The One Who Stays

by Blake, Toni

  This place was changing him. Or his grandpa was. Or Meg was. He only knew that before coming here, he never would have pulled a little girl onto a dance floor without some kind of ulterior motive like building fake trust to steal something from someone connected to her. But this...this was just dancing. He held his arm up, the girl’s hand in his, motioning her to spin beneath it, hearing her laughter, seeing her smile. He envied her childhood for just a few seconds. But it wasn’t envy of hers so much as just missing his—the good parts.

  Yet the thing to do—the only thing to do—was move forward, since no one could go back. And as one song blended into another on the patio, as more wine was consumed and dance partners changed—he made sure he ended up hand in hand with Meg.

  “It was nice of you to dance with Ashley,” she said as they came together. With her, he danced closer, though, one hand curving around her waist, the other folding over her outstretched one. Their torsos brushed lightly.

  He leaned in to speak low. “She’s sweet. But you’re my favorite partner, darlin’.”

  She lowered her gaze, bit her lip. Trying to hide the response he knew she wanted to give.

  Because she still wasn’t sure of him. Because she had good reason not to be.

  But damn, he wanted to change that. He wanted to change that almost more than he wanted to breathe.

  And like it or not, he knew what he had to do to be the man he desired to be. He knew beyond doubt.

  The problem being—doing it would probably achieve the exact opposite of making Meg believe in him. It would probably make her throw him right out of her life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  SETH STOOD ON the dock, watching the ferry leave, taking his grandfather back to the mainland. Granddad stood on the rear deck, holding up his hand in a last wave. Seth waved back as his grandpa got smaller, smaller, too small to see, the ferry’s wake pushing the boat farther into the distance past the striped lighthouse and toward the Mackinac Bridge, just a tiny silhouette on the horizon.

  It had rained this morning, a steady drizzle on his walk into town, but now the clouds were parting, the sun spilling out from behind them to reveal a blue sky.

  God knew he didn’t want to tell Meg what he’d done. But nothing else could ever make things right. And even if it meant losing her—losing more than he already had—it was the only answer he could come to. It was what his grandfather had advised him. It would make him proud of his grandson. And that seemed a good measuring stick to live by.

  Leaving the dock, he patted his pocket to make sure what he’d put in it earlier was still there. He turned left onto Harbor Street, taking in the coffee shop and neighboring yarn shop, the flower shop and Dahlia’s Café, the Skipper’s Wheel and the bicycle livery. Flowers dripped from window boxes, and picket fences lined tidy lawns. He passed pastel-colored bikes and pedestrians, as well as a large gray tomcat he’d come to know from the islanders as Mrs. Farley’s cat, even though he’d never met Mrs. Farley.

  Suzanne stood outside Petal Pushers watering cottage green window boxes of verbena and periwinkle, smiling and waving as he walked by. He returned the wave but kept up a brisk stride rather than going to say hello—he was suddenly a man on a mission. He had to do this now, clear his conscience now. It couldn’t wait another day; it couldn’t wait another hour or even another minute.

  Damn, the last few weeks really had changed him. His conscience had always been a thing easily quieted, shoved to the background—and he’d been good at justifying his own actions to himself as his father had taught him. But suddenly, all that was different.

  He stepped into the inn—the front door being like that of a hotel in summer, with a buzzer just inside to ring for service or check-in. Ringing it would be the easiest way to find Meg, but the least personal. And what he was about to do was personal as hell.

  He walked through the common areas of the house room by room—Miss Kitty lay curled up in the nook’s easy chair, breakfast dishes littered the kitchen counter, and the library stood quiet and untouched. The TV in the parlor wasn’t on, but a Scrabble game had been left spread across the coffee table, likely sometime yesterday. Where was Meg?

  Not in the laundry room, not on the stairs, not in her bedroom when he was so bold as to ease the door open a few inches to peek inside.

  You could just leave it here. Leave it here like some otherworldly miracle without explanation.

  Tempting as hell. But not the right thing to do.

  Returning downstairs, he exited the back door to find the patio empty, as well as the lilac grove.

  But the vague, almost imperceptible sound of garden tools led him through the lilac bushes into an open area of the yard, past clumps of daisies just starting to come up, and into the rose garden. Meg held a pair of pruners, kneeling next to a yellow rosebush. She smiled up at him. “The lilacs are gone, but the roses are blooming.”

  He’d barely visited this far region of the vast grounds—and when he had, the bushes had only looked thorny and thinly leaved. Now roses of yellow, pink, and white bloomed around a sitting area sporting old-fashioned metal chairs that he thought dated from the fifties.

  She saw him eyeing them. “The maintenance on these is rough, but they’ve been here my whole life so I paint and rustproof them every few years and only leave them out during tourist season.”

  “I couldn’t find you,” he said. It sounded dumb to him as a response. But not being able to locate her had thrown him for some reason. He hadn’t liked it. Even realizing she could have just stepped out to run an errand or see a friend, he felt better to know she was here. And the idea of her leaving this place for good felt as wrong to him as...well, as his whole existence up to now.

  “While the roses are blooming,” she replied, “this will pretty much be my go-to spot. I don’t love them as much as the lilacs, but they last longer and do the trick.” She grinned.

