Dani’s girls didn’t seem too concerned about leaving her behind, too excited at the fun ahead of them. “Bye, Mama,” Mia said.
“You have to promise me you’ll behave yourselves and stick with Dr. and Mrs. Morales.”
“I will and Silver will, too, won’t you?”
“Sure thing,” Silver said.
Her older daughter seemed actually...happy. Happier, at least, than she had been since they came to town. A tight band around Dani’s heart seemed to ease a little and she smiled at Silver.
“Keep an eye on your sister, okay? Here’s some spending money, if you need it.”
“Thanks.” Silver shoved the twenty she gave her into her pocket then bounded off the boat.
“They’ll be just fine. I promise, we won’t let either of them out of our sight. You have my number, right?” Myra asked.
“Yes. I have yours and Dr. Morales’s, plus Silver’s.”
“If you make it to the festival before it closes, call and we’ll let you know where we are. If not, we can drop the girls off at your house or they can wait at our house, whichever you prefer.”
She waved them off, then settled back on the boat.
Javi was going to climb back on, then pointed to the lineup of boats still waiting for the ramp. “That’s a good hour of waiting in the water. You could make it back to the marina in Haven Point in about half that. Want me to drive your truck and trailer back and meet you there?”
Ruben turned to Dani. “We’ll let you decide. Are you tired of the water or can you handle another half hour in The Wonder back to Haven Point? It will be faster now that the parade is done and there’s not so much traffic on the water.”
“I’m game for a return trip. Sounds like that would be the easier course. My car is at the marina in Haven Point anyway.”
“Good plan. I guess we’ll let you out here, then, Javi.”
His brother hopped onto the dock, untied the rigging and tossed it back onto the boat. “I’ll see you back in Haven Point, then.”
Ruben waved, maneuvered the boat away from the dock then slowly made his way around the other boats in the marina and out to the open water of the big lake.
The moment they were clear of everyone, Dani suddenly realized just what she had signed up for. Thirty minutes alone with Ruben on a romantic moonlight ride on his boat.
Heaven help her.
* * *
“The parade was fun, but I have to admit, I like this better.”
The boat seemed much quieter now as Ruben motored steadily back to town. There was an intimacy under the moonlight. A few other boaters had opted to make the return trip so they weren’t alone on the water, but they all seemed to keep their distance.
“Are you warm enough?” he asked her. She had moved up to sit beside him, much to his delight.
“I’m fine. You were right, it’s cozy here with this all-weather cover.”
“That was one of the selling points. When you live on a mountain lake, you’ve got a short boating season. Having a cover extends that, at least by a few months.”
In the glow from the boat instruments, her features were a blur. What was she thinking? Did she think he had somehow arranged all of this to be alone with her? He hoped not—although he had to admit, he might have, if he’d been that smart.
“The girls seemed to have fun tonight. I think I even saw Silver laugh a time or two.”
“Don’t say anything,” she said, “but I think my daughter has a crush on your nephew.”
He smiled, remembering those innocent, uncomplicated days when liking a girl meant holding her hand between classes and maybe slipping notes into her locker.
“Zach is a good kid. Don’t worry. Even if he likes her, too—which I think he does—he’ll be respectful.”
“Your family is pretty hard to resist.”
“Then why keep trying so hard? They like you, too. As much as you let anybody like you, anyway.”
She gave him a long look. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Now he’d done it. Opened his mouth, when he meant to simply enjoy the ride with her. “Never mind. Forget it.”
“No. I’d like to know.”
He sighed. “Only that you seem to go out of your way to keep people at a careful distance, almost as if you’re afraid to let anybody get too close. My family. The women of the Haven Point Helping Hands. Andie told me they’ve invited you to join them, but you’re really good at making excuses. I just wonder why you’re trying so hard.”
She gripped her hands tightly together in her lap. “I didn’t grow up in a nice, safe place like Haven Point, where they have light parades to celebrate the holidays and everybody knows everybody else.”
“I know. You grew up in Queens. But there are good people everywhere. Surely you had plenty of nice people around you there. Teachers. Neighbors. Friends. Your own family.”
Her hands curled in her lap and she gazed out at the boat lights cutting through the water. “I’m not like you, Ruben, with a wonderful, warm, loving family that gets together on Sundays and spends holidays together and does nice things for neighbors, just for the fun of it. That’s a completely foreign way of life to me. I’m...struggling to adjust.”
“What was your childhood like, then?”
She looked out at the moonlight slicing across the cold lake. “Not pretty. I went into the foster care system when I was eight years old and stayed there until I got pregnant with Silver at seventeen, mostly to escape.”
That explained so many things about her. Ruben’s heart ached and he fought the urge to turn off the motor, float there in the water and just hold her, as she had done for him only a few nights earlier.
“What happened to your parents?”
