EVERYTHING STOPPED FOR Aidan with those seven words. His world shrank in on itself, squeezing out sight and sound, until there was nothing left but a dark emptiness deep inside his heart where a lifetime of dreams once lived.
She might as well have lobbed a live hand grenade into the room. Not even a bomb could have done as much damage as those seven words.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know this is hard for you.”
How could she? He could barely grasp the meaning of it all himself. “How long have you known?” He sounded old, as if he had lived two lifetimes in a matter of moments.
“Since yesterday,” she said, watching him with eyes filled with pain that matched his own.
“And you didn’t tell me.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t. I wanted to, you have to believe that, but she had options, Aidan, legal options. The choices all belonged to her. We made a deal, and I had to keep my part of the bargain.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It’s the truth. She didn’t want any of you to know. She was going to have an abortion, and it would all be over and forgotten. She even lied to Seth and told him she’d gotten her period.”
“She wouldn’t do that. Kelly’s never lied to anyone in her life.”
A flash of something close to pity moved quickly across her face. “Don’t you get it, Aidan? She was so afraid of disappointing all of you, of not living up to expectation, of disrupting our wedding plans, that she was going to sneak off and have an abortion and live with the secret. You don’t know how much—” She cut off her words abruptly, her attention focused on the back door.
He turned around, and time stopped. His baby girl, his beloved daughter, his one great achievement stood there in the doorway with her lovely face—so much like her mother’s—bathed in tears. He looked at her and thought it couldn’t be true. This was Kelly O’Malley, a beautiful young girl with the kind of future ahead of her that every parent dreamed of for their child.
He wanted to reach out and make it all better, but pain grabbed his gut and twisted hard. She had it all, the brains and the talent and the drive to do anything she wanted, to become anything she wanted to be, and now, in an instant, it was all gone. One moment, one mistake, and her life, her future, would never be the same.
“Aidan.” He heard Maddy’s voice from a great distance. “She needs you. Please don’t lock her out.”
The last thing he wanted to do was lock her out, but a terrible sense of loss overwhelmed him, robbing him of movement and speech.
“Daddy?”
Da . . . da . . .
Daddy, can I have a new Barbie for my birthday?
Was my mommy pretty, Daddy?
Everyone else gets to stay out until eleven, Daddy. Why can’t I?
I got it, Daddy! A full scholarship to Columbia.
She was a whisper of love in her mother’s eyes. A baby cradled in his arms. A little girl with strawberry blond curls and a laugh that made him cry with joy. A teenager whose future could have taken her anywhere she wanted to go. A young woman with a baby of her own growing inside her belly.
He wasn’t sure how it happened. Maybe he took a step toward Kelly or she took one toward him. It didn’t matter. Suddenly his beloved child was in his arms, her tears wetting the front of his shirt, while he struggled with the death of one set of dreams and the birth of new ones.
“I’m sorry,” she said through her sobs. “I’m so sorry.”
“Shh.” He stroked her hair the way he had when she was a little girl and her biggest problem was what to have for dessert. “It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
He said it because it was what she needed to hear, but at that moment, with his pregnant teenage daughter crying on his shoulder, he didn’t think there was a chance in hell.
CLAIRE TAPPED TOMMY Kennedy on the shoulder. “Give me a cigarette.”
“The hell I will,” Tommy said as he pulled a draft for Mel Perry. “I thought you quit smoking.”
“Maybe I’m starting again. Just one, Tommy. I’m jumping out of my skin.”
He slid the draft down the length of the bar and was rewarded with a round of weary applause from the regulars. “What’s going on?”
“Aidan and I tangled a few hours ago.” She drummed her nails on the side of the cash register. “I think it’s a good thing I’m leaving, TK. We both need a change.”
“I’m not giving you a cigarette. Go out and take a walk around the parking lot. That’ll clear your head better than a Camel.”
“I might not come back.”
“Sure you will. You didn’t finish that piece of chocolate cake yet.”
“You I’ll miss,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “My brother-in-law I can do without.”
She threaded her way through the clusters of neighbors and friends and slipped out the front door. People made their jokes about New Jersey—and some of them were even true—but there was nothing more beautiful than the sweet smell of a spring night by the shore. A heady combination of sea air and lilacs that made her feel hopeful about the future.
She tilted her head back and looked up at the darkening sky. Corin was probably halfway to Newark Liberty by now and from there the long trip to Malaysia and whatever lay beyond. She touched the yellow rose she had pinned to the pocket of her shirt. He said he would come back, and she believed him. Anything was possible in this world, even happiness, or so they said.
She walked slowly down the front steps and followed the flagstone path that led to the parking lot in the back. She had told Aidan a thousand times that they should do something about the unlighted lot before O’Malley’s got hit with a slip-and-fall, but there had never been enough money to take care of everything that needed their attention. Maybe someday, she thought. Maybe this was the year when all of their fortunes changed for the better.
