Page 14 of At the Heart of It (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #4)

She was, but she didn’t care. She needed Jonah to hear this. Needed him to understand. He still hadn’t said anything, and she wondered what he was thinking. Were her words having an impact at all?

“Thank you,” he said softly.

“For what?”

“For what you just said. About the book mattering. About my parts of it. I know I’ve been acting like sort of an asshole about the whole book thing, but it means a lot to hear you say that. That it mattered.”

Kate felt a tiny prick of tears starting behind her eyelids, but she fought them back. “It did matter. It still does.”

She looked down at the table, struggling to get her bearings. She couldn’t afford to get too emotional over this. It was business, and she needed to stay professional. She thought about picking up her pizza and taking another bite, but she wasn’t sure she could get it past the lump in her throat.

The rumble of Jonah’s voice made her look up again.

“Who was he?”

Kate blinked, her expression so startled Jonah knew he’d hit a nerve.

“Who—what do you mean?” she asked.

“The guy who broke your heart. Who was he?”

He watched her take a few steadying breaths, watched her glance up and to the left. A neurolinguistic indicator, sometimes an indication that the subject was accessing a part of the brain that forms fabrications.

Or maybe she was looking at judgey-eyebrow cat again.

“His name was Anton.” Kate’s words were soft, and Jonah could tell she was speaking the truth. “I mentioned him over dinner in Ashland.”

“Did he hit you?”

Kate shook her head, but she blinked when she did it. Something was off here. “No,” she said.

“But?”

He watched her swallow, and he kept his gaze on hers, channeling all his energy into using the subtle elicitation skills he’d honed in his counterintelligence training for the Marines.

“‘Abuse takes more forms than fists,’” Kate said.

“I’m quoting Viv again, I know. But I’m trying to tell you how much those books meant to me.

How much I learned about what a healthy relationship looks like.

But Not Broken may have taught me to recognize signs of an unhealthy relationship, but it wasn’t until On the Other Hand that I understood what a healthy one looked like.

That I shouldn’t settle for anything else. ”

Something tightened in Jonah’s chest. A pang of guilt, or maybe regret. He remembered the first meeting he and Viv had with the editor contracted to work with them for On the Other Hand .

“You two have such an amazing relationship,” the editor had gushed, folding her hands on a polished ebony desk as she beamed at Jonah and Viv sitting across from her. “You have an important gift you can give people here. The gift of seeing what a healthy relationship should look like.”

Viv had smiled and twined her fingers through Jonah’s, and Jonah had squeezed back as the lump formed thick in his throat. By then they were already sleeping in separate bedrooms, already talking quietly about “taking some time apart.”

Deep down, he’d known then that they were past the point of no return. He hadn’t wanted to believe it, but it had sat there between them like an angry cat. Even if Viv had been the one to pull the plug, he’d known where things were headed.

“We’d love nothing more than to set a positive example,” Viv had told the editor while pressing the tip of her toe against his instep. “To help other people.”

Even then, Jonah knew she’d meant it. That was Viv for you. Maybe her words weren’t always genuine, but her desire to be of service never wavered. Her urge to help others, even at her own expense sometimes.

It was the thing he’d always admired most about her.

Jonah shook himself back to the present. Back to the woman sitting across from him with wide toffee eyes and a calico cat on her lap. She’d barely touched her pizza, and he wondered if he should have cleared his choices with her before ordering.

But now wasn’t the time to be fretting about pepperoni. He reached across the table and touched her hand.

“Hey,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

She nodded, then gave a small smile. “Yeah.”

He thought about sharing his own story then. Telling her everything about Jossy and that horrible day eighteen years ago. He looked down at his plate, trying to form the words.

“Owl.”

Jonah looked up at Kate. “What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“It sounded like you said owl .”

“I heard it, too, but it wasn’t me.” She glanced toward the window. “I think it came from over there.”

But there was no one there. Just the weird-looking black-and white-cat with the judgey eyebrows and the Marilyn Monroe beauty mark. Jonah looked back at Kate.

“Weird.”

“Very.”

“So this TV show. Would we be filming at Viv’s house?”

“She suggested it, and the network seems to like the idea. Some of it comes down to licensing and insurance. That’s Amy’s department, so she’s looking into?—”

“Ooowl!”

