She frowned, not following what was on his mind.
He explained, “Remember how this woman opened her eyes, and a door opened?”
“Ah.” Kate understood, as she looked around at the deserted building. “Really not much left here for structure, is there?”
“Nope,” he noted, “and no doors that would lead to that one room.”
“So let’s get on to the next one,” she stated. “Maybe we can get through all of them today.”
“And what if we go through all of them and find out it’s none of them?”
“Then it’s none of them.” She shrugged. “And I’m back to the drawing board.”
“Meanwhile I’ll be feeling even worse because I put you on this pathway.”
“Sure,” she noted, “and I’ll probably take a lot of ribbing because of the man-hours spent following this down.”
“Which is also why you did most of this alone yesterday.”
“Yet,” she added, “there’s a responsibility to follow the information too.”
He nodded and didn’t say anything.
“Let’s go,” she muttered. “The sooner, the better.”
With that, they turned and headed to the next building on the list.
By the time they’d gone to four more, she was feeling beyond desperate. And defeated.
“We need food,” he stated.
She nodded and didn’t argue.
“I’m surprised,” he said, “that you haven’t mentioned it before.”
“No appetite,” she replied, staring out the car window. “And it’s hard to have an appetite when you know somebody is suffering.”
“And yet again I could be wrong.”
“You could be, but it doesn’t feel like it.”
He looked at her in surprise.
She shrugged. “Yeah, I know. I’m not supposed to havefeelingslike this,” she admitted.
“I don’t think anybody is supposed to have or to not have anything like this,” he argued. “The fact of the matter is, you have whatever you have.”
She snorted. “How philosophical is that?” Something vicious was in her tone that she was desperately trying to crank back down because she wasn’t mad at him; she was mad at the circumstances. She looked up when he pulled into a restaurant. “The Italian place?”
“I come here at least once a week, and, if I don’t, Mama gets worried.”
She smiled, and, as they walked inside, Mama raced over. When she saw Kate with Simon, Mama’s face broke into an even brighter smile.
“I told him not to lose you,” she shared. “You’re too good for him.”
Kate just looked sideways at Simon.
He smiled at both women. “And I brought her, didn’t I? She hasn’t eaten all day.”