“Um…” Cady began. “I think so.”
If he noticed her sudden incompetence, he politely eased her through the moment. “Would you like to come along to the office? It’s hot in the sun.”
She pulled herself together. “Thank you, but we’re not really here on business.”
“Oh?” He waited to see what she would say next. In the pause that followed, he looked from one of them to the other. Did he seem to be looking with a sudden intensity, as though he was trying to place them? Wondering if he knew them from somewhere? Recognizing something familiar in the sweep of their cheekbones, or the set of their noses, or the blue of their eyes, a paler reflection of his own? Maybe it was her imagination. All the ways Cady had rehearsed this conversation suddenly went out of her head, and she had to just leap in, her heart pounding.
“We’ve come from England to ask you about Anne.” She held her breath, waiting for some definite flash of recognition on his face. But there was nothing. Surely he couldn’t have forgotten.
He maintained a polite expression. “I’m sorry…Anne?”
Shelby couldn’t help herself. “Anne Morrow! You know.”
“Anne Morrow?” Now he started to look uncomfortable, but probably not because he’d suddenly been presented with two unexpected daughters and was avoiding the truth. More like he’d been waylaid on a driveway by two increasingly rude strangers. He was either pretending, or…they had the wrong person entirely.
“I’m sorry,” Cady said hastily, taking Shelby’s arm and drawing her back. “We just assumed that you were the person we’re looking for. Are you Lawson Holt?”
“Yes, I am.” He held out his hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”
Cady knew that probably wasn’t true, so far—and he might not feel that way after what they had to say either. But she put her hand out in return. Her fingers were engulfed in a leathery handshake that proved he must work his land as hard as anyone on his staff. “I’m Cady,” she replied.
“And I’m Shelby.”
Right then, they saw the reaction they’d expected when they asked about Anne. Shock flashed across his face—but only for a moment. He composed himself so quickly that they had no clue what he could be thinking.
“Would you like to come to the house?” he suggested. “Seems like we might have some things to talk about.”
Eighteen
They sat on the wide porch at the front of the house, sipping sparkly peach tea with ice, and eating vanilla cookies. The elderly lady who brought them out patted each of the girls firmly on the hand, her eyes shining and her lips pressed together as if to contain some emotion fizzing inside.
“Thank you,” they both said, as she set out the refreshments.
“Elva, this is Cady and Shelby,” Lawson Holt said.
“Yes,” Elva said, looking fit to burst. “Yes. Hello, girls. Welcome!”
“Hello,” they replied together.
“Oh!” Elva pressed her hands to her cheeks and shook her head, a joyous expression of satisfied disbelief animating her soft features. Then she grabbed the sides of her apron and bustled back inside, all in a flap.
Once she was gone, there was an awkward silence. Cady looked around at the beautiful sweepy trees, the simple but manicured garden beds, and the white pea gravel path leading to the comfortably shady porch. There was no evidence of children anywhere, no bikes leaning against the steps, or abandoned shoes by the door, or footballs on the grass. They’d come straight onto the porch, so there’d been no chance to nosy in the house. She checked his left hand. No ring. Surely he couldn’t be single.
She didn’t know how she’d expected to feel in this moment. An instant bond, their blood link making everything click into place? Angry, like Shelby, about the years of deception? Overcome with emotion at meeting him? Now that they were sitting together, she was surprised to actually feel a sort of detached calm. The man in front of them was just a man. An impressive kind of man, who happened to be their father. But she was relieved to find herself quite steady.
Now, like Shelby, she badly wanted to know more. With their mother gone, he was the only one who could tell them what had really happened. Everyone knew what needed to be discussed, but now that the moment was here, Cady found herself unsure where to start. She searched around for the right words. So, you slept with our mother was a bit blunt. Shelby was no help, looking nervous and tongue-tied.
In the end, he did it for them.
“Well, I know why you’re here,” he said. “I’ve waited a long time to see you.”
