Thank God thank God thank God thank God thank God.
“Okay,” Abby said. “So abortion was off the table.” Abby pressed her forehead against a porch support column, trying to snuff out the unintended double entendre, the image of a woman lying on a metal slab, feet in stirrups. A cold ache slid between Abby’s legs, and the backs of her knees softened. Abby lowered herself to the granite steps.
“That left one option,” Professor Lombardi said.
“Which was?”
“Giving the baby up for adoption.”
To a stranger. It was telling that Professor Lombardi couldn’t say that to Abby’s face.
“But Tessa felt she had other options,” Abby said. A statement, not a question.
From the other end of the phone, an insistent tapping. The professor drumming his fingers on a mahogany desk? Abby didn’t press, just waited him out.
“She nagged me for months,” Professor Lombardi said.
Translation: Tessa had hoped in vain for her father’s approval.
“She talked about either offering the baby to you or keeping it.”
An exhalation whooshed out of Abby. Relief? Surprise? Utter shock? Tessa’s mother wasn’t a part of her life. Her father was a wrong-minded bully. Yet, all on her own, she’d opted to continue the pregnancy, had even considered raising Luke’s baby herself.
Her baby. The baby was Tessa’s, too. If she chose to take up the gauntlet.
Tessa wasn’t Abby’s daughter, but could she be proud of her anyway?
“Why not?” Abby said, and her voice lifted on a grin. “Why not encourage her to keep the baby?”
“She’s nineteen years old!”
“I was eighteen when I had Luke.”
“And you were able to take care of yourself and Luke’s financial needs? All on your own? Without any help?”
“Of course not. My mother helped us.”
Another harrumph. This one softer than the first, but Abby had heard it. The disdain had come through loud and clear.
“You didn’t offer to help Tessa?” No wonder Tessa was running scared. Her father had narrowed her choices, boxing her in a corner.
Just like what Tessa was attempting to do to her and Charlie. The child repeating the mistakes of the parent.
“You mess up, you suffer the consequences.”
Clean breaks. From his own child? “Did you threaten to disown Tessa if she kept the baby?”
“Abby—”
“Ms. Stone,” she corrected.
“I offered to give her a dose of reality.” His voice sounded tired, pulling from the last reserves of a long day. Or a long life. “Tessa has a lot of growing up to do. Who am I to take much-needed life lessons away from her?”
“You’re her family.” Family stuck together. Family never ever gave up on each other.
Especially a family of two.
“I’m aware of that fact,” he said, borrowing Abby’s previous statement and delivering it in a flat tone. “Perhaps we have different ideas about the meaning of family.”
Headlights swung into the driveway, pulling shadows along the porch posts. Tessa backed into an open space between two cars and cut the engine. A familiar sensation washed over Abby, relief at a loved one’s return, an up-shift of contentment.
The way she felt whenever family walked through the doors of Briar Rose. Luke, Lily Beth, and now Tessa.
Tessa wasn’t family. Was she?
That decision was up to Tessa.
“Tessa just pulled in. Hang on a second.” Abby held the phone to her chest, waited till Tessa made her way to the porch. “Would you like to talk to your dad?”
Tessa set down two big-handled white shopping bags. She squinted at the phone, rocked from side to side. “Do I have a choice?”
“You always have a choice.”
Tessa met her gaze, and her chin jutted forward, as though she might cry. But then she took the phone from Abby’s hands.
Abby went into the foyer and perched on the edge of the love seat. She straightened her sachets in the wicker basket, held one to her nose, inhaled lavender. Flipped open the white cardboard honor box and counted the cash.
The foyer light leaked onto the porch and lit the back of Tessa’s head. “Yes.” Pause. “Uh-huh. Dina sent me my vitamins.” Pause. “I don’t know. Why does it matter? You already paid my rent for the month. It’s not like you’re going to get it back.”
Tessa’s father paid her rent, but he wouldn’t if she had a baby?
“Not yet. I told you, I don’t know. And, really, Abby is none of your business.” Tessa sat on the rocker. “Wh-What?” The rocker creaked and moaned, Tessa pushing the chair to its limits.