“My father walked out when I was two. I have no idea where he went or why and to be honest, I don’t care. He lost the right to be considered any kind of father a long time ago. Mom tried her best to keep things together until she got sick. Hepatitis C. It hit her hard and she died before she could get a liver transplant.”
“I’m so sorry,” he murmured.
“One day she wasn’t at the apartment when I came home from school and a neighbor told me she collapsed on the stoop and was taken away in an ambulance. Social services came right after that and a cold stick of a woman told me my mother, my only remaining parent, had died. She told me to gather a few things I cared about so she and a police officer could take me to a new house.”
His throat ached and he finally couldn’t resist following up on his earlier impulse. He reached out a hand and pulled her closer to him. He thought she might yank away but after one frozen moment, she stayed there, cradled under one arm while he maneuvered The Wonder through the dark waves with the other.
“Was it...rough? Foster care, I mean.” He had to ask.
“There was no physical or sexual abuse, if that’s what you’re wondering. I know that can happen but I suppose I was luckier than some. I had a few close calls in the latter area but I knew enough to sleep with a kitchen knife close by and nobody tried anything twice.”
His hand tightened on the wheel as a mental picture emerged of her, slim and dark and pretty, sleeping with a kitchen knife. He hated even thinking about it.
“Some of it was good. I spent three years with a wonderful woman who loved the foster children she cared for, until she became too frail to continue.”
“It’s good you had that, at least.”
“It’s tough on a kid, always knowing every situation is temporary. Wondering when the call would come and you’d have to grab your garbage bag of belongings and head to the next temporary place. With every new family, I would vow that I wouldn’t cause trouble, but somehow it never quite worked out.”
“Oh, Dani. I’m so sorry.”
This glimpse into her past was both heartbreaking a
nd illuminating. So many things about her made more sense now. She had a hard time making connections because deep down in her psyche some part of her was in a constant state of worry that they would be yanked away.
She had trusted him enough to tell him this part of her past, something he didn’t think she shared very easily.
“You said you got pregnant with Silver at seventeen, mostly to escape.”
Her shoulders tensed beneath his arm and she slipped away from him. Cool air rushed in to take her place.
“I was...looking for a happy ending. The safety and security I lost when I was eight.”
“I take it you didn’t find it.”
She laughed, a sound without amusement. “You could say that. I might as well spill all my secrets. You want the ugly truth about me, Ruben. Fine. Here you go. I married an ex-convict.”
He glanced over, sensing that wasn’t the worst of what she wanted to tell him.
“Did you?” he said mildly.
“Tommy had served six months in jail for grand theft when we married. I knew that. He told me it was a misunderstanding, that he had made a mistake and trusted the wrong people, and I believed him. Mostly because I needed to believe him.”
He had seen that in the loved ones of people who ran into trouble with the law. They convinced themselves all the evidence was wrong, that their loved one had a bad rap and the system was rigged against them.
Ruben knew there were cases where innocent people were convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. They were the outliers, though. As a law enforcement officer, he wanted to believe that the system usually worked the way it was supposed to and those who committed crimes ended up right where they belonged.
“Tommy and I had two good years after Silver was born. I thought he had put the past behind him. He had a steady job as a mechanic and we were happy, I thought—until the day he was arrested along with three of his friends for organizing a luxury auto theft ring and chop shop in Jersey. Two members of the crew made the mistake of carjacking a Mercedes belonging to the wife of a federal judge, so this time Tommy was sent upstate. He wasn’t actually part of the carjacking but because this was his second arrest as an adult after numerous juvenile offenses and because he was considered the leader of the enterprise, the one calling the shots, he was sentenced to five to ten years.”
Not a small chunk. The charges must have been serious. “That’s a stiff sentence.”
“I tried to tell myself we could still make things work. That he would change and be the sweet man I knew when he got out again. I stayed married to him. I wrote to him every week while I was struggling to survive as a mom on my own, desperately trying to hang on to my scholarship and stay in college. Every Sunday, I would pack up Silver and we would take the train upstate to visit him.”
He could picture her, defiantly resilient, trying to make the best of things. His heart ached for all the things she didn’t say, the sacrifices she must have had to make and the loneliness she must have endured.
“He served four years. When he got out, I thought things would finally be different. That’s what he promised me, over and over. He had vocational training as an electrician in prison and was going to make a new start.”
“But he didn’t?”
“You probably know how hard it is for felons on the outside. I think he tried for a while, but...something had changed in him. Or maybe I had changed during that time on my own. I don’t know. Six months after he got out, I discovered he was hanging with his old crew, staying out late, being evasive about where he’d been. I kicked him out. I filed for divorce and left New York for Boston and vet school. Two months later, I found out I was pregnant with Mia, but by then Tommy was in trouble again and had been found in violation of his parole.”
“He went back to prison?”
“For four more years.” She was quiet. “He came to visit the girls once when he got out and I barely recognized him from the man I had once loved.”