  And he wanted to grin back. His usual grin. It wouldn’t come, though. A first.

  She noticed. “Is something wrong?”

  How the hell to answer. He had no idea.

  “I know you just saw your grandpa off. Is that it?” She tilted her head, narrowed her gaze, trying to understand.

  But there was no way she was going to understand what he’d come to tell her. Which maybe made telling her the craziest thing he’d ever done. And still something that didn’t feel like a choice or a decision—just what had to be done to make the world a little more right.

  His grandpa had said if he couldn’t do right by Meg he should move on, and he was taking that seriously. He’d played with people’s lives for so many years, uncaringly, so much that it was in his blood, a natural behavior for him—but now was the time to change that, quit playing. And there was only one way to do it.

  “Seth?”

  She looked downright concerned now—he’d taken too long to answer and was standing in front of her like some sort of zombie. So start. Somewhere.

  “I have some things to tell you, Meg.”

  Her face changed. She heard the gravity in his voice. “This sounds serious.” She’d been on her knees, pruning, but now lowered herself to sit in the grass.

  So he did, too. And shit, he’d given this no thought—where to begin, how to say it. One more piece of evidence that he didn’t operate the way he used to. He’d even forgotten how. For better or worse.

  “When I was last here, with my grandparents, as a kid, I did something wrong. I took something.”

  Her gaze narrowed with concern and her voice sounded cautious. “What did you take?”

  He couldn’t quite look her in her eye now—so he focused on a pocket, a breast pocket of the shirt she wore open over a tank. The shirt was blue, the pocket outlined with darker blue stitching and held closed with a small pearlescent button. It was old-fashioned but pretty, like Meg.

  He didn’t
answer her question—because he couldn’t yet; because it was all too hard. “My dad, he...wanted me to take things. He made me feel like it was the only way to make him proud of me. He’d already started teaching me how to do that—steal things, hide things.”

  He stole a quick glance at her face—she looked sullen, rightfully so. The pocket was easier to look at, so he shifted back down.

  “When I came on that trip, he told me to bring him something back, something valuable. And... I just didn’t quite understand the wrongness of it yet, Meg. I don’t mean to make excuses—or maybe I do. But the honest truth is—I didn’t understand what I was doing, or how it could hurt someone.”

  “What did you take?” she asked again.

  Swallowing past the boulder that seemed to fill his throat, he dug down into the front pocket of his blue jeans and extracted the diamond ring. He held it out in his palm, not knowing if she’d recognize it or be aware that it had gone missing. “It was your grandma’s wedding ring.”

  She gasped slightly. Reached out to touch it, but then drew her hand back as if it might burn her.

  He squeezed his eyes shut tight for a second, then willed himself to go on. This wasn’t even the hard part yet. So far, it was the confession of a little boy. But it was about to become the much more heinous confession of a grown man.

  “I hid it in a book,” he told her. “A copy of The Wizard of Oz my grandparents had given me. And I hid the book behind a baseboard. I guess maybe it was one of those spots your grandma knew about when she was young. And then a call came.” He stopped, caught his breath. “We had to leave. Right away. Throw everything into our bags fast and catch the next ferry. It was when my mom had her accident. She was in the hospital for a day before she died—we got there just in time to say goodbye. I mean...she wasn’t awake, I don’t know if she knew we were there, but we got to say goodbye.”

  The breath Meg took was audible—drawing it in, letting it back out. Sounded shaky. “I’m still so sorry that happened to you, Seth. That’s awful. Especially for a little boy.”

  He pressed on. She wouldn’t feel sorry for him in a few minutes. “I didn’t take the ring with me—forgot all about it until my dad asked me later if I’d brought him anything.”

  “Bastard,” she whispered.

  Yeah. He was a bastard. Seth had always known it—it was just harder to see it in someone whose only saving grace was that he loved you. And who, right about that time, had become Seth’s only lasting human connection in the world.

  His heart beat hard now, remembering. And knowing what came next. That the bastard had trained him too well.

  Talk faster. Get through this. Get it all out. “It’s why I came back here, Meg. To see if it was still here, after all this time. To see if my memory of taking it was true. And it was. Took me a while, but I found it.”

  Another gasp from her. And a soft murmur. “Those times I found you looking around...”

  Just keep going. “I came to find it—and take it with me. Sell it. Use it to get a new start. I thought it made sense. That if it was still where I left it, if it had been missing all this time, me taking it for good wouldn’t matter—it wouldn’t hurt anyone any more than it already had back when I took it the first time.” He stopped, let out a breath. Found the courage to raise his eyes back to hers again. “So who’s the bastard now?”

  Meg sat before him, breathless. Dumbfounded. She knew the story of the ring—how it had gone missing one summer when she was a teenager. Her family had arrived soon after, in fact, and they’d searched everywhere for it. Never in secret hiding places in walls, but in obvious spots it could have fallen—behind furniture, between couch cushions, in all the house’s known nooks and cracks and crannies. “All these years,” she whispered, “it’s been in a wall?”

