“Cora.” There was really only one thing Frazer could say. Something she’d said far too many times to parents. “I’m so sorry.”

Cora shrugged, like people did when they were pretending something didn’t matter when it still felt like it had happened yesterday. “It was years ago.”

“How far along were you?”

“Twenty weeks. She was stillborn.”

When Frazer winced, she was glad Cora was still looking at her bottle. “That would have been really hard.”

Straightening, Cora made eye contact, gaze steady. “It was. So I don’t know how I feel. It was all too early when it happened, we weren’t really ready. Yet, now never seems like the right time, you know?”

Really? It wasn’t the right time when you were having an affair with another woman? Strange.

“Yeah. There’s never a right time for these things, though.”

“Probably not.” Cora’s voice was even. “Okay, so, I have a meeting with the lovely Jack. I’ve called some organisations that assist with housing. I’m going to try to get him out of the shelter. See if he has a bank account, work out some government assistance.”

Frazer watched Cora stand up. “Great. And thanks for lunch.”

And for opening up.

“No problem.”

And she left, taking all of her mystery with her.

* * *

“You can get me out of the shelter?”

The disbelieving look directed at Cora almost made her smile. “I sure can.”

“Why me?”

That wasn’t something Cora had been expecting. When she met Jack, she had known he was someone who could surprise her with his depth, with his eyes that darted everywhere and took everything in before commenting. “Well,” she said, “why not you?”

“Because there are people in the shelter who need somewhere to go too. Maybe more than me.” His eyes dropped to his half-eaten soup, the canteen type that not many people were brave enough to try. “Definitely more than me.”

This was the hard part of Cora’s job, sorting out what assistance there was to the people she could, knowing that there were always others who needed it, too. How did you explain that to someone that you just had to make the dent that you could?

She cleared her throat. “This programme is for certain people. The money available is only there for those people in the programme.” She watched his jaw clench. “However, there are assistance programmes out there too where a referral from this programme gets things moving faster.”

Jack still wasn’t looking at her. “You mean because I’m pregnant.”

“Pregnant,” she caught herself with the word “women” just in time, “people and people with children often get in first, yes.”

There was a heaviness around Jack that was painful to watch. A sign of just how beyond his years he was.

“What if I don’t keep the baby?”