Tessa burst through the door, stopped short, and thrust the phone at Abby. “Thanks for having me. I’ll leave in the morning.” Tessa sidestepped past Abby, slid aside the pocket door, and race-walked into Abby’s apartment.
What had just happened?
Abby followed behind Tessa, closed the door behind them, and threw on the overhead lights. “What did your father say to you?”
Tessa halted in the middle of the living room. Her shoulders rose to her ears and then fell sharply with a huff, as though Tessa were mimicking one of Abby’s blowfish breaths. Tessa set her bags on the floor and spun on her heel. “I don’t stay where I’m not wanted.”
“Tessa, I haven’t asked you to leave!”
“Then why did you call my father?”
To figure out whether adopting her grandchild necessitated committing to Charlie.
Blackmail was a lousy reason for agreeing to marry someone. Whether or not Abby was still the girl of Charlie’s dreams, he deserved better. So did she.
“I don’t know,” Abby said.
Tessa snapped up her bags and huffed into her bedroom.
Luke’s bedroom.
Abby tried not to laugh at the absurdity. Abby never believed Tessa when she claimed ignorance either.
“I called your dad to let him know how you were doing.”
“Oh my God, you told him! You told him about, about—” Tessa’s eyes widened, as if they were trying to escape her face. She slapped her thigh once, twice.
“Stop it!”
Breathing hard, Tessa met Abby’s gaze, her hand wavering midair.
“Shh,” Abby said. “Hush, now. Nobody’s asking you to leave. Nobody’s leaving you. You don’t have to hurt yourself anymore. I didn’t tell your dad about the cutting.”
Tessa’s mouth twisted sideways, and her eyes watered. “Swear?”
Abby held up a pinkie, and Tessa’s expression softened, the hurt draining from her pink cheeks. Her hand floated to her side. “You still shouldn’t have called my father.”
“You shouldn’t have gone behind my back to try to emotionally blackmail Charlie. I’m the one seeking adoption. If you have a question, or a demand, come to me first. Leave Charlie out of it.”
“I don’t even know what emotional blackmail means.”
Not knowing the term hadn’t stopped Tessa from excelling at the practice. “It means you set impossible conditions,” Abby said. “It means you’ve threatened to give Luke’s baby to a stranger, strangers, if Charlie and I don’t get married.”
Tessa’s lips opened to form an O, and then she smoothed her features.
Abby shook her head, sat down on Luke’s bed, and patted the spot beside her. “Come on, Tessa. Did you really think Charlie wouldn’t tell me?”
“Luke would’ve wanted you and Charlie to raise the baby as a married couple.” With a sigh, Tessa lowered herself to the bed. Her shoulders rounded. “I want what I want for my baby.”
My baby. Abby hadn’t heard Tessa refer to the baby as hers before. She’d only ever called the child Luke’s. Or had that been Abby’s doing?
“Who’s to say a single parent can’t provide a good home? Hmm? Did Luke turn out so badly? He was a pretty good guy, don’t you think?”
“He had his good points.”
Abby bumped shoulders with Tessa. “He had a lot of good points, and you know it.”
“I guess.”
Abby wanted what she wanted, too. But what if that wasn’t the best choice for the baby?
“What do you want for your baby?” Abby asked, and Tessa’s pupils jostled on the word your.
“I told you. I want what Luke would’ve wanted.”
“I don’t think you’re looking at all of your options. Your father told me you mentioned keeping the baby?”
“Then he also must’ve told you he called me out for my foolish little fantasy. Silly, silly girl.”
“He did, but so what? I raised Luke myself. Charlie was away at school until Luke was three. If I did it, you can do it, too. If that’s what you really want . . .”
“What I really want? What I really want doesn’t matter. I never get what I really want.” Tessa stated the opinion without emotion. Abby would’ve felt better if Tessa had stuck out her bottom lip. Or, better yet, if she’d thrown herself on the floor and pitched a toddler fit. The fact no emotion bled through the statement let Abby know Professor Lombardi had hammered the fight out of his feisty daughter. She might not have been overly eager to take her father’s call, but she still wanted his approval.
Abby wrapped her arm around Tessa’s back, gave her shoulder a squeeze, to encourage both of them. Abby had jumped at the opportunity to adopt Luke and Tessa’s baby. She could jump just as high for the chance to be the baby’s grandmother. Wasn’t that the natural order of life? As if it was natural to be a grandmother at thirty-eight, when other women her age were just starting families. “You could take care of your baby. Nothing’s stopping you.”
