The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge

by Stewart, Mariah

  “She seems to be adjusting awfully quickly,” Cam noted. “Is that normal?”

  “I think she’s trying really hard to make me think she is, but she has to be hurting. She’s tried to act as if this is all very normal when it decidedly is anything but. No one adjusts that quickly when their life is turned upside down. But I have to give her a lot of credit for the effort she’s making. I don’t know that I was as strong at her age.”

  “Well, I should probably go and give you some time to be with her. You have a lot to talk about, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “You’ve been doing okay so far. The two of you will figure it out.”

  “What about us?” she asked solemnly. “Are we good?”

  “We haven’t not been good. We were good yesterday and last night and this morning. We’re good now, and we’ll be good tomorrow and the day after that.”

  He took a strand of her hair, wrapped it around his finger, and used it to gently pull her closer to him. He brushed his lips across hers, then kissed the side of her mouth. “We’re good, Ellie.”

  The rain began as misty drops that showed up silently on Cam’s windshield as he made his way home. By the time he pulled into his own driveway, it was a steady beat against the hood of the pickup. He jumped out of the truck and ran to the side porch. Once under the overhanging roof, he fitted the key into the door and pushed it open. The house was quiet, as if too well mannered to greet him with anything other than the hush from the hot-air vents. Usually he appreciated it. Today he could use a little more than white noise to drown out the cacophony in his head.

  All he’d been able to think about all day was Ellie. He’d never experienced that kick to the gut he’d heard other guys talk about, but the first time he saw her, he felt sucker punched. Still did. She was everything he’d ever looked for and never thought he’d find. Funny that the two things he wanted most in life were so deeply entwined. The woman and the house.

  How ironic that, to have the one, he’d have to say good-bye to the other.

  Not for the first time, Cam wondered why life couldn’t be less complicated and more simple.

  The Cavanaughs’ house had been a sanctuary to Cam, the calm in the midst of the storm. It had been a refuge for him and Wendy that terrible day when the whole world had shifted and they were suddenly cast out from their family—such as it had been—and became “the O’Connor orphans.” It had been their first taste of what a normal home life might be like, their first up-close-and-personal with consistently rational adults. Meals were at the same times every day and everyone was expected to be at the table at six o’clock every night. Homework was expected to be completed, and if there was a problem understanding something, Lilly or Ted would be there to offer help. People spoke kindly and listened when others spoke and engaged in real conversations, no shouting, no screaming, no slamming doors or loud cursing. The Cavanaughs’ house was definitely a no-drama zone. Even as an adult, when things bothered him or he felt confused or conflicted about something, he’d stop by the house at the end of Bay View Road. When Lilly was still alive, they’d sit and talk, and Cam would always feel better—calmer—just for having spent some time with her. After she passed, sometimes he’d let himself in and he’d sit for a while, sometimes in the living room, sometimes in the kitchen, and he’d let the memory of her spirit and loving heart soothe him.

  Cam believed that if he’d grown up to be a good man, he had Ted Cavanaugh to thank for being the role model he’d needed, when he needed it, and Lilly to thank for loving him and Wendy when they’d most felt unlovable. The Cavanaughs’ house represented all that was good in St. Dennis to Cameron, and knowing that it would be his by summer—when Ellie said she’d be ready to sell—should have gladdened his heart.

  But that was before he’d acknowledged his feelings for Ellie, before he realized just how deeply those feelings went. Before he understood that he’d gladly give up the house if only the woman would stay.

  Chapter 19

  Ellie took her time washing the coffee cup that Cam had used, drawing out the process by rinsing it first in hot water, then in cold. She wanted to curl up in the corner all by herself and sort out the events of the past twenty-four hours but there simply wasn’t time. Any sorting or thinking she was going to do would have to wait until she crawled into bed that night and could go over it all: the night spent with Cam and the new direction their relationship was taking; the fact that he’d known who she was and didn’t tell her that he knew; the revision of what she’d believed to be her parents’ love story from that of total mutual devotion to a husband who’d cheated. Gabi …

  Ellie wondered if her mother had known that her father had strayed. Had she known about Gabi? Was Clifford’s infidelity the reason Lynley began spending less time at home and more time working, accepting modeling jobs that would find her on any given day in some exotic place far from home?

