From the Heart

time in her life, to make a clear decision.
    She pulled up her legs and rested her brow on her knees. When she heard Jordan sit down beside her, Kasey didn’t move. She needed another moment, and he, sensing it, said nothing. They sat together, close but not close enough to touch, while a bird began to sing in the leaves directly above their heads. She sighed.
    “I’m sorry, Jordan.”
    “For the delivery but not the content?” he returned, remembering the other time she had apologized.
    She gave a quick laugh but kept her head on her knees. “I’m not really sure.”
    “I don’t think I’d mind being shouted at if I knew why.”
    “Blame it on the waning of the moon,” she murmured, but he slipped a hand under her chin and lifted it.
    “Kasey, talk to me.” She opened her mouth, but he cut her off before she could speak. “Really talk to me,” he added quietly. “Without the clever evasions. If I don’t know you, or what you need, it might be because you do your best to keep me from finding out.”
    Her eyes were very clear and directly on his. “I’m afraid to let you in any more than I already have.”
    Her candor unbalanced him. After a moment he leaned back against the trunk of the tree and drew her to his side. Perhaps the easiest place to begin to learn of her was through her background. “Tell me about your grandfather,” Jordan requested. “Alison said he was a doctor.”
    “My grandfather?” Kasey stayed in the circle of his arm and tried to relax. The subject seemed safe enough. “He lives in West Virginia. In the mountains.” She looked out at the even, cropped lawn. There wasn’t a rock in sight. “He’s been practicing for nearly fifty years. Every spring he plants a vegetable garden, and in the fall he chops his own wood. In the winter the house smells of wood smoke.” She closed her eyes, and leaning against Jordan, let herself remember. “In the summer there are geraniums in the window box outside the kitchen.”
    “What about your parents?” He felt the tension seeping out of her as the bird continued to sing out overhead.
    “I was eight when they were killed.” Kasey sighed again. Each time she thought of them, the needlessness for their death swept over her. “They were taking a weekend together. I was with my grandfather. They were coming back for me when another car crossed a divider and hit them head on. The other driver had been drinking. He walked away with a broken arm. They didn’t walk away at all.” Her grief had dulled with time but remained grief nonetheless. “I’ve always been glad they had those two days alone together first.”
    Jordan let the silence drift a moment. He began to see whyshe had understood Alison so quickly. “You lived with your grandfather afterward?”
    “Yes, after the first year.”
    “What happened the first year?”
    Kasey hesitated. She hadn’t meant to go into all of this, but the lack of demand in his questions had eased the telling. With a shrug, she continued. “I had an aunt, my father’s sister. She was a good deal older than he—ten, fifteen years, I think.”
    “You lived with her the first year?”
    “I lived between her and my grandfather that year. There was a dispute over custody. My aunt objected to a Wyatt living in the wilderness. That was how she termed my grandfather’s home. She was from Georgetown, in D.C.”
    A memory stirred. “Was your father Robert Wyatt?”
    “Yes.”
    Jordan was silent as he let bits and pieces fall into order. The Wyatts of Georgetown—an old, established family. Money and politics. Samuel Wyatt would have been her paternal grandfather. He’d made his fortune in banking, then had gone on to become a top presidential advisor. Robert Wyatt had been the youngest son. Two older brothers had found a place in the Senate. The sister would be Alice Wyatt Longstream, congressional wife and political hostess. A very wealthy, very conservative family. As he remembered, there had been talk of grooming the youngest son for the top office in Washington.
    He’d been a brilliant young lawyer. There had been a great deal of press when he was killed. And his wife . . . . Jordan frowned as he tried to remember things he had read and heard seventeen years before. His wife had been an attorney as well. They had opened a law clinic together, something his family had not wholeheartedly approved of.
    “I remember reading about the accident,” Jordan murmured. “Then a bit now and