by JoAnn Ross
“Wow! That’s so exciting!”
“And scary,” Kylee said. “But the doctor assures us that thirty-eight weeks is a safe zone. But, of course, I’m already chewing my nails off.”
“I’m on my way.” Furniture shopping could wait. Friendship came first.
“Thank you. Mai’s her usual Zen sea of calm, but I can tell that she’s as nervous as I am. I am upset about one thing.”
“What?”
“One of the reasons Seth was rushing on the house was to get us moved in in time for the wedding before we became parents. I’m not worried about the wedding. That’s just a technicality. But I did want to bring our daughter home to the house she’ll grow up in.”
“And you didn’t let me buy any baby furniture,” Brianna heard Mai say in the background.
“I didn’t want to jinx the adoption,” Kylee said. “I’m Scottish. We’re a superstitious people.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Brianna said. “This is an easy problem to fix.” Certainly easier than many she’d handled over the years. “You just stay calm so you won’t upset the mother. Calm’s got to be better for the baby, right?”
“Right.” She heard Kylee blow out a long breath. Then another. A third. “Okay. I’ve found my center. Now I’m going to go back into the labor room. See you soon.”
“Soon,” Brianna agreed. As she turned around in the direction of the hospital, she hit the icon on the phone.
Seth answered on the first ring. “That was fast.”
“Change of plans. I’m on the way to the hospital.”
“Is your mom okay? Your dad?”
“Everyone’s fine. Kylee and Mai’s baby has decided to make an early appearance. I’m going to offer moral support, but I need a favor.”
“Just name it.”
“You and Dad are the only two guys I know in town with trucks. I need everything moved out of Kylee and Mai’s apartment into their new house.”
“Sure, I can do that.”
“You’ll need me to get a key.”
“I’m a contractor,” he reminded her. “I know how to jimmy locks.”
Of course he did. “While you guys are moving furniture, I’m going to ask Mom to find something to put the baby in.” Kylee’s own mother had tragically died in a car accident four years ago. “I figure being the principal she can leave school early and find a bassinet or something either at Treasures or in Port Townsend or Port Angeles.”
For a moment, when he didn’t respond, Brianna thought she’d lost the connection. “Don’t bother,” he said finally. “I’ll take care of that.”
He didn’t need to say any more. Remembering Zoe’s emails about the nursery they’d been planning, she guessed that Seth must have furnished the room as a surprise for her. The same way he’d kept her car clean and running. As she realized that he must have kept that room the way it had been two years ago, and what he was now planning to do, her eyes misted. Wiping the tears away so she could concentrate on arriving at the hospital without having an accident, she bit her lip. “Are you sure?”
Another pause, shorter than the earlier one. “Yeah. I am... Tell Kylee and Mai not to worry. I’ll pull some of the crew off the old lighthouse keeper’s house they’re working on and we’ll have them moved in by tonight.”
After thanking him again, Brianna called the farm. Then, with her heart and thoughts torn between the about-to-be mothers and the special man she’d given her heart to years ago, Brianna turned down Quinault Road to Honeymoon Harbor General Hospital.
* * *
IT WAS EVEN harder than he had thought it would be when he’d made the offer to Brianna. Seth hadn’t opened the nursery door since the day he’d been notified of Zoe’s death. Hadn’t wanted to because everything inside the room represented a shared dream that, as much as he knew it would never happen, he couldn’t let go of.
On the other hand, two women who’d become friends enough to ask him to be in their wedding needed him to step up and open that damn door. After all, someday he was going to have to. He couldn’t spend his life like Miss Havisham, who, after having been jilted at the altar, spent the rest of her life alone in her decaying mansion, never taking off her wedding dress and leaving the moldering wedding cake on the table.
He’d had to read Dickens’s Great Expectations his senior year of AP English. Okay, two chapters into the book, he’d thrown in the towel and cheated by reading the CliffsNotes. But they were still detailed enough for him to find the story ridiculously over-the-top melodramatic. People got ditched. They divorced. And sometimes the one you loved with your entire heart, the one you’d planned to live the rest of your life with, the one in which all your great expectations lay, died.
Although he hadn’t set all the clocks and his watch to the time those officers had arrived at his and Zoe’s house, the way the old spinster had kept the clocks in the mansion set to the exact time she got the letter from the con man who’d defrauded and jilted her, by keeping this door closed for the past two years, he’d metaphorically behaved the same way.
He took a deep breath, and turned the handle.
Thanks to Megan’s Clean Team, unlike the decaying old mansion, there were no cobwebs, no mold, no rodents. The crib, which was designed to turn into a twin bed when their child got older, was a bright white, painted with an enamel guaranteed not to chip off when a teething baby gnawed on it. The bars were close together, per the new safety standards she’d found online, and the mattress was covered with a quilt his mother had made. Hot air balloons, in all the bright primary colors Zoe had insisted on, flew upward in each of the twelve squares of blue cloth sky. Riding in the baskets were baby elephants, bears, dinosaurs, dragons, ducks and more. Along each of the borders read, “Oh, the places you’ll go.”
A mobile he’d found online of Zoe’s beloved orcas, in bright, whimsical colors, hung over the crib.
