That it mattered much more than the things that rolled off your tongue with routine frequency.
As he watched the entire room erupt in shock, Knox was filled with one dark thought.
At the last funeral he had attended he would have given everything he owned for the little body in the casket to come walking into the room. Would’ve given anything to wake up and find it all a nightmare.
He would have even traded places with his daughter. Would have buried himself six feet down if it would have meant Eleanor would come back.
But of course that hadn’t happened. He was living a fucking soap opera at the wrong damned moment.
He looked down at Selena’s gray face and cupped her cheek, patting it slightly, doing his best to revive her. He didn’t know what you were supposed to do when a woman fainted. And God knew caregiving was not his strong suit.
His ex-wife would be the first to testify to that.
Selena’s skin felt clammy, a light sweat beading on her brow. He wasn’t used to seeing his tough-as-nails friend anything but self-assured. Even when things were terrible, she usually did what she had done only a few moments ago. She made a joke. She stood strong.
When Eleanor had died Selena had stood with him until he couldn’t stand, and then she had sat with him. She had been there for him through all of that.
Apparently, ex-husbands returning from the beyond were her breaking point.
“Come on, Selena,” he murmured, brushing some of her black hair out of her face. “You can wake up now. You’ve done a damn decent job of stealing his thunder. Anything else is just showing off at this point.”
Her sooty eyelashes fluttered, and her eyes opened, her whiskey-colored gaze foggy. “What happened?”
He looked around the room, at the commotion stirring around them. “It seems Will has come back from the dead.”
Will wasn’t dead.
Selena kept playing that thought over and over in her mind as Knox drove them down the highway.
She wasn’t entirely clear on what had happened to her car, or why Knox was driving her. Or what she was going to do with her car later. She had been too consumed with putting one foot in front of the other while Knox led her from the funeral home, safely ensconced her in his rental car and began to take them... Well, she didn’t know where.
She slid her hand around the back of her neck, beneath her hair, her skin damp and hot against her palm. She felt awful. She felt... Well, like she had passed out on the floor of a funeral home.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To your place.”
“You don’t know where I live,” she mumbled, her lips numb.
“I do.”
“No, you don’t, Knox. I’ve moved since the last time you came to visit.”
“I looked you up.”
Knox hadn’t come back to Royal since his divorce. She couldn’t blame him. There was a lot of bad wrapped up in Royal for him. Seeing as this was where he’d lived with his family most of the year when he’d been married.
“I’m not listed.” She attempted to make the words sound crisp.
“You know me better than that, honey,” he said, that slow Texas drawl winding itself through her veins and turning her blood into fire. “I don’t need a phone book to find someone.”
“Obviously, Knox. No one has used a phone book since 2004. But I meant it’s not like you can just look up my address on the internet.”
“Figure of speech, Selena. Also, I have connections. Resources.”
She made a disgusted sound and pressed her forehead against the window. It wasn’t cold enough.
“You sent me a Christmas card,” he said, his tone maddeningly steady. “I added your address to my contacts.”
“Well,” she said. “Damn my manners. Apparently they’ve made me traceable.”
“Not very stealthy.”
“And you’re rude,” she said, ignoring him. “Because you did not send me a Christmas card back.”
“I had my secretary send you something.”
“What did she send me?” Selena asked.
“It was either a gold watch or a glass owl figurine,” he said.
“What did she do, send you links to two different things, and then you said choose either one?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t count as a present, Knox. And it certainly doesn’t equal my very personal Christmas card.”
“You didn’t have an assistant send the card?” he asked, sounding incredulous.
“I did not. I addressed it myself, painstakingly by hand while I was eating a TV dinner.”
“A TV dinner?” he asked, chuckling. “That doesn’t jibe with your healthy-lifestyle persona.”
“It was a frozen dinner from Green Fair Pantry,” she said pointedly, mentioning the organic fair-trade grocery-store chain Knox owned. “If those aren’t healthy, then you have some explaining to do yourself.”
She was starting to feel a little bit more human, but along with that feeling came a dawning realization of the enormity of everything that had just happened.
“Will is alive,” she said, just to confirm.
“It looks that way,” Knox said, tightening his hold on the steering wheel. She did her best not to watch the way the muscles in his forearms shifted, did her best to ignore just how large his hands looked, how large he looked in this car that was clearly too small for him. One that he would never have driven in his real life.
Knox was much more of a pickup truck kind of man, no matter how much money he made. Little luxury vehicles were not his thing.
“I guess I don’t get his bearskin rug, then,” she said absently.
“What?”
“Don’t you remember that appalling thing he used to have in his dorm room?”
Knox shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. “Not really. Hey, are you okay?”
“I am... I don’t know. I mean, I guess I’m better than I was when I thought he was ashes in a jar.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. Are you okay, Knox? I realize this is probably the first—”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said, cutting her off. “We don’t need to. I’m fine.”
She didn’t think he was. Her throat tightened, feeling scratchy. “Okay. Anyway, I’m fine, too. My relationship with Will... You know.”
Except he didn’t. Nobody did. Everyone thought they did, but everyone was wrong. Unless, of course, Will had ever talked to anyone about the truth of their marriage, but somehow she doubted it.
“How long had it been since you two had spoken?” Knox asked.
“A long damn time. I don’t believe all the things Rich said to me before the divorce. Not anymore. He was toxic.”
As