Shelby looked skeptical. “You have?”
He smiled. “If twenty-five years counts as a long time.”
Cady could see where Shelby was going next. “So you knew about us,” she said accusingly. “All that time, and you never came to see us.”
Her tone was bitter, but he took it on the chin. “I promised your mother that I—”
“Yeah, Cady made her a promise too,” Shelby interrupted, her voice creeping upwards. “But, here we are.”
He looked at Cady, but she just shook her head. That was a whole other Shelby grievance they didn’t need to go into. They’d only been here five minutes, and already her sister was losing her balance. Although now she was starting to feel a bit edgy herself.
He cleared his throat. “There’s obviously a lot we have to say to each other. Do you want to have this conversation?”
Shelby sniffed, obviously overwhelmed now that he was in front of them, but Cady nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “We need to. We only just found out about you. And…our mum has died.”
He sat back suddenly, as if someone had socked him in the chest. Cady had never seen someone so tan actually go pale, but he did. He rubbed his temple, obviously processing the news.
“My God.” He shook his head, a million miles away, then seemed to remember them again. “I’m so sorry for your loss. She was amazing. But you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“Thank you,” Cady said. “It’s been a…difficult time.”
“How did it happen? If you don’t mind me asking.”
This was something Cady didn’t want to discuss at all. “It was an autoimmune thing,” she said. She could see he wanted to ask more, but her tone was so final it gave him no encouragement. Luckily, Shelby piped up.
“Didn’t you know who we were, when you saw us?” she asked suddenly. “Didn’t you recognize us?”
“I thought I did,” he said. “But I didn’t believe it could be you. I never expected to meet you at all, let alone find you on my driveway, out of the blue.”
Shelby looked satisfied. “I thought you’d just know it was us, somehow, even though you’ve never seen us before.”
Of course, Cady had secretly hoped the same thing.
“Well, I…” He stood up suddenly. “There’s something I should show you. I’ll be right back.” He went in through the open French doors, letting the filmy curtains fall closed behind him. They peered after him, but couldn’t see anything inside.
Cady sighed and leaned back against the pillows in the deep wicker loveseat. “What do you think?” she whispered. “So far.”
“I don’t know.” Shelby frowned. She looked at his cowboy hat, sitting on the wide arm of his chair. “He seems okay, don’t you think? But I’m not keeping my cool. I knew exactly all the things I was going to say, and now I’m just coming unglued.”
“Well, it’s not like we’re here to talk about the weather. If it gets messy, it gets messy. Then we just jump in the car and go.” She returned Shelby’s relieved smile. “But he seems nice enough. Maybe.”
“I suppose so.” She nibbled around the edge of her cookie, her expression tense.
Before long he came out carrying a small leather-bound album, and sat back in the seat opposite. “This was in my study. I thought you might like to see it.” He held it out, and Cady took it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s all I’ve had.”
She gave him a quizzical look, but he waved a hand toward the album. “Open it.”
Shelby came and sat in the loveseat too, and leaned over her shoulder. “Yes, open it.”
She turned the first page. And the next, and the next. It was them. Page after page of Cady and Shelby, each page revealing two girls a year older, posing with a spectacular birthday cake.
“She sent me a photo every year,” he said.
Their mother’s birthday cakes had made them the envy of their friends: castles and princesses, butterflies, a paddock with ponies, a mermaid, a unicorn with a rainbow mane and tail… After hours of painstaking effort, Anne would take a photo of them with the cake, then stand back and watch as her work was chopped up and eaten in minutes. It was only as a grown-up that Cady realized what a huge undertaking each cake must have been, especially in later years when her health started to fail.
“Wow. So this is how you knew it was us.” No family magic after all. She turned the pages slowly, Shelby looking on. It was surreal to see their lives documented year by year. All that time, they’d had no idea that someone far away was receiving a copy of the cake photo, holding onto this slender thread of connection. Someone connected to them in a way they never could have guessed.