Corin had stopped in at O’Malley’s to say good-bye an hour ago. Her heart had almost torn through her chest when she looked up and saw him walking toward her. The regulars had welcomed him into their midst because he was Olivia’s brother, but it was clear they had quickly come to like him for himself. She wasn’t quite sure why that pleased her so much, but it did.
“Look at him,” Tommy had said with a laugh as Corin chucked a McDonald’s bag into the trash behind the bar. “Guy stops by so he can clean out his rental car.”
“Hey, I drove around for ten minutes looking for a trash basket. Don’t you people believe in garbage?” Corin returned the teasing with the same kind of easy charm that had endeared his sister to everyone in town.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Mel Perry had boomed as Corin got ready to leave for Newark Liberty. “Remember, you’ve got family here.”
After he left, she found one last yellow rose propped up near the old cash register.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had looked forward to spring with a sense of renewal and—was it possible? —passion, but suddenly she was flooded with hope. Better than hope. She was flooded with the certainty that at long last life was going to treat her right.
She wasn’t exactly afraid of the dark, but the parking lot at night wasn’t her favorite place. She was about to turn around and return to the front when a voice reached out to her from the shadows.
“Hi, Claire.”
She peered into the darkness and saw Maddy sitting on the trunk of Kelly’s car. “What are you doing out here?”
“Kelly’s got me pinned in. I’m waiting for her to come out and move her car so I can go home.”
“Is she off somewhere with Seth?”
“She’s in the kitchen talking to Aidan.”
“So go in and ask her to move it.”
She shook her head. “Not a good idea right now.”
A deep silence fell between them, and Claire shivered as someone walked across her grave. “Is there a problem?”
The moodiness . . . that episode in the bathroom at the mall . . . oh God .
. . it couldn’t be . . . please . . .
“Yes, there is.” Maddy reached out and touched her forearm. “Kelly is pregnant.”
Her mind went blank. She could actually hear wind rushing through her brain, bits and pieces of memory, words and images all jumbled together in one giant sensory mass.
I wish your cousins were like you, Kelly . . . you’re the one we don’t have to worry about . . . this is Kelly, the O’Malley who is going to really go places . . . you know what your father always says: all he ever had to do was point you in the right direction, and you did the rest. All said with love and admiration and more than a touch of awe, but it was so much—too much—for any young woman to live up to.
She tried to concentrate as Maddy told her the story, ending up with a chance encounter at a mall drugstore and a trip to the women’s health center.
“Why didn’t you tell Aidan?” she asked as she tried to make sense of it all. “He’s her father.”
“She said she would drive up to an abortion clinic in Manhattan if I did. All I could think of was Hannah in the same position and how terrified she would be all alone in the city. If anything had happened to Kelly—” She shook her head. “So I made a bargain with her. I would respect her decision if she would let me be there with her.”
Claire felt the stirrings of admiration building up inside her.
“So what made Kelly change her mind?”
“A snapshot Rose found in the attic.” Maddy’s smile was wistful. “A little three-by-five of Sandy and Kelly on the day of her baptism.”
“I remember that day. They drove in from Pennsylvania with the baby, and the way Irene fussed over her you would’ve thought she was the new Messiah.” Had they ever been that young, that happy? She wanted to think so, that it hadn’t all been smoke and mirrors.
Sandy was little more than a baby herself, a tiny little blond with big blue eyes and a smile that could light up the world. She had been so proud of her beautiful baby girl, so filled with joy that just being in the same room with her made you feel good for the rest of the week.
Maddy’s eyes grew soft with memories of her own. “You know how it is when you first hold your baby daughter in your arms and you see your mother and grandmother and aunts and your sisters in that tiny little face, and then you blink and she’s holding a baby daughter of her own.”
Claire nodded, unable to speak.
“That’s exactly how it happened,” Maddy continued. “She realized that this baby wasn’t just part of her and Seth, it was part of her mother, too, and suddenly there was only one thing she could do.”
They looked at each other, and just like that their differences disappeared. Kelly was all that mattered. She was one of them now, part of their tribe, and the child she was carrying would propel their dreams forward into another generation.
Claire gestured toward the brightly lit kitchen behind the bar. “You should be in there with the two of them, working things out.”
A week ago she would have fought loud and hard to be there in the middle of everything, hungry for the future but too afraid to let go of the past to reach out and grab for it. She wouldn’t have missed these years with Kelly and Aidan for anything, but it was Maddy’s turn now. She had earned that right when she risked her future with Aidan to keep his daughter safe from harm.
Maddy slid off the car and brushed off the back of her jeans. “Can I borrow your keys? I need to get home.”
“You can’t leave.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I can. I need to see Hannah.”
“Go in there and talk to him.”
“It won’t change anything. He’s right. I should have gone to him the second I found out Kelly was pregnant.”
“This isn’t 1953,” Claire shot back. “I know my niece. If she said she would head to a clinic in New York if you told Aidan, then that’s exactly what she would do.” The thought of Kelly alone in some impersonal clinic in God knows what kind of neighborhood made her feel physically ill. “You did the right thing. I hope I would have had the guts to do the same.”
