Charlotte picked up a stapler. “I’m armed and ready.”
If he didn’t kiss her soon, he’d go mad. “I told you,” he said as he left, “use the hole punch.”
Leaving to the sound of her laughter, he made his way to the Vulcan Lane café his mother loved. Upstairs in a two-level building, it had windows that looked down on the wide pedestrian lane. When he glanced up, he saw her at a table by an open window, her dark brown hair brushing her shoulders and her gray eyes watching the people below. She spotted him just then, and smiling, raised a hand. Waving back, he ran up the narrow steps to the second level.
“I already ordered for you,” she said when he bent down to kiss her cheek.
“Thanks.” Taking a seat, he didn’t waste any time. “Did Brian call you?”
Her smile faded. “He’s your father, Gabriel.”
“No, he was never that.” Shoulders tense, he held his silence until after the waiter had delivered his black coffee and his mom’s cappuccino. “Why do you let him screw with you? I know you don’t love him anymore.”
Sighing, his mother leaned back in the chair, hands cupped around the white porcelain of her coffee cup. “I also have two children with him, gave him ten years of my life. It’s difficult for me to give up on him despite the fact my feelings for him died long ago.”
Gabriel tried to understand how she could have any sympathy in her heart for the man who’d abandoned her, abandoned them all, and came up empty. “What did he want?” Brian Bishop always wanted something.
“He’s sick.” Sorrow lay heavy on her face. “He asked me to go with him to his oncologist’s appointment, and because he was once my friend, I did.”
Gabriel’s hand fisted on the tabletop. “How bad?”
“Serious enough that he might not make it.” Holding his gaze with her own, she said, “He needs his sons—he has no one else.”
Gabriel thought of how they’d been evicted after Brian Bishop abandoned them, of the nights in the homeless shelter, the sneer on the face of the welfare officer and the shame and humiliation on his mother’s. “No,” he said flatly. “He gave up all rights to his family when he stole every cent you’d both saved and disappeared.” For two years afterward, Brian’s only attempts at communication had been postcards that said he was on to “something big.”
Then he’d had the nerve to be surprised when Alison handed him divorce papers after he did finally show up.
“Does Dad know about this?” he asked, referring to the man who had stepped in a year after Brian left them with no home and, because of his debts, nothing but the clothes on their backs. The only reason Gabriel and his brother, Sailor, still bore Brian’s name was that Brian had refused to allow Joseph to legally adopt them, regardless of the fact he never saw his sons.
Rather than allowing themselves to be tied to Brian Bishop, Gabriel and his brother had reclaimed the Bishop name through sheer grit and determination, made it their own, until it no longer led back to the man who’d sired them. Now, it was associated with “the Bishop” and with the nationwide chain of gardening stores Sailor had set up in his twenties, after starting his working life as a landscaper.
“Of course.” Alison closed her hand over his fist, her elegant manicure and soft palm a world away from the reddened and chafed skin he’d become used to seeing as a child. “Joseph and I don’t have secrets.” A deep and abiding love in every word. “He knows I just feel sorry for the man Brian once was—if we don’t help him through this, no one will.”
“Ask Sailor.”
“You know your brother takes his cue from you.”
Gabriel loved his mother, but she was asking the impossible. “I can’t do it, Mom.” He withdrew his hand, his jaw clenched so tight it felt as if his bones would crack. “I’m sorry. I can’t forgive him.” Everything else—the loss of their home, the fear and shock of having their belongings repossessed—he might have been able to forgive, but the beaten look on his mother’s face as she asked for welfare help?
No, he’d never forgive Brian that. Alison had worked so hard, done endless double shifts as a cleaner to scrimp and save so her kids would never go without as she had, and in a single selfish act, Brian Bishop had shoved her into her own private hell.
Alison might have the heart to forgive him, but Gabriel wasn’t that good; as far as he was concerned, Brian Bishop could stay out in the fucking cold.
CHARLOTTE KNEW SOMETHING WAS wrong the instant Gabriel walked back into the office. He had a temper and she’d seen him angry before, but never like this. Expression dark, he walked past her without a word, and over the next half hour didn’t even growl at her once for a document or a file.
Worried, she went to the break room and poured him a glass of milk. Then, taking an apple-cinnamon danish from the airtight container of goodies she’d brought with her from her cooking class, she put it on a saucer and carried both into his office. Placing them on his desk when he didn’t look up from his work, she headed back out.
It was fifteen minutes later that she heard an incredulous “Milk?” from inside.
Her lips tugged up, her teeth sinking into her lower lip. “It’s good for you.”
Coming to the doorway, he bit into the pastry with its flawlessly glazed top and delicate filling. It had taken Charlotte three tries to get it exactly right, and she’d given him that third, perfect attempt.