“I can feel all your furious thinking.” He sits across from me, watching me.
I have zero interest in traveling down this conversational road, so I point to the mason jar. “You have to try this. It’s so good you’ll feel you’ve died and gone to heaven.”
His eyes narrow.
I tense, waiting to see if he’ll let it go.
His attention drops to the jar between us. “What is it?”
My shoulders relax, but I can’t help feeling disappointed. What in the world is wrong with me? I’ll have to figure it out later, because now’s not the time.
“It’s whipped ricotta and this, like, huckleberry balsamic jam thingy.”
He cocks a grin at me. “Sounds like city food.”
I shrug. “It’s Jackson and Gwen food.”
He wraps his fingers around his bottle. “What’s Cat food?”
I don’t understand the question. I frown, my forehead pulling as I try to decipher what he means. I wave the plastic knife in my hand. “I’m not picky. I’ll eat up whatever is laid down in front of me.”
“But you must have preferences?” He takes a long pull off his water.
“What about you?”
He raises a brow. “It’s a simple question, Cat. It shouldn’t be hard to answer.”
“It’s not.” The words are too quick, although I don’t know why. Itisjust food. But it’s reminding me of something else…like how I’ve been picking up whatever’s put in front of me for so long I can’t remember any other way. “You know what I like? A really good doughnut.”
He laughs. “Fair enough. We’ll have to get some then, won’t we?”
“If we see something on the way, I wouldn’t object.”
His gaze narrows, his head tilting the slightest bit, as though he’s scenting something on the air.
I don’t want him thinking too hard about me, so I crumple my napkin. “Are you ready to go see your mom?”
“Not particularly.” He smooths his hand over the label of the bottle. “I’d rather stay here with you all day.”
“You’ll feel better once it’s over.”
“You’re probably right.”
He looks over my shoulder, staring into the trees behind me. “It’s hard, you know, when the person in front of you no longer matches the image in your head.”
“It is. I remember that with my mom. Toward the end, all her pretty hair was gone, and her face was swollen from meds, her body decayed.”
I still feel guilty about the last time I saw her alive. She scared me. It wasn’t my mother laying there but an alien, her skin like paper, still except for her eyes. When she looked at me, it seemed like she was trapped, her mind still vital and firing, but unable to escape the prison of her body.
I glance at Caden to find him watching me. “I just wanted her to be free.”
“Exactly.” He blows out a breath. “She’s not going to know who I am when I go there.”
“That’s okay.” I lift my lips in a smile. “Maybe you can make her happy by being who she needs you to be, instead of who you are.”
He looks beyond me and shakes his head before blowing out a breath. “I guess we’d better get this over with.”
“It will be okay,” I promise, even though I can’t really know.