Perfect Fit - Brenda Jackson [121]
At least, a part of her felt better. There was still that small part lodged within her chest that ached—her heart. Although she didn’t want to think about it or, even worse, admit it, she missed Gabe.
She missed him a lot.
Two days later, Sage’s gaze settled on her mother’s smile. It had always been a generous smile that Delores Dunbar had reserved for everyone she knew, and Sage didn’t want to think about how close she had come to losing that smile, to losing her mother.
“Whatever you’re thinking about must be serious.”
Sage blinked, realizing that her mother had spoken and had caught her staring. Sitting up in the hospital bed, Delores was eating solid foods, something she had begun doing yesterday for the first time since being admitted.
“No, it isn’t too serious,” she said, crossing the room from where she’d been standing at the window for the past fifteen minutes. At first she’d been thinking just how vastly different Charlotte was from Anchorage, and that was based on more than just the weather. Even the shape of the skyscrapers was different, and there were no snow-covered mountains in the background, no wilderness trails and … no Gabe Blackwell.
“That serious look just got more serious.”
Her mother’s words startled Sage from her thoughts. She smiled and took the chair across from the bed. “Just thinking about some things.”
“Some things like your father?”
Sage lifted a brow. Her father had left half an hour earlier to drop off a package at the office. They expected him to return at anytime. He spent most of his days as well as his nights at the hospital. “Why would I be thinking about Dad?”
Delores Dunbar wiped her mouth with a napkin and pushed her tray aside. “Mainly because I couldn’t help but notice that your relationship seems to have improved, and I’m glad. The two of you had me concerned for a while.”
Sage nodded, not wanting to discuss this with her mother when she knew she was wrong as to the reason why her and her father’s relationship had gotten strained.
“He was right, you know, Sage. It didn’t really concern you. It was about me and him.”
Sage blinked. She wondered what her mother was talking about. Did she have an idea what was going on between her and her father and why? Sage met her mother’s gaze, and as if she was blessed with the ability to read her daughter’s mind, Delores said, “Yes, I know what happened, Sage, with your father and that other woman. He told me.”
“He did?” Sage whispered in shock, not so much that her father had finally admitted the truth to his wife, but that her mother was calmly sitting in bed as if it was no big deal to discuss the fact that her husband had committed adultery.
“Yes, he did. I’ve known now for a while, but I didn’t bring it up to you whenever we talked on the phone because I felt when the time was right for us to discuss it, then we would.”
Sage leaned back in the chair. “How can you sit there and be so calm about it?”
Delores chuckled. “Oh, trust me, I had my moments when he told me. For the first time during the thirty-one years of our marriage, I made him sleep in another room. That was all the time it took for me to analyze the situation.”
“And apparently forgive him,” Sage said brusquely, not sure she liked how accepting her mother seemed to be about everything.
Delores shook her head, smiling. “No, the forgiving part came over time with prayer. A lot of prayer and an assessment of what I had and what I’d be throwing away, as well as what I could have done to prevent what happened.”
Sage frowned. “Surely you’re not blaming yourself for what he did?”
Delores smiled. Her daughter had a lot to learn which she knew she would if she kept right on living. “The woman in me couldn’t help but do that at first. No woman wants to know that her husband could not resist temptation. But then I had to realize that there is no perfect human being other than the Father. Man is weak, he is likely to sin many times over and if we love that person, we have