Love Is More Than Skin Deep (A Hidden Hearts Novel Book 4)

by Mary Crawford

  “I’m not sure what you expect me to say. You asked me to be here,” Tanyanita counters.

  “I know — and I’m trying to explain without sounding like some psychotic, clingy girlfriend. Please bear with me here. I’ve had a long night.”

  “Understandable, you have skin cancer — but what does that have to do with me?” she replies.

  “You have to understand that I never expected to have Mark in my life and I certainly never expected to fall in love with him— especially in the middle of a battle for my life. Who is crazy enough to fall in love while they’re dying?”

  Tanyanita just nods her head slightly as she sagely responds, “If you think about it, we all do. We are all dying from the moment we are born. If we are lucky enough to find love, we all do it as we are dying.”

  “You’re not upset?” I ask, thrown off by her easy acceptance of my words.

  “Upset that you have cancer? Of course I am. It’s hard on Ketki and Mark to watch you suffer. I don’t like to see them in pain. I still love them very much.”

  “See!” I exclaim as if I’ve suddenly found the secret to life. “That right there is why we’re here today. We both love the same man and that’s not okay with me. At first, when you came back into Mark’s life, I thought that I might be able to just gracefully step aside and let you all reunite as family. But I realized I can’t do that because Mark is my happy. I am not willing to give up my shot at happy. My whole life, I’ve let other people decide what happy is for me and I’m done. Even though I have cancer — do you understand that?”

  Tanyanita is still sitting there, all quiet, regal and composed and it pisses me off, so I continue, “I have cancer! And I am still happier with Mark than I have ever been in my whole life. I am not going to step aside for you or anyone else. I love Mark and I love your daughter. Ketki is phenomenal. She makes me smile every day. She makes me think about the world in a different way and she makes me want to fight a million battles just to make the world a fairer place. People may think that I should step aside and let you all be a family, but you had your shot and you let that opportunity go. Please let me have my happy with Mark.”

  “Do you think that I want Mark back?” Tanyanita asks with a confused expression and her mouth agape.

  “Well… yes…” I stammer. “Why else would you light up Mark’s phone? You don’t talk to the man for years and now you can’t stop calling him. I only know of one explanation for that. When I look like me and you look like you, the odds are not in my favor —”

  Tanyanita moves her heavy curtain of hair out of her face before she responds with a heavy sigh.

  “Obviously it’s time for us to have a woman to woman talk about your man. Notice I called him your man. Once upon a time, he was my man. I really wish that I could have been in love with Mark. He is one of the finest men I’ve ever known. But I never was in love with Mark. Do I love him? Yes, absolutely — I will always love him. He’s the father of my daughter.”

  I openly cringe at her statements, but she holds her hand up as she continues speaking.

  “I have never loved him like a woman should love a man. God knows we tried, we really did. We tried to do all the right things as a couple. We wanted to make our families so happy. We wanted to be the perfect couple. Even though I never really wanted to have kids after having to raise all of my siblings, I was really happy to be pregnant with Ketki because Mark was thrilled. Yet, having Ketki didn’t really make us any more of a couple or a family. It wasn’t fair to Ketki, I wanted her to be the glue that pulled us together, and when that didn’t turn out to be, it made my depression even worse.”

  “Why not take Ketki with you?” I ask the question that’s been burning a hole in my brain since I first heard the story.

  “So, this is the hard part to admit even to myself — but it’s the truth. Mark is a hundred times the parent I could ever be. I don’t have it in me. Maybe I used it all up as a kid with my siblings, I don’t know. I never bonded with Ketki, she was like some strange alien doll to me. Other people would tell me how adorable and cute she was and how blessed I was to have her in my life and all I could think about was how much she hated me.”

  “That must’ve been absolutely terrifying and awful,” I concede. “Ketki would like a chance to know you, are you aware?”