If Abby had been able to see Professor Lombardi’s expression over the phone after she’d made a similar suggestion, she strongly suspected his face would’ve looked a lot like his daughter’s. Tessa raised her eyes. Then her head turned and lowered until she’d fixed Abby in her what-madness-is-this gaze.
“I don’t know about your father, but my daddy doesn’t support mess-ups. Professor Lombardi pays for college. After that, you get a job and pay your own way. Why go to school, if you’re planning on mooching off your family for the rest of your life? What’s the point?”
Abby strongly suspected that some of Tessa’s words—mooching and mess-ups, for instance—came directly from her father, too. Professor Lombardi’s mouth to Tessa’s ear and back out through her lips. Had the sentiments lodged in the child’s heart?
Young woman. Tessa was a young woman. Old enough to make up her own mind, even if Abby didn’t agree with her decisions.
“You could live at home,” Abby said.
Tessa snorted.
“Just until you got on your feet. You could still go to school. They must have day care on campus.” Abby’s years-ago fantasy about living on campus with Charlie and a baby played before her eyes, the colors washed out, like an old movie. She’d considered Charlie’s original request more than a year after it was already too late. People whom she used to know.
“I’m not lucky like you. I don’t have a rich mother,” Tessa said.
Abby squeaked out a laugh. “Lily Beth’s not a wealthy woman. Her shop is charming. But she makes most of her money during the summer season. Her house is nice, but small. She’s a single mom, too. Had me when she was a kid herself.”
Damn if Tessa didn’t remind Abby of Celeste. Eyes focused, expression open, trying to take in the whole picture. “Then how’d she buy her house? And who paid for all of this?” Tessa’s gaze swept Luke’s bedroom and lighted on the French doors. Nothing remarkable there. Just run-of-the-mill glass doors that took in a side-of-the-house path that angled around Abby’s New Englander and opened onto an expansive yard with a view of the Casco Bay. Not the biggest house. Not the most awe-inspiring view. But big enough and awe-inspiring enough that, even sixteen years ago, the price should’ve been too expensive for a single mom with a limited income. Expensive enough that Abby should’ve long ago wondered about the source of Lily Beth’s money.
After Briar Rose had become profitable, Abby had sent Lily Beth monthly checks to reimburse her for the down payment. Monthly checks that Lily Beth had called to a halt after Abby had breached the halfway mark.
Lily Beth had never needed the money.
“Luke told me you guys lived with his gran when he was small. I figured Lily Beth was either divorced or widowed or—”
“Never been married.”
“So your father sends money.”
“There’s no father.”
“Everybody has a father.”
“Not me. According to Lily Beth, Daddy was a merman.” A painting of a mermama watching her merbaby playing in the sand hung in the Hermit Island Kelp Shed, where her mother had worked as a teen. Lily Beth had always claimed she and Abby were the artist’s inspiration, even though the signature was dated 1931. “My merman father beached long enough to get Lily Beth pregnant, and then swam back out to the deepest darkest depths of the ocean. No merman could survive on land.”
Abby had once thought Lily Beth’s fish tale couldn’t possibly survive into Abby’s adulthood.
By the time Abby had turned eighteen, she’d been too overwhelmed with her own teen pregnancy to worry about her mother’s. She’d allowed Lily Beth to continue with the mermaid tale, adding chapters to the fable, as fast as mermaid statuary and aquamarine multiplied in her shop.
“Sounds romantic.” Tessa’s gaze lifted to the Luke-and-Tessa photo above Luke’s bed, the image already fading under the barrage of sunlight. A little more each day. Luke’s impossible-to-handle childhood photo albums hid in his bureau drawers. But even this photo and the surrounding photos of Luke and his friends used to give Abby a jolt of sadness, a gong struck at her center and echoing throughout her body. But now? Nothing.
That hurt in a whole new way.
“A story doesn’t have to be sad to be romantic,” Abby said.
Tessa looked at Abby sideways, as though daring her to prove otherwise.