  Ellie had to accept the fact that those were questions that most likely would never be answered. The questions about Cameron and their relationship—those were very different. Her feelings for him left her totally confused. She’d thought she was in love with Henry, but Henry had never ignited her whole being the way Cam did. When she was with Cameron, she felt totally alive, totally engaged in whatever they were doing or talking about. Her mind didn’t wander onto mundane things like a pair of shoes she’d seen in the window of a shop earlier that day or which trendy restaurant they’d go to for dinner. Cameron was always in the present, and he brought her with him and kept her there.

  It was so strange to think that what had begun as the most difficult time of her life was turning out to be the most rewarding in so many ways.

  And then there was Gabi.

  Ellie’d agreed to take her in because she couldn’t bear to send any kid into the hell of foster care and the possibility that she’d be bounced from one foster home to another. It wasn’t Gabi’s fault that Clifford had cheated on his wife with her mother. It wasn’t her fault that her mother was dead and she had no one else to turn to. It wasn’t her fault that there was no one living who loved her enough to give her a home. Ellie hadn’t really wanted her, but she wasn’t heartless enough to turn her back on a kid who needed her. Even if the last thing Ellie needed right now was a kid to complicate her life.

  Right now that kid was upstairs trying to make herself at home in a place where she had to know she hadn’t been wanted.

  Ellie turned off the voices in her head. Too much had happened today for her to think rationally about any of it. It was time to shut down the inner chatter and deal with things in order of priority.

  She went upstairs and stood in the doorway and watched Gabi sorting through her clothes. She was struck by Gabi’s obvious attempts to make even this task seem, well, normal.

  “I have more clothes than dresser space.” Gabi looked up when she heard Ellie in the hall. “I hung stuff in the closet, but I have a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere.”

  “You can use a dresser from one of the other rooms if you like. There’s one that matches this one across the hall.” Ellie looked around the room. “We could move out that chair and put the dresser there.”

  “I was thinking that would be a good place to read,” Gabi told her. “I like to read at night before I go to bed.”

  “An excellent habit. Did you bring any books with you?”

  “A few. Just my favorites. I didn’t have time to pack up everything. I don’t know what’s going to happen to all our stuff. All my mom’s stuff.” A dark cloud crossed Gabi’s face. “What happens to people’s stuff when they die?”

  “Depends. If your mother had a will, then things will be divided up in accordance with the instructions she left.” Even to Ellie, that explanation sounded stiff. “Do you know if she had a will, or if she had a lawyer?”

  “She had a lawyer.” Gabi’s eyes lit, remembering. “That’s how I got to go to the Foresters. Because her will
said that if anything happened to her, I was to go to my father.” Gabi made a face. “I guess she wrote that part before he went to jail.”

  “Do you know the name of the firm?”

  “Mr. Forester would know.”

  “Maybe it’s in that envelope that you brought with you. Do you know where it is?”

  Gabi nodded and leaned into one of the big boxes Jesse had carried up for her. “It’s here.” She handed it over to Ellie, who immediately opened it and started leafing through the papers.

  “Let’s see if we can find … oh, here it is. Donald Ansel. Germaine, Ansel and Gallagher.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s probably too late to call now but we can call on Monday.” Ellie paused. “Actually, maybe we should have Jesse call.…”

  “He can find out where my mom’s stuff is? Where the rest of my stuff is?” Gabi looked hopeful.

  “I don’t know why not.” And I don’t know why Max Forester hadn’t dealt with this, but whatever. It will be dealt with now, Ellie resolved.

  “I didn’t have much time to pack.” Gabi sat on the edge of her bed and Dune jumped up next to her. “It was hard to know what to take.”