The last cake—a masterful confection, exquisitely detailed in gothic red and black flowers—was for their seventeenth birthday, just before Shelby left home. In the photo she looked sullen behind the overdone teenage eyeliner, obviously there under sufferance and utterly unimpressed.
“I can’t believe how different we look,” Cady said. “That wasn’t even ten years ago. This was the last cake, remember?”
“Guilt cake.” Twenty-five-year-old Shelby shook her head, her expression reflecting her seventeen-year-old self. “All those years, lying. How could she do it?”
“I liked the cakes,” Cady said.
“Well…I liked them too. But still!”
Cady closed the album and put it on the low table in front of them.
“The cakes were like her thing,” she told him. “Her trademark. We never realized they were for your benefit.”
“No. They were for you,” he said emphatically. “Give her more credit than that.”
The girls looked at each other. They remembered how much their mum loved revealing the cake each year, seeing their surprised faces, and knew he was right. But now that they were questioning even simple things like birthday cakes, it was like their whole lives were built on very shaky ground. How many of the other things they’d taken for granted were not exactly what they thought?
Now he had a question for them. “You called her Anne. Was that a nickname?”
“No. That’s her name.” Shelby stopped, corrected herself. “Was her name.”
“Oh.” He let it float.
“Why?” Cady asked.
“Well…she told me her name was Adrienne. That’s why I was thrown when you asked about Anne.”
The girls looked at each other. Adrienne. Was that who their mother saw herself as—or dreamed she might be—in her imagination? It was hard to reconcile the glamorous-sounding Adrienne with Anne’s ordinary, everyday life in Broadstairs, then in Peckham Rye.
“She always said she hated how boring her name was,” Cady said. “I guess she took the chance to be someone more exotic.”
He looked awkward. “I’m sorry about all this. It can’t be easy for you, having your world completely shaken up.”
“Thanks.” Cady looked at him, this father who wasn’t her father. She hesitated. “Speaking of names—I don’t know what to call you,” she said.
“Everyone calls me Holt. My father was always Lawson, so I started out being ‘Little Holt’ around the farm. But, you know…I grew.”
Holt. That was impersonal enough to sit comfortably with Cady. Then she registered that he’d said his father ‘was’ Lawson. “Your father has passed away?”
“Yes, and my mother. It’s okay,” he added, seeing their faces. “It was a long time ago now.”
Cady thought of his sisters, the other Cady and Shelby in the photo, who they were named for. “So it’s just you and your sisters now?”
“My sisters? No, I was an only child. Naughty. Spoiled rotten.” He shook his head as if regretting the wildness of his younger self. “I could have done with sisters to keep me in line.”
Shelby looked at Cady, her eyebrows raised. Cady shrugged a little, perplexed. She was sure of it: Anne had definitely said she named them after his sisters. Could she have remembered wrong, in her exhaustion and illness?
Before they had a chance to ask him anything more, he spoke. “Maybe the best thing is for me to just tell you my side of the story. If you want to hear it.”
Cady nodded. “I want to.”
“Me too,” Shelby said.
“Okay.” He took a breath, then let it out again, as if in preparation to relive the past. “I met Adrienne—Anne—in London. I’d had some…difficulties, here at home. I was young, but not young enough to excuse how immature I’d been. That’s a whole other story, but believe me, I’d had the spoiled stuffing knocked out of me. Which was a good thing.”
“What did you do?” Shelby had to ask.
“Nothing criminal, don’t worry. But I left my growing up a bit late.”
“How old were you then?” Cady asked.
“Twenty-four. When I met your mom, I knew she was older, but I didn’t ask how much. She was just a woman who seemed to have it together, who knew who she was.”
That was ironic, for a woman pretending to be someone else entirely. Cady held her tongue, waiting for the next part of the story, but Shelby rolled her eyes. “Pfft. Mrs. Robinson.”
