Free The Best of Times: A Dicken's Inn Novel by Anita Stansfield

the perfect opportunity to ask, “So, you live alone back in . . . where was it you come from?”
    “Norfolk. You should have known that from the background check.”
    “I knew it; I just forgot. You live alone in Norfolk?”
    “I do. And the answer to your next question is that I’ve never been married, and I have no children.”
    “Why not?” she asked as if she were asking why he hadn’t become a doctor.
    “I’ve only loved one woman, but she didn’t love me enough to commit to a military lifestyle. I asked her to marry me and she told me no.”
    “When was that?”
    “We were high-school sweethearts. We’d known each other all our lives. I joined the Marines at eighteen.” Chas set down her fork and became suddenly solemn. “Did I say something wrong?” he asked.
    She sighed loudly but wouldn’t look at him. “I told you earlier about me and Martin, that we grew up together. It just . . . sounds so much the same.”
    “Yeah,” he said, “I thought the same thing earlier. It’s too bad someone like me couldn’t have been killed in a training exercise, and someone like Martin couldn’t have come home to his wife.”
    Chas looked at him then, but she didn’t know what to say. She’d shared more deeply personal conversation with this man in the last twenty-four hours than she’d shared with anyone else in years. And what they had in common was beginning to feel eery.
    Jackson couldn’t help but ponder the coincidences stacking up between them. The conversations they’d shared felt as dreamlike and strange as his being in this house, buried in snow and at a safe distance from the realities of life. How could he not consider the similarities they shared? Feeling a little sorry for himself, he wondered how his life might have been if Julie had agreed to marry him. He found it easy to say, “It must have been very difficult for you to marry a military man and leave all of this.”
    “I loved him,” she said with a forced smile. “I think it was harder on Granny than on me. I would have gone anywhere just to be with him.” She paused and tilted her head. “Is that an insensitive thing to say to a man like you?”
    “No,” he said. “I like honesty, even when it’s brutal. If Julie’d married me, she probably would have eventually divorced me.”
    “What makes you think so?”
    “I don’t think I would be very easy to live with.”
    “How could you know when you’ve always lived alone?” She felt a little alarmed to think that maybe she was being presumptuous. In today’s world, admitting he’d never been married didn’t mean he’d always lived alone. “Have you always lived alone?”
    “Yes,” he said. “Since Julie left me, I’ve had only a few brief and meaningless relationships.”
    “So your life is your work.”
    “Pretty much. And the people I work with make it clear that they’re glad they don’t have to live with me.”
    “Do you have anyone in your life beyond the people you work with?”
    “Not really,” he said. “I found friends among my coworkers, but now . . . all of that’s become . . . awkward.”
    “Since the shooting.”
    “That’s right.”
    Chas picked up her fork again and began to eat. “And what about family, Jackson? Where did you come from originally?”
    Jackson let out a partly facetious groan. “Now you’re treading into taboo territory.”
    Chas was surprised. “You can tell me about the woman who left you and a shooting that’s turned you inside out, but you can’t tell me about your family, your hometown?”
    “That’s right,” he said again.
    “Why not?” she demanded as if they’d known each other for years and she had a right to know. “You know practically everything about me.”
    “To put it in less than a hundred words, Detective, my childhood was a nightmare. My grandparents were always arguing or drunk—or both. My father was a violent drunk, and my mother probably would have liked to keep him from beating us