His father had surprised him by building not just a rocking chair, but a white dresser with each of four drawers painted in the colors of the quilt. Zoe’s parents had provided the changing table along with the best safety car carrier on the market.
In the corner of the room was the bassinet that would be moved into their bedroom when they brought their newborn home. Made of see-into mesh, it had all the bells and whistles. It rocked, swiveled and had adjustable white noise sleep sounds, and the sides lowered, allowing the baby to sleep at the same level next to Mom and Dad, but not in the bed, which, Zoe had read, and their own doctor had agreed, was a lovely idea, but also increased the risk of suffocation and SIDS. Needless to say, it was the most expensive one made, but he’d been willing to pay anything to keep his child safe and his wife worry-free.
But he hadn’t been able to keep his wife safe. And the child she might have been thinking about in those last seconds of her too-short life would never be conceived. Never born.
When the pain hit him like a sledgehammer in the gut, he dropped the toolbox he’d been carrying, doubled over, hands on his thighs, head spinning as he struggled to keep from passing out.
“You can do this, dammit,” he muttered as vertigo had him swaying on his feet. “Not just for Kylee and Mai, but for yourself.” He also knew gifting the new mothers with this nursery Zoe had put so much thought and love into was exactly what she’d want him to do.
So, picking up the toolbox, he pushed through the pain and guilt that he’d been carrying around for all this time and got down to business dismantling Kylee and Mai’s crib.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CAROLINE DIDN’T KNOW what to think. After handing Ben that ultimatum letter at the Stewed Clam, she’d been expecting a call. Or maybe he’d even show up at her door. She’d been trying to decide what his silence meant. Was he merely ignoring her, still counting on her returning home and things continuing just as they’d been? Which, although she hated to think it, wasn�
�t going to work for her. Maybe he was giving himself time to seriously consider the words that had come straight from her heart.
Could he be deciding how much he was willing to change to keep the woman he’d sworn to love, honor and cherish that day amid the moss-draped oak trees in her parents’ backyard? If a green space three times the size of Honeymoon Harbor’s park could be called a yard.
An army of gardeners had mowed, trimmed and clipped, so the lawn looked like a huge putting green and the gardens could have held their own against the Biltmore Estate, which, when built during the Gilded Age, had been the largest private home in the nation. Her mother was a renowned Southern belle who, after providing the family with both an heir—Caroline’s brother—and a daughter born to marry well into their class, had handed her offspring to nannies and turned all her attention to gardening. Her passion for creating floral perfection had her making a pilgrimage to North Carolina every year to confer with the Biltmore gardeners. Other plants had been grown from heritage seeds from Monticello and were said to have been avid gardener Thomas Jefferson’s favorites.
In addition to the arbor covered with a pink climbing rose appropriately called New Dawn, beneath which she and Ben had exchanged their vows, thirty more varieties bloomed in a rose garden that had won the city’s garden show award every year for as long as Caroline had been alive. At the far end of the lawn, a white tent had been erected for the reception for three hundred of her parents’ closest friends. In the kitchen (which was larger than the house she’d moved into after her marriage) another army of chefs and servers had kept the reception running like clockwork.
Caroline had known that Ben hadn’t expected such an ostentatious display of wealth. But she’d been proud at how he hadn’t appeared the least bit intimidated. After all, why should he be? Not only was he the man she’d chosen to marry, he was a far better man than others she’d grown up with. Including her own father who, despite having a law degree from Vanderbilt, spent more hours a day at the country club than his office. He had, she’d accidentally discovered when she’d been a junior in high school, a fondness for women around the same age as the twenty-four-year-old bourbon he favored.
She’d sensed, during their early years of marriage, that every time they had an argument, her husband had expected her to go running home to her parents. To her previous life of wealth and privilege. What she suspected he’d never entirely understood or believed was that she’d always found her parents’ life suffocating. Everyone behaved exactly the same way, expectations remained the same generation after generation, and certain things just weren’t done. Like choosing a career as an artist, or complaining about your husband’s wandering eye. Having watched her mother suffer her father’s adultery in silence for so many years, Caroline had decided, that memorable day when she’d gone into the pool house looking for a book she thought she’d left there, and walked in on her father and a woman who was definitely not her mother having sex, that she was going to break the mold.
The day had sparked the flame that had her taking that trip across America. The trip where she’d met a man with strong hands, a brilliantly creative mind (although he hated it whenever she told him that) and, although he kept it well guarded, a heart as big as the vast Western landscape she’d fallen in love with.
She hadn’t understood how such a smart, manly male like Ben Harper had remained single, but deciding that the women of Honeymoon Harbor must be blind, stupid or both, she’d taken less than a minute to stake her claim on him.
Life experience had changed him over the years, given him challenges that she’d watched him fight to overcome. It had only been the past two years that she wasn’t certain if he could find his way back to the husband she’d loved. The partner she’d wanted to spend the rest of her days with.
Then, just when she’d feared he’d given up on them, this morning he’d surprised her.
