5
He’d been tempted to accept Ricky Junior's invitation and join them for lunch. Shawn sat in his office, glumly evaluating a soggy tuna sandwich. He had been entirely too tempted. But who was he kidding? He could not put aside his past with Beth, not even for an hour. Not when watching her pretend that there was nothing between them caused his chest to constrict with pain.
He couldn't get the sight of her thin body out of his mind, hovering in a cloud of flowery cotton print, and the fine, weary lines around her eyes.
Her mother was dead, she had said. When had that happened? He allowed his mind to wander back in time, back to the summer before he'd left. Her mother had been ill, off and on. He'd hardly seen her, in fact. But he had never supposed that she was really all that sick. Af