  “Didn’t anyone help you?”

  “Mrs. Carroll, next door, helped. She said I should just take my winter stuff because the cold weather was coming.” Gabi stared at the space between her feet on the carpet. “She said I could only take a few books because there wouldn’t be room in the car.”

  “Mr. Forester’s car?”

  Gabi nodded.

  “We’ll work this out next week, and we’ll see if we can get your books and your other things.”

  “My summer clothes, too?”

  Ellie knew Gabi wasn’t thinking about what she’d wear next year as much as where she’d be. She was asking if she’d still be here.

  “Whichever of your things you want, we’ll bring. Maybe you could make a list,” Ellie suggested. “In the meantime, let’s see where we could fit another dresser in here, maybe rearrange the furniture if we have to.…”

  The furniture was rearranged, the second dresser brought in and filled, and dinner made and eaten by eight thirty. They’d barely finished eating when Gabi began yawning, her eyes at half-mast.

  “Why don’t you turn in early?” Ellie suggested. “You’ve had one heck of a long day.”

  “A life-changing day,” Gabi replied. “A day after which my life will never be the same, ever.”

  Ellie suppressed a smile. Had she been this dramatic at thirteen?

  “We’ll need to put clean sheets on your bed,” Ellie told her.

  “I did that already. I switched the sheets that were on the bed in the first room. They smelled clean.”

  “They were. Good thinking.” Ellie mentally added independent and self-sufficient to intelligent, adaptable, and good-natured.

  “Can I take Dune up with me?”

  “If she wants to go, sure. But I don’t let her sleep on the bed.”

  “Come on, Dune.” Gabi snapped her fingers and Dune got up and trotted after her, leaving Ellie to wonder if she’d just lost her dog to this child.

  “I’ll be up in a while to say good night.”

  “I’ll be awake for a while. I like to read before I turn off the light. I like to have nice things in my head before I go to sleep.”

  “What are you reading now?”

  “Anne of Green Gables.” Gabi hastened to add, “I know it’s a kid’s book, but I really like it. I’ve read it, like, a million times.”

  “That was my favorite when I was a girl,” Ellie told her.

  “I like that Anne was always so hopeful. I mean, she was an orphan and still believed that good things would happen when she went to live with Matthew and Marilla.” She paused, then added, “And I like the way she looked at things, like everything was special. Like the Violet Vale and the Lake of Shining Waters. I was thinking about that when I was looking at the Bay today, but Bay of Shining Waters doesn’t sound quite the same.”

  Ellie couldn’t help but smile.

  “And at first, after my mom died and no one knew what to do with me, I was thinking I was like Anne. You know, an orphan coming to live with strangers who don’t understand her. But I told myself that I’m not quite an orphan, that I do have someone.” She looked across the room to Ellie with her huge round eyes and said, “I have you. And while you don’t understand about my mother, you understand about my father.”

  “All too well.” Ellie nodded. “But I can relate to how it feels to lose your mother. My mother died, too, though I wasn’t a kid when that happened.”

  “I remember about your mother. My mom had a People magazine that had her picture in it. She was beautiful, like a fairy princess.”

  “I always thought so, too. But how could you remember that?” Ellie asked. “You were only a year old or so when she died.”

  “I found the magazine in my mom’s room. I guess she kept it for some reason.” Gabi’s fingers twisted in her hair. “You probably don’t like my mom very much, do you?”

  “I didn’t know her,” Ellie answered honestly. “I don’t know what went on between my dad and my mom, or Dad and your mother. I doubt we’ll ever know.”

  “She was a really good mom, Ellie.” Gabi’s voice was thin and tight.

  “I’m sure she was. Judging by the fact that you seem like a really good kid, she’d have had to have been a really good mom.”

  The tension that had been building in Gabi’s face began to vanish.

  “Gabi, you know that you can talk about your mom anytime you want,” Ellie assured her. “Your mom, or anything else you want to talk about.”

