“That’s me.”
“So the gardening—?”
“My degree is in botany and after Ingrid I was…” He shrugged.
“Who gets a degree in botany?” Joce said. “How can you make a living with a degree in botany? You should have—” She broke off because he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
“Jocelyn, I love you. I apologize that it took me so long to say it and that I kept so many things from you, but I had to be sure. Do you think you can ever forgive me?”
“Sure she can!” David Clare said from behind them. “If Edi could forgive me for being an uneducated lout, she can forgive you for pretending to be one.”
Luke and Jocelyn smiled at him because they’d learned that since the war he’d built his little garage into a franchise that was all over the Northeast. He was a multimillionaire. And he’d put all his businesses under the name of his beloved brother, Bannerman, who’d perished in the war. The switching of the names was why Edi had never found out her David was still alive.
“Can you forgive me?” Luke asked.
How could she not? she thought. But she wasn’t about to let him off so easily. “On one condition. You have to tell me if Thomas Canon is ever going to get Bathsheba.”
“Not you too,” Luke groaned. “I have a huge box full of letters in my house, all from readers asking me the same damned question. I don
’t know.”
“Who do you mean you don’t know? You created those people. You control them.”
“Sort of.”
“What does that mean?” Joce asked.
David was laughing. “You’d better give up now,” he said to Luke. “She may look like me, but she’s just like Edi.”
“I’m not at all like her,” Joce said, her eyes wide.
“Identical,” David said. “Did she tell you about the time—”
“Wait right there,” Joce said. “I’m going to get a tape recorder. Unlike some people, I don’t make up characters.”
When Luke and David were alone, the older man was still chuckling. “You have your hands full there, boy.”
“Yes, I do,” Luke said, grinning.
It was later, after dinner, when David was asleep, that Luke and Joce sat alone in the kitchen and talked. She was still feeling a bit distant toward him about his concealing his occupation from her, but Luke was wearing her down.
“Last night my mother told me the oddest story,” he said, then watched Joce’s ears perk up at the word story. “She went to Miss Edi’s house about six months before she died.”
“Why?” Joce asked.
“I’m not sure,” Luke said. “My mother’s never been a good liar, but—”
“Unlike you?”
“Yeah,” Luke said, grinning. “She said something about a secret that needed to be repaired.”
“A secret about what?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me, but it’s my guess that my mother knows why Alex McDowell felt like he owed Miss Edi for his whole life.”
“That secret?” Joce asked. “And your mother knows what it is?”
“Maybe. Why don’t you ask her?”