His Long-Lost Family

by Brenda Harlen

  Ava apparently recognized the vehicle, too, because her scowl darkened. But she said nothing, only grabbed her backpack and slammed out of the car. Kelly unlocked the house for her, then waited on the driveway for Jackson.

  He didn’t look like he’d come from the office today. Instead of a shirt and tie, he was dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. But he still looked good. Too good.

  The surprise must have shown on her face, because the first words he spoke were “Did you forget you invited me to dinner?”

  “No, I just thought, after Ava’s reaction last night, you might not want to come back here.”

  “I didn’t expect it was going to be easy. I hoped it might be,” he admitted, with just the hint of a smile. “But I didn’t expect it.”

  “It could be a quiet meal—Ava’s barely talking to me.”

  “She can’t give us the silent treatment forever.”

  “You might be surprised,” Kelly warned. “She’s stubborn and hardheaded. Which I guess only proves she’s a Garrett.”

  “Yeah, because you’re such a pushover,” he said dryly.

  She had to smile at that. “How do you feel about fajitas?”

  “As favorably as I feel about any meal that someone else is making,” he assured her.

  “It’s one of Ava’s favorites,” she told him. “Tacos are the absolute number one, but we just had those last week.”

  “And you’re still feeling guilty for the way she found out about me,” he guessed.

  “I’ve been feeling guilty for twelve years.” She opened the fridge to pull out the ingredients she’d chopped earlier that morning.

  While she started cooking, Jack opened the bottle of wine he’d brought. “And in those twelve years,” he said, “did you ever think about contacting me?”

  She nodded. “From the day she was born, and for a long time after, I thought about it almost every day. But you were married to Sara, then I married Malcolm, and then it seemed as if I’d let it go for too long.”

  He poured the wine into two glasses. “When was she born? All you told me was that it was February, but you didn’t mention the actual date.”

  She added the onions and peppers to the pan. “The twelfth.”

  “February twelfth,” he echoed. And she could tell by his tone that he finally understood why she hadn’t reached out to him on that day.

  She nodded. “Ava was born the day you got married.”

  * * *

  When they sat down to eat and Ava finally decided to break her self-imposed vow of silence, the first words out of her mouth were “I’ve decided that I should move in with Jack.”

  Kelly had to focus all of her effort on breathing. Suddenly there was an unbearable weight on her chest that made it impossible to draw air into her lungs. She didn’t know if Ava’s request to live with Jack was based on a desire to get to know him better or a plan to punish her mother for keeping the identity of her father a secret for so long; she only knew that her heart was breaking into a thousand pieces.

  Maybe she should have anticipated this. Or maybe, subconsciously, this scenario was one of the reasons she’d stayed in Washington as long as she had. Because she’d feared that when Ava found her father, she’d choose to be with him. Because no one had ever chosen Kelly. Not her mother or her father, not even the man she married, and certainly not Jackson. So why should she expect her daughter to be any different?

  He seemed to recover from his surprise first. “You want to live...with me?”

  Ava nodded.

  His panicked gaze flew across the table, but Kelly couldn’t help him. She was still too busy trying to process her daughter’s statement to know what to do or say.

  “Where is this coming from?” Jackson finally asked.

  “I was talking to Laurel about the fact that I suddenly have this father I don’t even know, and she suggested that the best way to get to know you would be to live with you.”

  Kelly managed to find her voice. “You talked to Laurel about this?”

  “Yeah.” Ava lifted her chin. “So?”

  “So...I thought we might want to take some time to think about this before we announced it to the whole world.”

  “I didn’t announce it to the world—I told my one and only friend in Pinetar, and you can’t get mad at me because I know you’ve at least told Uncle Lukas.”

  Which, of course, she couldn’t dispute. “You’re right. And I’m glad you have a friend in whom you feel comfortable confiding, but living with Jackson is not an option.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve only got a one-bedroom apartment,” he said.

  “I can sleep on the couch,” Ava offered.

  “Actually, it’s an adults-only complex.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that no one has kids.”

  She frowned. “Why would you live in a place like that?”

  “It’s a nice building in a good location.” He shrugged. “And there was no reason not to live there, because I never had a kid before now.”

  “I know you’re eager to spend time with Jack,” Kelly said, trying to keep her tone calm and rational, “but this situation is new to all of us and I think we should, right now, just take it one day at a time.”

  Ava didn’t seem thrilled with this suggestion, but she turned her attention back to her plate. She finished folding her second tortilla and took a bite, and Kelly exhaled a quiet sigh.

  “I noticed a picture of you in a soccer uniform in the living room,” Jack commented when she was finished eating. “Do you still play?”

  “Not this year,” Ava told him, with another unhappy look toward her mother. “I couldn’t do anything this summer because we were moving.”

  “You’ve been playing at camp,” Kelly reminded her.

  “Like that counts,” the girl grumbled.