“That must have been tough, being on your own with two little girls while going through graduate school.”
“Somehow the girls and I survived. During my second year of school, I started corresponding with your father and eventually he offered me this internship when I finished, with the potential to purchase his practice if I liked it here, so we moved here right after graduation. This was my chance to give the girls the life I always dreamed about.”
“You’re doing exactly that.”
“I thought I was. But somehow the ghosts of our past mistakes never quite leave us alone, do they?”
He thought of his own mistakes on the job, the moments when he hadn’t been fast enough to react or had misjudged a situation or underestimated a suspect.
“They don’t. But life has a way of helping us eventually make our peace with them.”
“I hope so. But I’m not there yet.”
She was quiet. “I don’t want to tell you, but I think you need to know the rest of it.”
The rest of it? What more could there be? Judging by the way she twisted her hands in her lap and wouldn’t meet his gaze, it had to be something she considered terrible. On impulse, he turned the boat engine off, wanting to focus on her without the distraction of having to maneuver the boat. They floated there on the water, rocking gently on the waves.
Under other circumstances, he would have found it restful and beautiful there on a cold December night, being safe and dry here inside the shelter, but the tension shimmered between them.
“There. Go ahead. Now I can give you my full attention.”
“It’s bad, Ruben. So bad.”
“Tell me,” he urged. He reached out for her hand and after a startled moment, she entwined her fingers through his.
“After that last visit a few years ago, I severed contact with Tommy,” she said slowly. “I didn’t know where he was until I heard his name on the news three months ago.”
Three months ago. Right after she had come to Haven Point, around the time she began to shut herself off from participating in community events and started turning down invitations.
Her hand was trembling, he realized. All of her was trembling.
“Why was his name on the news?”
“You heard it, too, Ruben. Everyone in the country did. One lovely September afternoon, he walked into a bank in Brooklyn and pulled a gun on the tellers. He ended up killing a guard and two police officers in a shoot-out as he tried to escape, before he was eventually gunned down.”
Ruben’s gut clenched. He remembered that case, though it happened across the country. Every member of law enforcement grieved when any of their own died in the line of duty and these deaths had seemed particularly senseless.
“Tommy DeLuca,” he said.
“That’s right. My ex-husband—the father of my beautiful girls—is Tommy DeLuca.”
13
As she might have expected, Ruben went rigid at her words.
Three months earlier, Tommy’s name had been bandied about on every news channel. He had been talked about in the same disgusted tones people used when discussing mass shooters, white supremacists, violent dictators.
He had become the current face of evil, a representative of everything wrong in the world—until the next newsmaker did something heinous and wiped him from memory.
Ruben remembered. She could tell by his reaction and the sudden tension that seemed to vibrate from his skin to hers where they held hands.
“DeLuca. Not Capelli,” he said, his voice gruff.
She pulled her hand away and curled her fingers into a fist, wishing she could hold that heat inside. “I legally changed my name and Silver’s back to my maiden name during the divorce proceedings, before Mia was born. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been grateful for that decision. Never more so than three months ago.”
Water lapped against the boat. Norma
lly the sound would have been calming, but not at this moment when her emotions were raw and exposed.
“I told your father the moment I heard the news, of course. When he first offered me the internship, I felt I had to tell him about Tommy—that he had served time during our marriage and some of the things he had done—but I don’t know if I ever mentioned his name. I had to tell him everything after...after Tommy killed those men, who were only doing their job.”
“What did my father say?”
That was yet another reason she adored Frank Morales, for his steady, kind support while she had been reeling in shock.
“He said I couldn’t take on the burden of what my ex-husband had done. They were his choices, not mine. As far as your father was concerned, none of it mattered.”
“Sounds about right.”
“What else could he say? I was already here and had started working at the clinic.”
“That wouldn’t matter to my father. He says what he means.”
“He is wonderful, yes. I was beyond grateful for his support, but he is the only other one who knows. You understand why I don’t want this to get out. Imagine how people would treat the girls if they knew about their father.”
He stared. “Why would anyone treat them any differently? They had nothing to do with Tommy’s actions. None of it is their fault. Or yours, either.”
“There you go, wearing those rose-colored glasses again. Of course people will treat me differently!”
“You’ve been divorced since before Mia was born. At least six years ago. And you’ve said he hasn’t been part of your life in that time. How are you responsible for his actions?”
“You’re being irrational if you don’t think people will think less of my judgment for having married and had two children with a cop killer. Of course they will!”
He jaw hardened. “Then they’re idiots. Idiots you don’t need in your world. No one should blame you for your ex-husband’s bad acts. If they do, they’re not people you need in your life.”
He couldn’t really be that naive. He was in law enforcement. He had to know that even baseless whispers and finger-pointing about a person could ruin lives.
Season of Wonder Page 18