“I don’t know what to say.” She could feel Dawson’s quiet alertness beside her. “It’s so generous of him.” She hesitated, more affected than she wanted to admit. “He—I guess he knew what it would mean to me.”
Tanner nodded before sorting through the pages and finally set them aside. “I think that’s it, unless you can think of anything.”
There was nothing else, and after their good-byes Amanda rose while Dawson lifted the walnut box from the desk. Tanner stood but made no motion to follow them out. Amanda accompanied Dawson to the door, noticing the frown forming on his face. Before they reached the door, he paused and turned around.
“Mr. Tanner?”
“Yes?”
“You said something I’m curious about.”
“Oh?”
“You said that tomorrow would be ideal. I assume you meant tomorrow as opposed to today.”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me why?”
Tanner moved the file to the corner of his desk. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I can’t.”
“What was that about?” Amanda asked.
They were walking toward her car, which was still parked outside the coffee shop. Instead of answering, Dawson put his hand in his pocket.
“What are you doing for lunch?” he asked.
“You’re not going to answer my question?”
“I’m not sure what to say. Tanner didn’t give me an answer.”
“But why did you ask the question in the first place?”
“Because I’m a curious person,” he said. “I’ve always been curious about everything.”
She crossed the street. “No,” she finally said, “I don’t agree. If anything, you lived your life with an almost stoic acceptance of the way things are. But I know exactly what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?”
“You’re trying to change the subject.”
He didn’t bother to deny it. Instead, he shifted the box beneath his arm. “You didn’t answer my question, either.”
“What question?”
“I asked what you were doing for lunch. Because if you’re free, I know a great place.”
She hesitated, thinking about small-town gossip, but as usual Dawson was able to read her.
“Trust me,” he said. “I know just where to go.”
Half an hour later, they were back at Tuck’s, sitting near the creek on a blanket that Amanda had retrieved from Tuck’s closet. On the way over, Dawson had picked up sandwiches from Brantlee’s Village Restaurant, along with some bottles of water.
“How did you know?” she asked, reverting to their old shorthand. With Dawson, she was reminded of what it was like to have her thoughts divined before she uttered them. When they were young, a momentary glimpse or the subtlest of gestures had often been enough to signal a world of thought and emotion.
“Your mom and everyone she knows still live in town. You’re married, and I’m someone from your past. It wasn’t too hard to figure out that it might not be a good idea for us to be seen spending the afternoon together.”
She was glad he understood, but as he pulled two sandwiches from the bag, she nonetheless felt a quiver of guilt. She told herself that they were simply having lunch, but that wasn’t the full truth, and she knew it.
Dawson didn’t seem to notice. “Turkey or chicken salad?” he asked, holding both of them out to her.
“Either,” she said. Then changing her mind, she said, “Chicken salad.”
He passed the sandwich to her, along with a bottle of water. She surveyed her surroundings, relishing the quiet. Thin, hazy clouds drifted overhead, and near the house she saw a pair of squirrels chase each other up the trunk of an oak tree shrouded in Spanish moss. A turtle sunned itself on a log on the far side of the creek. It was the environment she had grown up in, and yet it had come to feel strangely foreign, a radically different world from the one she lived in now.
“What did you think about the meeting?” he asked.
“Tanner seems like a decent man.”
“What about the letters Tuck wrote? Any ideas?”
“After what I heard this morning? Not a clue.”
Dawson nodded as he unwrapped his sandwich and she did the same. “The Pediatric Cancer Center, huh?”
She nodded, thinking automatically of Bea. “I told you I volunteered at Duke University Hospital. I also do some fund-raising for them.”
“Yes, but you didn’t mention where at the hospital you worked,” Dawson replied, his sandwich unwrapped but still untouched. She heard the question in his voice and knew that he was waiting. Amanda absently twisted the cap on her bottle of water.