  He nodded. “Where I left it as a kid. I’m so sorry.” He was still holding it out to her, and now gestured with it again. “Take it, darlin’. It’s yours now.”

  She still just looked at it, though. It was like...seeing a ghost in a way. “But...why? If you came here to take it, why on earth are you giving it to me?”

  “Because... I can’t. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

  She let out a breath. “This makes you a pretty terrible crook.”

  “Good. I don’t want to be that anymore.”

  But she hadn’t meant to absolve him—and in fact, now it was running through her mind how long he’d lied to her about this, even if just by omission, and how close she’d felt to him in moments when he’d been keeping this ring, this secret, from her. It answered so many questions—but not in good ways. “No wonder,” she said, more to herself than to him.

  “No wonder what?” he asked, looking appropriately wary.

  “No wonder I never could quite trust in you completely. No wonder I felt some kind of secret still between us.”

  “This is the last of them, though,” he told her. “I know you have no reason to believe that, but it’s true.”

  Meg reached out, took the ring from his palm, the ring she hadn’t seen in over twenty years. “I’m sad my grandma died without it,” she said, “but I’m glad it’s back.”

  Sitting across from her in a patch of thick green grass, Seth shut his eyes a second, then reopened them on her. “Can you forgive me, darlin’?”

  It was a good question.

  He’d come clean. But after a reprehensible choice. He’d been so dishonest when they were so close. And yet he was being honest now.

  Maybe it was the act of a sincerely repentant man who was truly changed.

  Or maybe the act of a man who would sin again because it was in his nature.

  Can someone really change that much? Can someone really break away from their upbringing? She had no idea. Was he the man who’d spun little Ashley Eastman around on the patio last night, the man who’d done an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay since he’d arrived here? Or was he the thief who’d snuck around her house to steal her grandmother’s ring a second time while he bedded her in the process?

  “The part that stings the worst,” she said softly, “is that you kept this from me even when we were having sex, when I was trusting you, feeling connected to you, close to you.”

  He lowered his eyes. “I hate that I did that, Meg. I wish I could go back. But I can only go forward. And... I understand if you don’t want anything more to do with me. I just...” He stopped, shut his eyes again, shook his head. Then reopened them. “I feel like there’s something good between us, darlin’. Something real, something solid. I’d hate for us to lose out on that because I made one last mistake—no matter how big.”

  She took that in, let it settle in her heart. Something good between us, something solid. He was a charmer—she’d known that about him from the start. But she’d gotten lost somewhere along the way and didn’t know how to find that line where the charm became the truth—or not.

  She stared down at the ring in her hand. It had never lost its sparkle hidden away all that time—even now the sun shone down through tall tree limbs to make it shimmer in the light.

  “I need some time to think.”

  He nodded. Sat there for a moment more, but then pushed to his feet. She did the same, not in the mood to let any man tower over her.

  “I’ll head back to the cabin. Be there if you want me—if you want to talk, if you want me to do some work around here, anything. Anything you want at all.”

  She was out of words, so just briefly met his gaze one last time before walking away, pruners still in one hand, her grandmother’s long-lost wedding ring closed in the other.

  The summer of 1957 had nothing on this one.

  Part 4

  “There is no place like home.”

  —L. Frank Baum,

  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE SKIPP
ER’S WHEEL RESTAURANT was four times deep as it was wide—with a total width from one side to the other of about twelve feet. It was mostly a long counter with a griddle behind it, but a handful of tables had been crammed in every imaginable spot down the side. It served breakfast all day—and only breakfast—its walls whitewashed and hung with fishing nets, black-and-white pictures of old boats and seafarers, and of course a few ship’s wheels.

  The place was always packed, making it a less than ideal setting for an intimate conversation, but that was where Meg and Suzanne ended up after Meg texted her: Calling an emergency lunch! Can you go?

  Let me hustle a couple of customers out of here and I’ll lock up and meet you in ten at the Skipper’s Wheel.

  Suzanne already had a table in a rear corner beneath a polished wooden eight-pronged captain’s wheel when Meg squeezed her way past the counter stools and bustling waitresses to take a seat.

  “What’s the emergency?” Suzanne asked, wide-eyed.

  Meg held up the ring, which was far too big for her but on her finger just the same—because she wasn’t sure quite what else to do with it.

  Suzanne’s jaw dropped at the sight of the diamond. “Where did it come from?”

  “Seth.”

  Suzanne raised her gaze from the ring to Meg, appearing flummoxed. “He proposed?”

  Meg gasped softly. “God, no. It was my grandmother’s.” And then she explained the whole twenty-plus-year story.

  “That’s a pretty good emergency,” Suzanne replied when she was done.

  “So what do I do?”

  Suzanne scrunched up her face, clearly stumped for an answer. Finally she settled on, “Follow your heart?”

  Meg let out a long sigh—just as a waitress named Jolene who she’d known forever came skidding up to their table to say, “What can I get you two today?”

  When they’d placed their orders and Jolene departed, Suzanne said, “The fact that he came clean means he’s not trying to play you—I think. And frankly, I’d be more skeptical about that if you had a trust fund or something, but you don’t, so seems like if he was trying to get something from you, he’d have just taken the ring and never let you be the wiser.”