  A dark, thunderous expression crosses Tanyanita’s face so reminiscent of Ketki’s that it would be amusing if the topic was not so serious. “Yes, I am ‘aware’. Why the hell do you think I’m totally freaking out? That’s why I’ve been calling Mark. I can’t decide whether it’s a good idea or a terrible one. I mean, I’ve been out of her life for so long. Maybe I should just stay out of her life?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good plan—” I start to argue.

  “I know, I know— Mark told me about the whole suicide thing. So, I know I need to get over my fears and just face her. How scary can she be? She’s only nine. I can’t believe she’s going to be ten. Where did the time go? My baby is going to be ten and I missed it all —” Tanyanita laments, as a tear rolls down her face.

  That’s when it all becomes clear to me. All of this is about fear. My lunch with Tanyanita, her phone calls to Mark, Ketki’s beliefs about her mom — it’s all about fear. This woman does not want my boyfriend; if she had wanted him he waited for her four years and she could’ve had him. My reunion with Savannah has shown me that things aren’t always what they seem on the surface. Tanyanita and Ketki need to be together — I’m going to help make that happen.

  I reach out and grab Tanyanita’s hands as I vow, “Stick with me, you and I have an epic party to plan. We need to make one little girl and her dad very happy.”

  Tanyanita looks a little stunned as she echoes my words from before, “You’re not upset that I’m going to be part of Ketki’s life?”

  I can’t hide my flush as I admit, “I wouldn’t be human if I wasn’t a little jealous that you and Mark share something with Ketki I’ll never have. Still, for Ketki’s sake, we need to pull together as a team. Welcome to Team Everybody Loves Ketki.”

  “SHOULD I BE WORRIED?” I tease as I watch Shelby’s fingers fly across the laptop. She is hunched over the computer as she sits cross-legged in the bed. “You look like you’re plotting to take over the world.”

  “Very funny,” she replies. “Have you ever tried to plan one of these things? Now I know why I don’t do birthdays. This is insane. Trying to work around Tanyanita’s schedule makes it even harder.” Shelby straightens the baseball cap on her head and more hair falls out. She watches it fall down and hit the keyboard. She scowls at the offending hair as she mumbles, “Dammit, I knew I should’ve listened to the people at the support group. Common sense should’ve told me that no amount of ice cubes on my head was going to save me from the side effects of chemotherapy. Are you still going to love me when I look like a deranged golf ball?”

  First of all, you are much too beautiful to look like a golf ball. Second, even if you did look like a golf ball, I like to play golf.”

  “Ha ha,” Shelby responds as she sneezes violently. Her sneeze dislodges the baseball cap and another flurry of hair.

  She looks down at the aftermath and she frowns as angry tears spring to her eyes. “Oh God, why didn’t I listen to them when I had a chance. I could’ve gotten a nice cute little cut and this would not have been so traumatizing. I don’t want to go to a salon like this.”

  I close the file that I’m working on and walk over to the bed. As I scoop her up and hold her next to my chest, I note with alarm how light she has become. She has never been heavy, but her weight loss is really noticeable, even though she tries to disguise it with baggy clothes. It’s no wonder she’s lost so much. The chemotherapy has made her obnoxiously nauseous, even though she takes a cocktail of medications to prevent that.

  I sit back down on the bed with her on my lap as I offer, “I don’t know if you’re interested but I’m pretty handy with a pair of clippers. I used to c
ut Callum’s hair all the time. He used to keep it really short because he liked to travel embedded with the news crews.”

  “What if my head is all lumpy and bumpy and disgusting? I don’t want you to see all that ugly mess. This isn’t how the fairytale is supposed to go,” she whispers as she buries her head in my chest.

  “You’re right, it’s been a little unorthodox. Even so, I can’t help but think things are pretty idyllic between us despite your cancer.” I declare as I capture her lips and kiss. I break the kiss and look her in eyes as I continue, “Shelby, I don’t care if you have scars on your face or your breasts or your back. I don’t care if your hair reaches your chin or your shoulders or your knees for that matter. I don’t care if it’s curly, straight, brown, black, or blonde. In fact, I don’t care if you have any hair at all. I didn’t fall in love with your hair or your skin. Love is more than skin deep. I know that you know this. You demonstrate it with everything that you do and say.”

