polite and cheerful, sending him pictures of faraway places he’d never been and didn’t want to visit. Jasper couldn’t recite their names to save his life, but it was nice to see them getting on so well.

“What is it, Jasper?” Trixie asked. “Why do you suddenly look so sad?”

He grunted, startled back into an awareness of his surroundings. “I’m not sad,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

“About what?” Theo asked. He was eyeing the frying pan like he’d never seen food before, so Jasper clicked off the burner and slid the toast onto a platter. Theo and Trixie were eager to pounce on it, but not so eager they dropped the thread of the conversation.

That was another thing about the Sampsons. They were tenacious little monsters, and Jasper liked them all the more because of it.

“You’re not still upset about us staying here, are you?” Trixie asked as she watched Theo pour out half the maple syrup onto his plate. She took a decorous amount for herself, but Jasper could tell she wanted a lavish pool of her own, so he picked up the jug and did it for her.

She uttered a short protest before giving in with a giggle. “If Chloe saw this much sugar on my plate, she’d freak out.”

“Andmake us brush our teeth three times before bed,” Theo added through a mouth thick with French toast.

Trixie wrinkled her nose. “With baking soda, too. It’s so much grosser than real toothpaste, but it’s cheaper than cavities, so Chloe makes us use it.”

Since all four of the Sampsons had excellent smiles, Jasper was forced to agree with Chloe on this one. He was about to say as much when Trixie reached over and touched his hand. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it, Jasper. We won’t make you.”

“It’s fine,” he said. Since this came out as a quick, harsh burst, he coughed and tried again. You couldn’t lavish a couple of kids withexpensive maple syrup and then get stingy when it came to what really mattered. If he took nothing else away from this mess his life had become, it was that. “I was just thinking about my own brothers and sisters. I was wondering if they were like you guys growing up.”

“No way,” Theo breathed. “You have brothers and sisters?”

Theo’s comment made him want to laugh, but Trixie cut right to the heart of the matter. “What do you mean, you wonder? Don’t you know? Didn’t you grow up with them?”

He shook his head. “Not really, no. I was about your age when I moved away. Most of their growing up happened while I was gone.”

Neither child attempted to smile at this. Theo, for once in his life, wasn’t shoveling food into his mouth. He held his fork halfway between his lips and the plate, the syrup falling in gloopy drips.

“You left them?” he asked somewhat blankly. His brow wrinkled. “You mean like Chloe? You moved away for college?”

Jasper was tempted to lie, but something about the boy’s wide frank gaze stopped him. These kids were so much more like him than he’d ever wanted to believe. For years, he’d been watching them over the fence with their noise and their activity, their constant go-go-go lifestyle. Seeing them play—and hearing them laugh—always made Jasper feel like an outsider looking in, and he was ashamed to admit that his automatic reaction was toactlike an outsider looking in.

To admit how much he wanted to be a part of it, ofthem, would be to admit that his entire life had been spent longing for the things he couldn’t have. First it was Catherine. Then it was the family he was so close to having with her. Then it was everything else: the ups and the downs, the laughter and the tears, the thousand different worries and joys that made life worth living.

“No, Theo,” he said, but with a smile that he hoped would make his situation seem alittleless bleak. “I left to go to work. Decades of it, in fact—hard manual labor that left me very little time or energy outsideof getting by.”

Jasper could tell his confession startled them. To look at him now, with his knees protesting every time he get up from the couch and an acid reflux that seemed to flare up the moment he got near a piece of fruit, you wouldn’t think that he’d once been a strapping young thing who could chop down a tree in under thirty minutes flat.

“My family was a lot like yours,” he said, a little gentler. There was a time and place to describe the hardships of being a logger in the sixties, but this wasn’t it. “There were six of us kids. My mom earned a living taking in laundry, but there never seemed to be enough money to keep all of us fed, let alone dressed and shod. I was the oldest, so I had no choice but to earn as much as I could and send it home.”