The voice was more forceful this time, and it was definitely coming from the window. Judgey-eyebrow cat seemed to lift one brow, or maybe it was Jonah’s imagination. If a cat could speak, would it really choose to say owl ? Her expression looked more like, “You people are fucking idiots.”

He was probably reading too much into this.

“I really think it’s the cat,” he said. “Judgey-eyebrow cat.”

“You have to stop calling her that,” Kate said. “She’s not judgey. Just misunderstood.”

Jonah laughed. “Funny. I think I said that to my sister the first time she met Viv.”

“That’s nice,” Kate said. “That you stuck up for her. Viv, I mean.”

“Sure,” he said, wishing he hadn’t said that. He needed to watch his mouth, especially around a woman who made a living in reality television. It was juvenile to be hanging up their dirty laundry so long after the divorce.

He looked at the cat again, wondering what the hell her deal was. She had a sweet face, regardless. The cat stared back at him, then opened her mouth.

“Owl!”

Jonah shook his head. “Apparently she has something important to say about Strigiformes.”

“Strigiformes?

“It’s the order owls belong to,” he said. “In the animal kingdom. It includes a couple hundred species of solitary, nocturnal birds of prey known for an upright stance, a broad head, binocular vision, binaural hearing, sharp talons, and feathers adapted for silent flight.”

“Wow.” Kate did her own eyebrow raise, though it wasn’t nearly as impressive as the cat’s. “You really are kind of a geek.”

Jonah grinned. For some reason it felt like the best compliment anyone had paid him in a long time. “Thanks.”

“Have you always been such a nerd?”

“Pretty much.”

Kate laughed and took a bite of pizza. She seemed ravenous all of a sudden, and he watched her wolf down the rest of the slice in just a couple of bites. Then she wiped her hands on her napkin and stood up.

“Look, I know it’s important to you to get out of the shadow of the Average Joe thing.” She carried her plate to the trash can and dropped it in, then smoothed down the front of her dress. “To have the opportunity to be known more for your brains than your favorite sports team.”

Jonah started to nod, then stopped. That wasn’t it exactly. “It’s not as much that I care how other people see me. It’s more about how I see myself.”

“How do you mean?”

“I know I’m a smart guy,” he said. “Intellectually, I know that. But I haven’t always felt smart.”

“How do you mean?”

“I grew up with dyslexia,” he said. “I’m still dyslexic, of course, but I’ve learned ways to manage it.”

“Wow,” Kate said. “And you co-wrote a bestselling book and own a bookstore?”

Jonah nodded and watched Kate’s face. He waited for the barrage of questions. The gentle probing he’d always get from Viv about how he felt about his disability or what motivated him to overcome it.

Instead, she smiled. “That’s impressive.

I worked on a documentary about dyslexia a while back.

The people we interviewed talked about being made to feel stupid or lazy.

” She smiled and Jonah felt his heart twist. “I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone who spends more than five minutes with you that you’re neither of those things. ”

Jonah swallowed hard and wondered if she knew she was saying exactly what he needed to hear. He wasn’t sure why he’d volunteered that information in the first place, considering he didn’t know Kate all that well.

But there was something empowering about being the one to share it. About telling the story on his own terms, in his own way.

Or maybe it was just Kate. There was something about her that made him want to open up his chest and his brain and the whole big mess of himself and let her have a look at whatever might be in there.

“Right,” he said, feeling a little sheepish. “Opening a bookstore had been my goal for a long time. I didn’t have the balls to do it until things started winding down in my marriage.”

“It’s pretty admirable,” she said. “Talk about confronting your fears.”

Jonah smiled. “Yeah. Anyway, besides the dyslexia, I’m forgetful as hell. It’s partly an ADD thing, partly just me being—well, me .”

The way she looked at him with eyes flooded by admiration made Jonah’s chest ache.

“That’s the you people fell in love with in the books, Jonah,” she said. “The guy who’s self-aware and eager to fight his own demons.”

“Thanks,” he said, his heart snagging a little on the word love .

Kate looked at him for a while, leaning back against the counter. Then she nodded. “I hear where you’re coming from,” she said. “For what it’s worth, if you agree to do the show, I’ll do my best to make sure you’re portrayed in the best light.”

He stood up, feeling dumb for sitting on his ass while she was on her feet. She was probably itching to go. Waiting for him to ask more questions about the TV show or to give her an answer or something. She hadn’t come here to make idle chit-chat.