  Shelby shakes her head as if to push my words away. She whispers in a broken voice, “I just want to be beautiful for you.”

  I wipe away Shelby’s tears with the pads of my thumbs as I struggle to verbalize my thoughts. This may be harder than any closing argument I’ve ever delivered, but far more important.

  “Immokalee, look at me,” I direct. “Listen to me carefully. There will never be a time that you are not beautiful to me. You are the definition of beauty to me. Do you understand? You are beautiful to me because you are you. It has nothing to do with what you look like and everything to do with who you are.”

  I have to take a moment to swallow hard and catch my breath before I can continue. “You are beautiful because you see my daughter for the miracle that she is. You take the time to understand her sorting system and to answer her endless questions. You respect her talent and encourage her to be proud of who she is. You make her feel strong and empowered. You help my daughter feel beautiful,” I explain. “That’s the kind of beautiful I’m looking for. The rest of it is only skin deep.”

  “Mark, I have made your life so much more complicated,” Shelby argues. “Some days, I bet you wish you’d never even laid eyes on me.”

  “Hush. If anything, you are a beautiful complication in my life, Shel,” I state emphatically. “Ketki and I had slipped into survival mode. I don’t even think we realized how lonely and isolated we’d become until you popped into our lives. We were so used to counting on only each other that we forgot what it was like to include other people. Do you know how much it means to me that you always ask how I feel after I’ve interviewed a new client or lost a close case? You always support me whether I win or lose. It gives me a sense of being grounded. With everything else in my life coming down to winners and losers, profits and losses, ups and downs — it’s nice to know that you’re always here holding steady.”

  Shelby wrinkles her nose at me and lets out a startled burst of laughter as she exclaims, “Mark, you make me sound like I’m some strange financial institution that’s set to give you advice on stocks and municipal bonds for your retirement instead of your lover. I’m sorry. I know you meant that to be all romantic, but it’s just funny to me.”

  The woman does have a point. For a man who expresses himself in words every day, I’m botching this pretty badly. I feel a blush overtake my body as I respond, “Guilty as charged. For some reason, I can manage to break down the most complicated legal issues and explain them without difficulty, yet I struggle to tell you exactly how much I love you. All I can do is show you the pictures in my mind and hope you understand.”

  “Mark, I was only teasing—” she protests weakly, still smiling. She sobers as she senses the mood shift.

  “No, Immokalee, this is important. I want you to hear me out. You need to know that you are what holds my little family together and makes it work so well. Technically, Ketki and I were functioning adequately before, but you make us a family. You know how my dad’s thing is cameras? Well, my grandfather’s thing was watches — most specifically Swiss watches. I used to watch in complete fascination as he would take apart all these intricate gears and put them back layer after layer until each watch ran perfectly. It’s as if you are the perfect gear for our family — the one thing that has been missing. You smooth out the hitches and help everything sync perfectly between all of us. You hold us all together.”

  Shelby’s brows furrow and she bites her lip. This is her trademark maneuver when she’s trying to solve a puzzle. Finally, she begins to talk, haltingly at first, “When you first started talking, I was a little offended, honestly. You didn’t say any of the romantic lines that I’ve been trained to expect from a guy. In fact, on the surface, some of them seemed exactly the opposite. Your words are unorthodox, but as I listened to you I realized that the reason you’re having a hard time defining our relationship in typical terms is because our relationship is not typical by its very nature. It explains why I never was a good fit with anyone else; I was meant to fit with you and Ketki.”

  I plant a symbolic kiss on the top of Shelby’s baseball cap before I declare, “I won’t argue with that Immokalee. Now, are you going to let me help you with your hair?”

  Shelby reaches up and touches her hat as if she forgot that her hair the whole reason we began having this conversation. Abruptly, she breaks out into a fit of giggles as she declares, “I give up. It’s not as if you don’t know I have cancer.”

