The One That Got Away by Jamie Sobrato Page A

a word out.
    “She’s taking the dog for a walk,” Ginger explained.
    Marcus gave her a look that reflected a mixture of frustration and sympathy. He didn’t need to say a thing. She knew exactly how he felt—or at least she could take a good guess.
    It was surreal to have him standing in her living room, larger than life, studying her family photos. He was in so many ways her fantasy come to life. But, she had to remind herself, the fantasy and the reality had never met up before. And he was here as a friend now, one who’d nearly lost his life. But he was safe and in one piece. That was what truly mattered.
    The moment he’d asked her if she would have room for two houseguests, she’d know she was going to say yes. She definitely wanted to help Izzy and Marcus, but just as much, she wanted to help herself move on.
    “Your room is behind the kitchen. Can I show you?”
    “That’s okay. I already figured it out and put my bags in there.”
    “Would it be good if I got lost for a while tonight, so you and Izzy can have some alone time?”
    He grimaced. “I’m not sure either of us wants that right now.”
    “It might relieve a bit of the pressure to have one less person in the mix.”
    “Maybe.” He gave the matter some thought as he turned away from the mantel and strolled to the French doors that looked out on the deck and the backyard and, beyond that, the woods and lake.
    He peered out the door into the fading light of late afternoon and changed the subject. “Do you think she’ll be okay out there alone?”
    “Sure. The worst she might encounter is an overgrown banana slug.”
    “No snakes? Scorpions? Hungry mountain lions?”
    Ginger laughed. “Doubtful.”
    “I never took you for a back-to-the-woods kind of girl. I thought you’d live out your life in the urban jungle.”
    Ginger sighed. “I guess the urban jungle wore me down.”
    “What do you mean?”
    She shrugged, unsure herself what she meant. But then she opened her mouth and out came words she knew were true.
    “I couldn’t spend any more time being perpetually single and living in an apartment and feeling like something was missing.”
    “So you figured out that redwood trees were missing?” he joked.
    She crossed the living room and opened the double doors onto the deck so that the early evening breeze could flow through the house. “I needed to get out of the city, and this place cast a spell on me. Well, it and Soleil’s baby girl,” she added, only half joking.
    Ginger felt a little shy talking about the main reason she’d moved here.
    “Oh?”
    “I knew when I met Soleil’s baby that I wanted to have a child of my own. I mean, I knew it before, but when I held her little girl, I felt the wanting somewhere deep down, you know?”
    Silly question. Of course he didn’t know.
    “So your biological clock’s ticking, huh?” He flashed a wry grin that somehow annoyed her.
    “That reduces what I felt to a cliché, and it didn’t feel like a cliché.”
    He sobered. “I’m sorry. It must be hard, wanting a baby and not being able to afford one.” He added this last part as if it didn’t compute.
    And truly, it was an odd dilemma when she thought of his own problem—accidentally having a child he’d never thought he wanted.
    Ginger shrugged. “It’s an abstract problem at the moment. I’ve just been dealing with the more tangible problem of getting this house repaired, and the more I try to fix, the more I find wrong.”
    He smiled. “It’s great to see you doing so well.”
    His tone was warm, but… But that’s all it was. There wasn’t any interest on Marcus’s part about whether she had a boyfriend or a lover or anything else. Otherwise he would have asked by now. She’d known there wouldn’t be, but given that the last time they’d seen each other she’d still been pining after him, she supposed old habits were hard to break.
    This was good. She’d moved on in her heart, and now her subconscious was