“Ben left flowers in front of my door this morning,” she told Mike as they stood in a meadow, painting the wildflowers dancing like ballerinas in the breeze. It had been his idea that she try her hand at plein air painting, which was all about leaving the four walls of the studio and capturing the landscape in its natural setting. He’d told her that the practice went back centuries, but had been turned into an art form by the French Impressionists.
“I think you’d find the spontaneity suits you,” he’d said.
And he’d been right. She was immediately drawn to the freedom, but was quickly discovering that it was also more challenging than it looked due to the constantly changing light and weather conditions. But she’d never been one to turn down a challenge.
“Has he mentioned your letter?”
She’d told him about Ben, not because she was attracted to Mike Mannion, though there had been that brief flirtation the night of the play years ago, the night she’d met the man who’d become her husband, but because he’d become a friend she could talk with to get a man’s take on her problem.
“No. But they were roses. A beautiful hybrid that blends from coral to orange. They’ve always been my favorite because they reminded me of the honeymoon in Hawaii we’d been planning to take. But shortly before the wedding, he discovered that his father had driven the company deeply in debt. So, instead of flying off to paradise, we came back here, buckled down and got to work.”
“Like the steel magnolia you are,” he suggested, as he painted in the shadows of clouds moving over the mountains. Clouds that made the painting an entirely different one than it would have been two minutes earlier. Plein air, she was discovering, was all about change. Just like marriage.
“Ben’s always called me that,” she murmured, watching as a butterfly flittered over a flower, and trying to quickly sketch it in. “I’d told him that the only things I missed about my old life down home were the rosebushes my mother dedicated her life to cultivating. So he bought me that bush, the first of many, for our first anniversary,” she said. “The same week we managed to get Harper Construction back in the black. We planted the bush together, then sat out on the deck, drinking mai tais he’d made from a mix he picked up at the market, and drinking in the scent of the flowers.”
And talking about how someday they’d get to Hawaii. She wondered now if he was sending her a reminder of that promise. And that maybe it was his way of saying he wanted to talk.
Then why the hell didn’t he come by her apartment? Or at least call.
“I’ve always envied him,” Mike surprised her by saying. “For having won you.”
“You make me sound like some sort of prize.”
“Yeah.” He cringed a bit at that. “It sounds sexist, but the thing was, I fell for you when I was putting those last-minute touches on that forest scene that had gotten dinged while setting up. You came over and we talked about painting.”
“I remember it well.” He’d been handsome and she found their shared interest in art appealing.
“Then that damn rainstorm happened, and you started talking to Ben Harper, and I realized, watching the two of you together, and the chemistry was so electric, that I didn’t stand a chance.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” If she had, would she have ended up with this man? No, she decided. She enjoyed his company, he was still handsome, and she loved her classes and their conversations. But Ben Harper had, and undoubtedly would, whatever happened in their marriage, always hold her heart.
“It was a disappointment.” Then he treated her to a warm, wry grin. “But, as you can see, I’ve survived.”
“But you’re still single.”
“When I find a woman as perfect as you, I’ll give up my bachelor days without looking back. Ben’s a lucky man. Hopefully, only because I want you to be happy, he’ll pull his head out of his ass.”
Well. The clouds had rolled over the meadow, bringing with them a light rain that created drops on the flower petals, but if it kept up would have t
hem quitting for the day. Which was probably a good thing. Because between the roses outside her apartment door, and Michael’s surprise admission, Caroline’s life had just become even more conflicted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
KYLEE WAS IN the waiting room, pacing like a stereotypical expectant parent, when Brianna arrived in the maternity wing. “Thank God you’re here,” she said. “I’ve been wearing a path in the floor and need comfort.”
“Where’s Mai?” One advantage of a small town with slow population growth was that they were the only people in the waiting room.
“She’s in with Madison, our birth mother, and her grandparents. Apparently there’s a rule about only three visitors at a time.”
Brianna had learned over tea that the birth mother was a seventeen-year-old girl who’d be attending her freshman year at Washington State University. Her grandparents, who’d taken over the job of parenting after Madison’s parents had died in a small plane crash in the Cascades when the girl was ten, were elderly and not well enough to take on the care of a newborn. Without any aunts and uncles to take up the slack, and the boy and his parents having no interest in helping raise an unplanned and unwanted child, the small family of three had agreed that it would be better for everyone, including the baby the teenager was carrying, to choose adoption.
“I’m sorry about you having to put your wedding off,” she said.
“It’s not that big a deal,” Kylee said with a shrug. “Well, it kind of is, because I wanted to be married before I became a mother, but it can wait. It was just going to be a few close friends and a bunch of Mai’s relatives, who unfortunately are all having to change their plane tickets.”
“So, your dad’s not coming.”
“No.” Another shrug, but regret momentarily shadowed Kylee’s eyes. “He still hasn’t forgiven me for my ‘lifestyle’—” she made air quotes “—since I came out.”
“His loss.”
“That’s what Mai always says. She’s good for me, Bri. And her family’s been wonderful. Her mom’s filled in for mine and her dad assured me that he’d love to be my dad, too. Her grandmother’s even coming. Can you imagine? She’s in her nineties, and not only is she willing to fly across an ocean to share in her granddaughter’s wedding, she’s more open-minded than my decades-younger father.”