  I knew this would be hard, but I didn’t think it would be this hard. Even opening the grooming kit was hard. Dammit. Stupid, Fucking terrorists. I can handle losing in court. If I lose in court, it generally means the facts of my case were weak or the law wasn’t on my side. To lose my baby brother to a bunch of nameless faceless terrorists — I guess they’re not really faceless any more, because I’ve seen their mug shots plastered all over the news — is a whole different kind of losing. It’s losing without reason or justification. It will never, ever make sense. I can’t explain it to my mom and dad and I can’t explain it to my sister and my nieces and nephews. More importantly, I can’t make sense of the senseless for my daughter, who loved her uncle with unparalleled dedication.

  I can hear Callum’s teasing voice in my head as I put a new blade on the clipper. During the last haircut I gave Callum before he was killed, he warned me to keep a hunk of his hair in case he ever got famous and we had to prove we were his relatives. Of course, it didn’t exactly play out the way he planned, but in the end, investigators ended up confiscating his personal razor for DNA to help identify his body.

  My hands tremble as that memory slams through my brain. I look up in the mirror and catch Shelby’s stricken gaze. “I’m sorry. This is going to cause you pain. I don’t want to hurt you,” she declares with big tears rolling down her face. “Why does this stupid disease have to hurt everyone I know?”

  Her hollow voice haunts my soul. I might have a beef with terrorists half a world away, but Shelby is fighting a battle every single second of every single day right in front of me. I need to get my head in the game.

  I paste a smile on my face and run my hand over my own hair as I offer, “Maybe I should shave mine off too — you know, as a show of solidarity with you. What’s good for one is good for all and all that jazz—”

  Shelby looks positively horrified as she responds, “Don’t you dare! I don’t want to be reminded that my hair is gone every time I look at you. I love your hair. Don’t make that sacrifice for me. It proves nothing. It would just make me sad.”

  “I guess you’re right, I didn’t think of it from that perspective. I just want you to know that I’d willingly take on this burden for you if I could,” I respond as I start to snip off locks her hair.

  Shelby looks at me in the mirror with a watery smile and remarks, “One of the women from my support group had a head full of stick-straight hair before chemo. When it all grew back, she said it was a completely different color and curly. Maybe when mine grows back, it will be straight and gorgeous like Ketki’s
.”

  I tilt her head back and kiss her on the forehead as I respond, “You know, I don’t care. I will take you however I can get you. You will always be gorgeous to me.”

  Shelby leans back against my chest with half of her head clipped and the other in complete disarray. Her eyes meet mine in the mirror. “I don’t know what it is about you, Mark Littleson, but you make me want to believe in impossible things,” she declares as a tear rolls down her cheek.

  “Ditto” I whisper softly as I wipe it away with my thumb. I have nothing to add. I could not have said it better myself.

  “Un-freakin-believable!” Shelby exclaims as she slams the laptop shut, causing her tea to slosh over the side of the cup.

  I look up from the brief I’m outlining and ask, “What’s up?”

  “I thought Kristi was supposed to be Ketki’s friend,” Shelby huffs with a scowl toward her computer.

  “Last I checked that was the case,” I answer, my focus half on my work.

  “Mark, you need to pay attention to this.” Shelby declares with disgust, her body vibrating with tension. “That was an email from Kristi’s mom declining Ketki’s birthday invitation, because it would be bad for her daughter’s social reputation.”

  “What? That doesn’t sound like Vivian. The girls have played together since they were babies,” I protest.

  “Well, she wasn’t quite that rude, but that’s essentially what she said,” Shelby clarifies. “Ketki’s teacher wasn’t any more encouraging. She yammered on about the classroom being a mirage of friendship for Ketki and encouraged me to look elsewhere.”

  I sigh as I respond, “I should’ve known this would happen. Last year was an unmitigated disaster. I guess I was just hoping that she was becoming a little more social and making more friends. Ketki tried to warn me it wasn’t getting any better; I just wasn’t listening. Some days, I feel like the worst parent on the planet.”