  Gabi nodded several times, then ran up the steps, Dune close at her heels.

  It wasn’t hard for Ellie to recall how lost she’d felt when Lynley died, and she’d been twenty at the time, halfway through college. But she was an adult, and had handled Lynley’s death with a certain amount of maturity with the help of her father. At thirteen, Gabi not only lacked the maturity, but she hadn’t had the support of her father, and from the little she’d said, there didn’t seem to be another adult in her life who could help her to navigate such deep waters.

  Whatever the relationship between Marilyn Hansen and Clifford Chapman might have been, their daughter did seem like a good kid—despite the lack of attention from her father—a kid who deserved a better hand than the one she’d been dealt. Ellie covered her face with her hands. The last thing she’d expected when she arose that morning was to find herself with a very young teenager to raise, but there it was. And if Gabi could make such a brave effort to adjust, so could she.

  Ellie cleaned up the kitchen from dinner and closed up the house for the night, turning off lights as she went through the downstairs to the stairwell in the foyer. She started to grab a book from the stack of journals she’d yet to read, then put it back. What if she discovered something else that she didn’t really want to know about? She had enough to keep her mind racing through the night, so why look for trouble?

  She stopped in Gabi’s room to say good night, and found her already asleep, book in one hand, the other resting on Dune’s back. The dog’s tail began to softly thump when Ellie walked into the room to turn off the light, her little dog face looking chagrined at having been caught on the forbidden bed.

  “It’s okay,” Ellie whispered, her hand briefly touching Dune’s head as she reached for the book. “Keep her company, Dune. Good girl.”

  Ellie left the book on the bedside table and turned off the lamp. In her own room, she stripped down for the shower and grabbed a long nightshirt from a drawer. She took a long, hot shower, dried her hair, and dressed for bed. The last time she’d felt so drained, mentally and physically exhausted, had been last year when the charges were made against her father and Henry. Ellie had been so shocked, so devastated, so disbelieving. She’d had to be shown the evidence in order to believe it, and the agents who’d investigated the case undercover for months had been happy t
o lay it all out for her, hoping for her testimony. But since Ellie had never been involved in the investment side of the business, and because both her father and her fiancé had gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure she was kept in the dark, the government had had little use for her. She’d been deprived of the comfort of both men in her life, and had been left with Carly and Carly’s family to hold her together.

  She couldn’t imagine going through something like that without Carly to help her through. Yet here was Gabi, going through so much more, with no one. Well, no one except Ellie.

  The wind picked up outside and the branches of the trees smacked against the glass. Ellie turned off the light, pulled the blankets up to her chin, and tried to get comfortable. The last time she’d crawled into this bed, she’d been with Cameron. If not for Gabi, he’d probably be here now.

  Not a good idea to have a sleepover with a guy the first night Gabi was here, she’d realized. Not a good message to send the kid. She pulled over the pillow Cam had used and held it against her body. It was a poor substitute, but she could smell the faintest bit of his aftershave lingering on the pillowcase.

  She’d been shocked when Cam admitted that he knew who she was, surprised that he hadn’t made more of an issue out of it and that he’d never let on. She tried to focus on this one thing, her eyes closed in the dark, an attempt to calm her brain because there was way too much swirling around in there tonight.

  On the one hand, she felt that he’d deceived her by not letting her know that he knew, for letting her keep up the pretense. On the other, she’d be the world’s biggest hypocrite for accusing him of being deceitful when she—liar, liar, pants on fire—had so deliberately kept her identity a secret.

  He knew, but he hadn’t told anyone, not even her. He’d respected her right to privacy, he’d said. How could she be angry with a man who hadn’t grilled her or confronted her, but who’d left it up to her when to reveal her secrets?

  She fell asleep, thinking he was a one-of-a-kind guy. A guy it would be really hard to say good-bye to when the time came. But they had from now until summer, and that was going to have to be enough.