Past Midnight Read Free Page B

“Wouldn’t have mattered if they had known, though. There wasn’t anything the doctors could do after the parasites got into his brain.”
    “I’m so sorry.” Rachel’s heart was racing, the horror of the loss washing over her, leaving her hands clammy. Yet she’d wondered about Dominic’s “World’s Best Dad” mug and assumed in the end he’d taken whatever was available in the cupboard.
    “It was awful,” Yvonne murmured. “I knew Jay all his life. And Erin had an awful time of it when she was pregnant with him, too. Fibroids in her uterus. She spent the last couple of months in bed so the baby wouldn’t come too soon, then she had him caesarean. They ended up giving her a hysterectomy afterward.” She shook her head sadly. “So no more babies.” Yvonne had three grown kids she doted on, two sons and a daughter, and Rachel knew she was thinking that Erin had lost more than her son; she’d lost the chance at more children.
    Though who would even think that having another child could replace the one you’d lost?
    Rachel’s stomach crimped. How could Erin DeKnight even get up in the morning? Every morning, knowing her little boy wouldn’t be in his bedroom. Never again. One day he was laughing and playing, then he was gone. Just like that. Rachel didn’t think she’d have survived. “How old was he?”
    “Eight. I tell you those two adored him.” Yvonne glanced at the closed door down the engineering hall. “Nothing’s been the same around here since. Nothing ever will be. It’s like we all lost Jay that day.”
    Rachel’s boys were thirteen and fifteen. Even now she sometimes got a sick feeling letting them out of her sight, though that was probably an aftereffect of the divorce.
    “Dominic was supposed to go on the school trip.” Yvonne wore a faraway look, her gaze fixed on the closed door. “But there was some problem with one of the new product releases, and he didn’t.” Quickly, she touched Rachel’s hand, her fingers cold. “Not that I blame him. It would have happened anyway.”
    Dominic must be racked with guilt.
    “Poor Erin, she was always taking care of everyone else, including all of us, and now, when she needs it, she doesn’t know how to ask.”
    From down the engineering hallway, despite the closed door, they could hear voices, not yelling, just tense. Rachel realized that for a woman who didn’t gossip, Yvonne was revealing things far beyond anything Rachel needed to know. It was like reading someone’s private diary.
    And yet, Rachel didn’t know how she was going to resist the urge to tell Erin how very, very sorry she felt for her.

2
    DOMINIC SET DOWN THE GAUGE, BUT HE DIDN’T LET GO OF IT NOR did he look at her. He could feel the steady shoosh of his blood through his veins. “Don’t make me go alone, Erin,” he said softly.
    “You always go alone.”
    “Not this time.” He hadn’t gone last year. He didn’t believe she’d considered that this time of year held as many reminders for him as it did for her, that his guts ached with loss, with guilt for not being there that day, that at times he was as close to despair as she was. She wasn’t unfeeling, but she didn’t . . . notice him. Yet no matter how much you didn’t want it to, life kept right on going, rolling over you if you didn’t get out of its way. The trade show was important for them, a venue to show off their new products. He had to go.
    Around him, equipment hummed, beeped. Something scrabbled on the roof, maybe a bird, or a squirrel snatching up acorns that had fallen off the oaks surrounding the industrial park. He could smell Erin, the sweet shampoo he sometimes borrowed when his ran out. He liked having her scent on him.
    “I’m not sure I can.” Her voice lacked the tension she’d entered the lab with.
    “Do it for me,” Dominic said, his fingers tight on the gauge. “I need you.”
    It was dirty pool and he knew it, but he was tired of fighting fair with her. In past