  “There’s a school tournament every fall,” Jackson interjected. “Tryouts for the team start the second week of September.”

  “I’m really rusty,” Ava said.

  “Do you have a ball?” Jack asked.

  “Of course I have a ball.”

  “Then why don’t we take it outside and see just how rusty you are?” he suggested.

  Ava looked at him as if he’d just offered her the moon on a silver platter. “Do you play?”

  “Just for fun every once in a while now,” he told her. “But I was on the varsity team all through high school and I usually help Adam Webber—he’s the fifth-grade teacher and coach of the girls’ team—with his practices.”

  Ava was already pushing away from the table. Then she suddenly remembered the manners that had been ingrained in her and paused to ask, “May I be excused?”

  Kelly nodded. “Go wash up.”

  Ava carried her plate and cup to the counter, then raced up the stairs. Ordinarily Kelly would have called her back to put her dishes in the dishwasher, but she was so grateful to Jackson for successfully diffusing the volatile situation that she wasn’t going to object to being stuck with the kitchen cleanup.

  “She’s good,” Kelly told Jack as she started carrying the rest of the dishes to the sink. “You won’t have to use your personal connection with the coach to get her on the team.”

  “I expect her to be good,” Jack said, with more than a hint of arrogance. “She’s my kid.”

  “Yeah, all I did was carry her in my womb for nine months and give birth after thirty-four hours of labor,” Kelly noted dryly.

  His cocky smile faded. “Thirty-four hours?”

  “Actually, it was only four hours,” she admitted, her own lips curving. “But no one ever sympathizes with a woman who only suffers through four hours of hard labor.”

  He turned he
r around to face him, his expression serious now. “Was it hard?”

  “Not really. It was a pretty routine pregnancy and a blessedly quick birth. But the twelve years since have definitely been a challenge.”

  Before he could say anything else, Ava was back with her ball in hand.

  Kelly tried to focus on the dishes while Jackson and Ava kicked the ball around the backyard, but she couldn’t prevent her gaze from occasionally shifting toward the window. Ava’s earlier moodiness was completely forgotten, and she was smiling and laughing as she deked around Jack. But he had some pretty good moves of his own for a thirty-seven-year-old, and sometimes their battles for control were pretty intense. Certainly Jack didn’t seem to be trying to score any points with his daughter by letting her win.

  It was the sound of barking that drew her attention to the window again, and she saw that the game had expanded now to include Matt, Quinn and Shane, with Finnigan and Frederick trying to chase the ball and avoid flying feet.

  There didn’t seem to be any real purpose to the action, at least not so far as Kelly could tell. But they were all laughing and having a great time, and she felt as if some of the enormous weight had been lifted off of her chest as she watched her daughter playing with her father.

  She hadn’t been sure it would ever happen. Even when she’d decided to return to Pinehurst, she couldn’t have predicted what would happen when Ava and Jack each learned about the other. And although she knew there would inevitably be bumps further down the road, this, at least, had turned out to be a very good day.

  Chapter Eight

  On Saturday, Jack invited Ava and Kelly to go hiking at Eagle Point Park. He didn’t know if either of them was the outdoorsy type, but it was a perfect day to be outside, as evidenced by the numerous other groups and families on the trails. The sky was a brilliant blue and nearly cloudless, and though the sun was high in the sky when they started, the canopy of trees offered some respite from the heat.

  There hadn’t been much rain in the past couple of weeks, so the trail was dry, the dirt packed hard from all the boots and shoes that had stomped upon it. Sometimes, if he wasn’t in a hurry, Jack would look for animal tracks, but he knew they wouldn’t find any today.

  They started along one of the easier routes with the thought that a less strenuous hike might help facilitate conversation. But after a brief discussion of the weather and an even briefer discussion about the local flora and fauna, Ava plugged in her earbuds. Obviously she preferred her music to the sounds of nature—and conversation with her parents.

  After a few minutes, Kelly said, “Lukas never told me that you coached soccer.”

  “I’m not actually the coach—I just help out.”

  “Still, I would have thought that a man who’d shared that basic connection with kids wouldn’t freak out at the news that he had a kid of his own.”

  “But they weren’t kids to me,” he admitted. “They were soccer players. And if I ever did think of them as kids, there was comfort in knowing they were someone else’s.”

  “Are you still freaked out?”

  “No. Just terrified.”

  She smiled. “Good.”

  “Why is that good?”

  “Because you wouldn’t be scared if you didn’t care. It proves that she matters to you.”

  “I didn’t expect that she would matter so much so fast,” he admitted. “I mean, I barely had my head around the fact that I was a father and suddenly she was my child.”

  To his surprise, Kelly’s eyes filled with tears.

  “What did I do?” he asked warily.

  She shook her head. “You said ‘my child’ without any hesitation.”

  “Yeah, well.” He wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.

  Kelly laughed. “So what have you been doing with your life besides practicing law and helping-but-not-coaching girls’ soccer?”

