4. Suzie

4

SUZIE

M y hands shake as I push open the door to Carrie's house. I've been trembling ever since Jack turned up at the Search and Rescue HQ.

I thought I had put him firmly behind me, but there's no denying the way my body responded to him. When Jack touched me, I ached for him to kiss me, to caress me, to pull him into his arms.

The memories of our two weeks together flooded my mind, and I almost melted into him. Almost. I'm not the impressionable young student I was three years ago. It's going to take more than a lopsided grin and a sexy accent to win me over. Not that there will be any winning over.

I've gotten along fine for the last three years without Jack; I don't need him in my life now.

"Mommy!" George's unsteady feet patter along the wooden floorboards. His joyful grin is ringed by red sauce, which ends up all over my pants as he barrels into me.

"Wash your hands and face!" Carrie calls from the kitchen.

"Too late," I call down the hall as I drop to my knees and scoop George into my arms. He giggles with delight and kisses my chin, and now I've got sticky sauce all over me too, which makes him giggle even more.

I don't care if he covers me with spaghetti sauce. The comfort of his small body on my hip stills the uneasiness that's settled over me ever since Jack walked into my workplace.

"I missed you today." I bury my face in his soft sandy curls and breathe in his milky scent tinged with waxy crayon and spaghetti.

Carrie appears in the doorway with a wet rag. "Sorry, he ran out of the kitchen as soon as he heard the door."

She takes one look at me and frowns. I can't hide anything from my sister. "What happened?"

I shake my head slightly. I'm not going to get into it with George around.

Carrie lets out a huffy breath, and her eyes narrow at me. It's her determined look and lets me know she won't forget.

She wipes George's hands with the rag and swipes it over his mouth.

He chatters to me about his day and drags me into the living room to show me the finger paintings he did.

He loves his days with his auntie. I'm lucky to have her around for free childcare a few times a week. I can't afford to put him into daycare full time. Sometimes he comes into work with me when Carrie's and my shifts clash. It's always a juggling act, but we make it work.

I leave George playing with a wooden railway set while I help Carrie tidy up the kitchen. As soon as we're alone together, she turns her piercing dark eyes on me. "Did something happen at work?"

It's upsetting when a search doesn't end well. There's been more than one occasion when I've ended up at her place with a bottle of wine after a bad outcome at work.

"Nothing like that."

She loads dishes into the dishwasher while I rinse a cloth to wipe the highchair down.

"Jack turned up at work today."

Carrie frowns, and I watch her face as she searches her mind for a local called Jack. The moment she realizes who I mean, she nearly drops the plate she's rinsing.

"Jack, Jack?" Her eyes bug out of her head, and she looks as shocked as I must have when I saw him. "Jack the Asshole Englishman?"

"Yes. Jack the Englishman." For lack of a surname, he's ended up with various colorful monikers over the years. But I'm done with being angry with him, and these days it's just Jack the Englishman.

Carrie shakes her head. "What does that asshole want?"

She's never forgiven him for ghosting me. When I came back here miserable and broken, nursing Mom through her final weeks and then the realization of what he'd left me with, Carrie was my support. She cried with me and laughed with me and helped me find the path to my new life as a single mom.

"I don't know. I told him to fuck off." She raises an eyebrow at me. I never swear when George is in the house. "Not exactly in those words," I admit.

What I don't admit is the way my body responded to seeing him. How my heart galloped faster the closer he got, how the hairs on my arms stood on end when he touched me, how the scent of him brought back memories of tangled sheets and rough hands on my skin and the scrape of his stubble on my thighs.

"Did you tell him about…?" She indicates the living room. I poke my head around the corner to check on George and he's chatting away to his trains, deep in some imaginary world.

"No."

Her eyes go wide again. "You didn't tell him he has a son?" she hisses, trying to keep her voice down. This isn't a conversation I want George to overhear. "Suzie, we spent hours trying to find him so we could tell him, and now he turns up and you don't say a word."

I rinse the spaghetti-soaked cloth in the basin, letting the hot water scald my fingers. When I found out that I was pregnant in the midst of grief at losing mom and heartbreak from losing Jack, we scoured the internet looking for him. But there was no trace of Jack maybe from Cornwall. I tried again after George was born, wanting him to know his father even if I was still angry at him. But I couldn't find any link to the man I'd spent the best two weeks of my life with.

I got used to the idea of George never knowing his father and conducted a story ready to tell him when he was old enough to ask.

"It wasn't the right moment. I was in shock."

Carrie closes the dishwasher and leans against it. "So why is he here after all these years?"

Which is the question I've been asking myself all afternoon. "He wants to take me out to dinner. Said he wanted to explain why he left the way he did."

"Hold up. He come all this way to the ass end of North Carolina just to see you?" The scowl has gone from her face.

"This isn't the ass end. I love this mountain."

Carrie rolls her eyes. "I know, I know, it's paradise." She says it sarcastically, because for some reason she's always hated Hope the small town we grew up in at the base of Wild Heart Mountain. The small town where we both still live. "But my point is, he comes literally halfway across the world to see you and you told him to F off?"

I squeeze the water out of the cloth and begin a vigorous attack on the bench. "I don't care what his explanation is. I don't want to hear it."

With the bench thoroughly scrubbed, I turn to the fridge. There are mucky fingerprints on the door, and I give it a good onceover.

"Suzie, he's the father of your son. You should give him a chance to explain."

I turn from the fridge and cast my gaze around the kitchen, looking for another surface. "You've changed your tune. A moment ago he was the Asshole Englishman."

I rinse the cloth and crouch down to run it over the cupboard doors under the sink.

"Because he broke your heart and disappeared. But he's here just to see you. Aren't you even a tiny bit curious?"

With all the surfaces clean, I chuck the cloth into the sink. "Not interested. I don't know what he wants. I don't know anything about him, Carrie, I never really did. If he finds out about George now, who knows what he'll do? What if he tries to take him back to England?"

A cold shiver runs down my spine, and I wrap my arms around myself. I cannot lose my son.

The frown's back on Carrie's face. "He's his father. He has a right to know."

I shake my head. "He gave up all rights to anything when he left the way he did. He ghosted me, Carrie. He even changed his goddamn phone number. The man doesn't deserve anything."

The sound of footsteps on the kitchen tiles has me spinning around. The panic from a moment ago dissipates at the sight of my beautiful boy holding up a Thomas train.

"I made a track." He beams at me, and my chest feel lighter.

"Then I better come and see it."

I follow George into the living room, leaving Carrie huffing in the kitchen. She might not understand my decision, but to me it's perfectly clear. Jack walked out on me three years ago, and that door closed firmly shut. It doesn't matter if my body remembers him. That's nostalgia and general longing from not being with a man since.

I'm not giving Jack the Englishman another moment of my time.