He needed to take control back, he realized. Right here, right now. “You didn’t say let’s consider marriage, did you? You didn’t say let’s discuss it.” Which had been his plan if she’d given him the chance. “There are a lot of factors here besides two people who enjoy and respect each other.”

And love each other, he thought. God, he loved her. But he needed to know what they wanted for the future—separately, together, as a family. There were things they were just going to have to set straight, once and for all.

“Of course there are,” she began. “But—”

“Let’s start with you. Right now, you’re free to pick up your dance career any time you want. There’s nothing stopping you from going back to New York, back on stage.”

“My school is stopping me. I made that decision before I met you.”

“Kate, I saw you. I watched you up there, and you were a miracle. Teaching’s never going to give you what that gave you.”

“No, it’s not. It’s going to give me something else, the something else I want now. I’m not a person who makes decisions lightly, Brody. When I left the company to come back here, I knew what I was doing. What I was leaving behind, what I was moving toward. If you don’t trust me to make a commitment, then stand by it, you don’t know me.”

“It’s not a matter of trust. But I wanted to hear you say it, to me, just like that. You say you mean to stay, you mean to stay. I’ve never known anybody as focused on a goal as you.”

He’d thought, moments before, he’d known how he would handle this. The steps he’d take toward asking her to share his life. Building on that foundation. Now the woman had finished nailing on the trim and wanted a wreath for the door.

She was going to have to back up a few steps, because he built to last. “I’ve got something more than a career decision to consider. I’ve got Jack. Everything I do or don’t do involves Jack.”

“Brody, I’m perfectly aware of that. You know I am.”

“I know he likes you, but he’s secure the way things are, and he needs to be sure of me. Kate…God, he’s only ever had me. Connie, she got sick when he was only a few months old. Between doctors and the treatments and the hospitals…”

“Oh, Brody.” She could imagine it too well. The panic, the upheaval. The grief.

“She couldn’t really be there for him, and I was just trying to hold it all together. The world was falling apart on us, and I had nothing extra to give Jack. The first two years of his life were a nightmare.”

“And you’ve done everything you can to give him a happy and normal life. Don’t you see how much I admire that? How much I respect it?”

Flustered, he stared at her. He’d never thought of parenting as admirable. “It’s what I’m supposed to do. Thinking of him first, that’s how it has to be. It’s not just you and me, Kate. If it were…but it’s not. A change like this—a life-altering one—he has to be in on it.”