“No.” He shook his head at her words. “Not like Mrs. Robinson, at all. She was a breath of fresh air. Straightforward. Funny. Honest.”
“Honest!” Shelby exclaimed. “Hardly.”
He acknowledged her comment with a small smile. “Yeah. But it was like…I don’t know. Like she was really living, determined to make the days count. I liked her very much.”
There was one thing in particular that Cady really wanted to ask. “Did you know she was married?”
“No.” He was emphatic. “I didn’t.”
“Wasn’t she wearing a ring?” Shelby asked. “You must have known something.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said again. “Look, I’m sorry. I know this is upsetting for you. But if she’d told me she was married, I would have backed off.”
Shelby persisted. “Well, wouldn’t there have been a mark on her finger where her wedding ring usually was?”
“She actually wore rings on almost all her fingers, so…”
Wow. She’d thought of everything. Cady marveled at the amount of planning Anne had put into her baby-making project. She’d obviously organized it meticulously—and her secret had held until she gave it away herself.
“And what happened?” she asked. “Did you see her many times? I mean, we don’t want the details, of course,” she added hurriedly.
“No, of course.” He looked embarrassed that they were even indirectly referring to him sleeping with their mother. “I was in London for about a month. My father had suggested some time away might be a good idea. I had a room at a hotel on Queensway. I remember being impressed by how royal that sounded.”
“Americans,” Shelby snorted.
“Right.” He smiled, not offended. “Anyway, on the second Saturday I saw Anne eating alone at a restaurant. I was alone too, so after she finished her meal I introduced myself. She said the girlfriend she was supposed to meet had missed the train to London. We went for drinks, and then…”
Cady held up a hand. “Aaand that’s where we let the curtain drop.”
He nodded. “She came back the next weekend, and then the weekend after that. After that I had to go home. Dad wanted me to buckle down and work here. I didn’t want to say goodbye to her, but she let me go so easily. I tried to make her promise to come and see me. I
offered to pay for her flights. But she wouldn’t make any plans, wouldn’t say any of the things I wanted to hear. It was only afterwards that I realized why.” He looked genuinely unhappy, as though the retelling brought back the pain. “I couldn’t believe it when I got her letter.”
“She told you everything?” Cady asked.
“Yes. And she was crystal clear—she wanted her husband and her family. If I had any feelings for her, I had to respect that. I knew I couldn’t wreck her life. So I kept myself busy. The business needed me, and I’d let that slip for long enough as it was. Somehow, I’ve been busy for twenty-five years.”
There was silence, the girls taking in everything he’d told them. Cady realized she felt a bit sorry for him. They’d been so busy imagining him as a kind of villain, it hadn’t occurred to them that he might have suffered collateral damage from their mother’s scheme. She had to ask one more thing—the thing she’d been wondering for weeks, but never intended to bring up. Hearing him talk, though, and seeing his obvious emotion, she suddenly had to know.
“Was it love?”
He smiled. “There’s a question spoken by someone who still believes in love.” Then he paused, looking out over the lawn to the almond trees row on row, their leaves glossy green in the sun. “Love in three weekends? Sure, I fell in love with what I knew of her, and who knows what would’ve happened if things were different. But they weren’t. She didn’t love me, I know that much. But I wanted to do the right thing.”
“And the money…?” That had to be acknowledged, if it was from him.
“She didn’t want it, but in the end she agreed. A little each week, into a bank account, for your futures. The account was under the name A. Morrow, so I never knew she wasn’t really Adrienne. And all our communication was in writing, via her lawyer. I had no idea where she was. I was tempted to find her, but what good would that have done any of us? I think I did the right thing, just sending the money.”
“Thank you for that,” Cady said, remembering her manners. She nudged Shelby.
“Yes, thank you,” she said.
“That’s okay,” he said. “It’s only what any of my children would get.”
The Near & Far Series Page 38