  He was grateful for the change of topic. “Work doesn’t leave me a lot of time for anything else.”

  “How long have you been on your own?”

  Obviously she knew that he was practicing independently now, because she’d been to his office and the name “Taylor & Ross” wasn’t on the door. He thought Lukas might have told her the details of his decision to leave his father-in-law’s firm, but maybe she’d never asked about him, as he’d been careful not to ask his brother about her.

  “Almost ten years,” he said in response to her question.

  She stopped in the middle of the path. “You left Taylor and Ross ten years ago?”

  “Yeah. About two years before Sara left me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I did want my name on the door, but I wanted to know that I’d earned it. As long as I was working for my father-in-law, I would never be sure.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “For that crack I made about it being a wedding present.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” he reminded her. “You’d have to throw sharper barbs than that to pierce my thick skin.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “How about you? What have you been doing with your life besides cooking books and raising our daughter?”

  “Forensic accountants don’t cook books,” she said indignantly. “They investigate and analyze financial evidence.”

  “And they have very thin skin.” As if to prove the point, he rubbed his hand on her upper arm briskly. He was being playful, teasing her. But then he noticed that her skin wasn’t thin, but soft, and warm. And his movements slowed, gentled.

  She stepped away, picked up her pace. “But my new job is more managerial than practical, and my hours will be more regular, which means I’ll be able to spend less time at work and more time with Ava.”

  Jack fell into step beside her again.

  “But speaking of cooking books,” she continued in a deliberately casual tone. “I do have a collection of cookbooks that I haven’t cracked open in far too long because I didn’t have time for anything more than the basics, and I think I’d like to start cooking again for fun.”

  “I thought cooking was just for eating,” he admitted. “And speaking of eating—why don’t we stop for lunch when we get to Summit Falls?”

  So they did.

  Kelly had offered to pack a lunch, but Jack had arranged for a takeout picnic from the Bean There Café. A pointed look from her mother had Ava tucking her music away while they dined on turkey sandwiches, macaroni salad and potato chips, and washed it all down with bottles of water. But as soon as they were packing up to head back to the trail, the music came out again.

  Obviously, Ava wasn’t a nature lover, but Jack wasn’t too disappointed. His plans for the day hadn’t been a complete bust, because at least he and Kelly seemed to be communicating again. He wasn’t ready to forgive her entirely—and he didn’t doubt that she still had some residual anger of her own to work through—but he was at least confident that they could cooperate for the sake of their daughter.

  * * *

  Based on the experience at Eagle Point Park, Jack suspected that the urban jungle might be more Ava’s style. So the following day, he decided to take her to The Fun Warehouse in Syracuse. He extended the invitation to Kelly as well, but he wasn’t surprised when she declined, claiming that she had errands to run. As much as he enjoyed spending time with both of them, he couldn’t deny that being close to his daughter’s mother was more than a little distracting. Especially when he couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss they’d shared in her kitchen more than a week earlier.

  He picked Ava up at ten o’clock and took her to The Pancake Palace to fuel up on carbs before they went gaming. They played three rounds of laser tag and five games of air hockey (three of which she won), and then spent an hour in the arcade, at the conclusion of which they were both suffering from extr
eme sensory overload. But when they got back to Pinehurst, it was still only early afternoon.

  “Are you ready to go home? Or do you want to check out my condo?”

  “Am I allowed?” she asked hesitantly.

  “There are no age restrictions on visitors.”

  “Okay.”

  He parked in his usual spot and led her into the building. She looked around curiously, but didn’t say anything. In fact, as they made their way toward the bank of elevators, she seemed to be tiptoeing.

  “It’s so quiet,” she said, her voice pitched so low it was practically inaudible. “I feel like I’m in a library.”

  “That’s because you’re whispering,” he said, speaking in a normal tone.

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble for having a kid in the no-kid zone.”

  “The official designation is adult lifestyle condominium,” he reminded her.

  “We lived in a condo in Seattle,” she told him. “On the twelfth floor. What floor are you on?”

  “Three,” he said, and pressed the button for his floor.

  She frowned at the panel. “There are only three floors?”

  “This isn’t Seattle,” he reminded her.

  “No kidding,” she grumbled.

  She shrugged and wandered through the living room, studying the art on his walls, the books on his shelf, the CD collection. Then she wandered over to the floor-to-ceiling windows, peered out. “There’s no Space Needle, but the view doesn’t completely suck.”

  “High praise,” he mused. “Do you miss Washington?”

  She lifted a shoulder. “I miss my friends.”

  “You’ve already made some new friends, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah. A few. At camp.”

  “Are you looking forward to starting school?”

  She just shrugged. “I’m thinking of getting some more streaks in my hair before then. Maybe green this time.”

  Jack shook his head, genuinely baffled. “Why would you cover up such pretty hair with fake color?”

  “You think my hair’s pretty?”