She could imagine it very well, because, she thought, she’d always had just the opposite in terms of a family that was there for her. “They didn’t deserve her.”

Brody lifted his eyes, met Kate’s. “Damn right they didn’t. The rougher it got, the more we dug in. We made it work. She made it work. A thousand times I panicked, and some of those thousand times I saw myself walking away. She’d go back to her parents, and everyone would be better off.”

“But you didn’t. You stuck.”

“She loved me,” he said simply. “The day Jack was born, I was in the delivery room, wanting to be pretty much anywhere else in the world. But she wanted me there, it was really important to her. So I pretended I wanted to be there, too. All I could think was get this over with, get this the hell over with because it’s too hard. Nobody should have to do this. Then…there was Jack. This little, squirmy person. Everything changed. Everything clicked. I never knew you could love like that, in an instant, in a heartbeat, so it was everything. Every damn thing. I wanted, had to be, whatever he needed me to be. They made a man out of me, right there, in that moment. Connie and Jack made me.”

Tears were flooding her cheeks, continued to spill over. She couldn’t stop them, and didn’t try.

“I’m sorry.” He lifted his hands, let them fall again. “I don’t know what got into me.”

“No.” She shook her head, could say nothing else quite yet. You stupid idiot, she thought. You’ve gone and made me fall in love with you. Now what? “That was lovely,” she managed to say. “Just give me a minute.” She got to her feet, and dashed off to the bathroom to compose herself.

As an alternative to banging his head on the table, Brody got up and paced. He’d come to the same conclusion as Kate—he was an idiot—but for different reasons. He’d taken her very nice gesture of a casual meal at home, one he imagined was supposed to be at least marginally romantic, and he’d turned it into a marathon on his troubles and his past.

He’d made her cry.

Great going, O’Connell, he thought in disgust. Maybe you can round on the evening by talking about how your dog died when you were ten. That would really jazz things up.

He imagined she’d want to take off as soon as possible, so began to clear the table to give her a way out.

“Sorry,” he began when he heard the light click of her footsteps. “I’m an imbecile, dumping all that on you. I’ll take care of this, and you can…”

He trailed off, froze, when her arms slid lightly around him and her head rested on his back.

“O’Connell, I come from strong Slavic blood. Strong and sentimental. We like to cry. Did you know my grandparents escaped from the Soviet Union when my mother was a child? My aunt Rachel is the only one who was born here in America. They went on foot, with three babies, over the mountains into Hungary.”