Had the true story about Lily Beth and Abby’s father been so horribly sad that Lily Beth had needed to fabricate a fable? As tragic a romance as, say, Luke and Tessa?
Abby didn’t take well to lies.What was a story, but a lie artfully told?
Whether Abby raised Luke’s baby or not, she’d want the child to know about Luke. The good and the bad. The truth, not the lies.
A child deserved to know his, or her, own father.
It was about time.
If Abby knew her mother, Lily Beth would be sitting out on the deck beside the two-foot-high look-alike mermaid statue and in front of the wooden bowl full of sand dollars, with a shawl draped over her shoulders, her hair cascading over the shawl, and a wineglass in hand. If Abby knew her mother, Lily Beth would, right now, be alternately taking a sip of that wine—white or red, didn’t matter—and gazing out to sea. If—
“Hi, baby.”
Red wine.
Lily Beth grinned—warm and welcoming without an ounce of surprise—as though she’d been expecting Abby to step out of the shadows and onto the deck. “Beautiful night,” Lily Beth said.
“Sure is.” An oval waxing moon lighted a silver path across the waves.The ocean brushed the shore, as if someone had unfurled a blanket of blue-black silk. Living all of her life on the Maine coast hadn’t jaded Abby. She’d grown up knowing they lived in a vacation town. That most people worked fifty-one weeks a year, just so they could spend one week in Hidden Harbor. That for some people, like those who’d once summered in the cottage Lily Beth owned, Hidden Harbor was nothing but a long-ago dream. Others—Lily Beth—had summered in Hidden Harbor thirty-nine years ago, and never left.
“Glass of wine?”
“No, thank you.”
Rough stones lined the deck. Dark blue lapis lazuli for truth, blue-green aquamarine for protection, pale blue moonstone for feminine energy. Working stones, Lily Beth called them. Their jagged edges allowed the properties to
emanate, heal the user, and the world beyond. Lily Beth sold a few at Heart Stone, but Abby preferred the bins of tumbled rocks. She’d never been able to resist touching them, digging through the cool, rounded edges, worrying her fingers over the shiny-smooth perfection. But the rough stones stood apart, untouchable.
Not unlike Lily Beth.
Lily Beth knew everyone in town, and everyone knew her. Yet, while Abby was growing up, her mother had never dated. She’d never stayed out late and then come home, flushed with flirtation. She’d never brought men back to the house for drinks, conversation, and the low rumble of pillow talk. And whenever a man had tried to ask her out—from vacationers to locals—she’d put them off with a ready excuse. Sometimes she’d slip a friend’s phone number into the gentleman’s palm, the way you gave away something you didn’t need.
Who didn’t need love?
“You look tired,” Lily Beth said. “Long day?”
“Aren’t they all?” Abby hadn’t meant to sound so morbid, so raw. So truthful. The daily grind kept her hands busy, darker thoughts at bay. But come nightfall, darkness seeped back in, filling in the silence with her son’s name.
Tonight, Abby’s brain tumbled rough-edged questions only Lily Beth’s answers could smooth.
Abby lowered herself to the cushioned love seat beside Lily Beth’s chair, ran her fingers across the sea-damaged white wicker, the familiar striations. Weak light spilled from the great room, casting a shadow across Lily Beth’s features. Even in unflattering light, Lily Beth could’ve easily been mistaken for a much younger woman, Abby’s sister rather than her mother. Growing up, strangers made the mistake all the time. But Lily Beth had never confused their roles.
“Mom,” Abby said, “I want to know about my father.”
Lily Beth blinked twice. She refilled her wineglass from the bottle on the glass coffee table, swirled, but did not sip. “Why?”
“I have a right to know where I came from.”
“Why now? You haven’t asked me about your father in years. Did something happen today?”
The last twenty-four hours rained down like a summer storm, sudden and soaking. Snippets of her conversation with Charlie. Her out-of-bounds longing for Rob. Her frustration with Tessa and the girl’s unnerving ability to poke at Abby’s life and find her weak points. The driving force behind the squall? Abby couldn’t lose Luke’s baby. Salt, sharp and tangy, swirled across Abby’s tongue. Abby’s sinuses swelled, like when she’d swim underwater, eyes open, wide strokes pulling herself along the ocean floor.
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