“Thanks,” Maddy said, “but that doesn’t change things. I’ll come back for my car in the morning.”
“Don’t go,” Claire pleaded. “He can be a jackass sometimes, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.”
Aidan’s voice cut through the soft spring air. “She’s right.”
If there ever was a time to call in a favor from God, this was it.
CLAIRE QUICKLY EXCUSED herself and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Maddy alone in the parking lot. Maddy was exhausted in every atom of her body. The simple act of standing upright was almost beyond her ability.
“It’s been a long day,” she said as Aidan made his way slowly across the rutted ground toward her. “I’m going home.”
“This can’t wait.”
“It will have to,” she said. “I want to go home and see my daughter.”
He wasn’t using his cane, and her breath caught as he maneuvered his way around the potholes and branches that littered the ground like land mines.
“Where’s your cane?” she asked. “You shouldn’t be out here without it.”
“Fuck the cane,” he said. “This is more important.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow for my car,” she said over her shoulder as she turned to leave. “Tell Kelly I’ll call her.”
“She’s asleep at the kitchen table. If you wait a few minutes, you can tell her yourself.”
“Nice try, but I already told you I’m out of here.” Two steps, three, five, the distance between them grew, but he kept walking toward her.
His voice cut through the sounds of music and laughter that spilled from O’Malley’s. “Kelly told me everything.”
“So did I, but you weren’t listening.”
“I wasn’t listening to anything at that moment, Maddy. I had just found out my daughter was pregnant.”
He was right. Of course he was right. But she was too exhausted and angry and scared to admit it. “I betrayed your trust, Aidan. I didn’t think about you at all.” She flung the words at him like a challenge. “I was only thinking of how to protect Kelly.”
“I know,” he said. “You were thinking like her mother.”
The truth of his words struck her like a blow and her throat tightened. “Occupational hazard, I guess.”
“But it’s more than that, isn’t it?” He sounded hopeful, scared, everything in between.
“I love her,” she said simply. “I don’t know exactly how or when it happened, but I love her the way I love Hannah. All I could think about was making sure she wasn’t alone.”
“Thank you,” he said, and in his words she heard seventeen years of love and worry and bittersweet triumph.
She lowered her head and started to cry softly. She wasn’t sure if she was happy, sad, exhausted, relieved, or some potent combination of all those emotions and more, but it didn’t matter. The tears spilled down her cheeks and left wet splotches on her cotton sweater just the same.
“I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
“I know,” she said, but she cried anyway, as he closed the distance between them. She had always been a sucker for big men, for broad chests and wide shoulders, for powerful arms and muscular thighs . . . for stubborn, imperfect men with big imperfect hearts who knew how to love. She had recognized his goodness the first moment they met, recognized her future in his eyes even if that future wasn’t turning out exactly the way she had imagined it.
“I know I should have told you everything right away,” she said, “but I was terrified we might lose her if I did. She would have gone up to New York, Aidan, I know she would have, and if anything—”
The thought was more than either one of them could handle.
He pulled her close, and she settled into the familiar thrill of his embrace. His smell, his warmth, his love. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, his mouth warm against the side of her throat. “We won’t be y
our normal everyday newlyweds.”
“Hannah would have made sure we never had a chance to be normal everyday newlyweds.”
“I want you to know what you’re getting into. Anything’s possible. We could end up raising Kelly’s baby.”
She dropped her guard and let him see into her soul. “I know what I’m getting into,” she said, as well as anyone could possibly know what the future held for them. “If Kelly needs us, we’ll be there for her.”
“This is a hell of a lot more than you were bargaining on when you said you’d marry me.”
“You’re right. It is.”
“If you want to postpone the wedding until we see—”
She raised up on her toes and kissed him. “No.”
“What was that?”
She kissed him again. “That was a no.”
“Last chance to change your mind.”
“Not now,” she said. “Not ever.”
“This is a hell of a lot to ask of you,” he said. “We were supposed to be talking about our own babies, not grandbabies.”
“Is there a law that says we can’t do both?”
The look in his eyes made her heart soar.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” he said, and then he kissed her and sealed their fate.
Whatever happened, they were in this together.
They were family.
Epilogue
Late September—Paradise Point
“THIS IS A VERY important job,” Kelly said as she fastened the last tiny hook on Hannah’s dress. “The flower girl brings all of the magic to the wedding.”
Hannah eyed her reflection in the full-length mirror. “I know,” she said, lifting up her skirts so she could admire her ruffled petticoat. “Mommy told me.”
She looked like an angel in her cotton candy-pink dress, and Kelly had to blink back sentimental tears as the little girl twirled around the room with Priscilla yapping at her heels. It seemed all she did these days was cry. Happy tears, sentimental tears, tears for no reason at all. Morning sickness had been replaced by an excess of emotion that had kept her in a constant state of hormonal weepiness.
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