by Nora Roberts
She’d resigned from Monroe when she married him. Between her trust fund and Wade’s income, she hadn’t needed a job. She’d wanted to devote herself to the remodeling and redecorating of the town house they’d bought. She’d loved every hour of stripping paint, sanding floors, hunting in dusty antique shops for just the right piece for just the right spot. Laboring in the tiny courtyard, scrubbing brick, digging weeds, and designing the formal English garden had been pure pleasure. Within a year, the town house had been a showplace, a testament to her taste and her effort and her patience.
Now it was simply an asset that had been assessed and split between them.
She’d gone back to school, that academic haven where the real world could be pushed aside for a few hours every day. Now she worked part-time at the National Gallery, thanks to her art history courses.
She didn’t have to work, not for money. The trust fund from her paternal grandfather could keep her comfortable enough so that she could drift from interest to interest as she chose.
So, she was an independent woman. Young, she thought, and, glancing over at the stack of mail, single. Qualified to do a little of everything and a lot of nothing. The one thing she’d thought she’d excelled at, marriage, had been a dismal failure.
She blew out a breath and approached the Belker table. She tapped her fingers against the legal packet, long narrow fingers that had received piano lessons, art lessons, fingers that had learned to type, to cook gourmet meals, to program a computer. A very competent hand that had once worn a wedding ring.
Kelsey passed over the thick envelope, ignoring the little voice that hissed the word coward inside her head. Instead she picked up another, one with handwriting oddly like her own. It had the same bold, looping style, neat but a little flashy. Only mildly curious, she tore it open.
Dear Kelsey: I realize you might be surprised to hear from me.
She read on, the vague interest in her eyes turning to shock, the shock to disbelief. Then the disbelief turned into something almost like fear.
It was an invitation from a dead woman. A dead woman who happened to be her mother.
In times of crisis, Kelsey had always, for as long as she could remember, turned to one person. Her love for and trust in her father had been the one constant in her restless nature. He was always there for her, not so much a port in a storm, but a hand to hold until the storm was over.
Her earliest memories were of him, his handsome, serious face, his gentle hands, his quiet, infinitely patient voice. She remembered him tying bows in her long straight hair, brushing the pale blond tresses while Bach or Mozart sang from the stereo. It was he who had kissed her childhood hurts better, who had taught her to read, to ride a bike, who had dried her tears.
She adored him, was almost violently proud of his accomplishments as the chairman of the English department at Georgetown University.
She hadn’t been jealous when he’d married again. At eighteen she’d been delighted that he’d finally found someone to love and share his life with. Kelsey had made room in her heart and home for Candace, and had been secretly proud of her maturity and altruism in accepting a stepmother and teenage stepbrother.
Perhaps it had been easy because she knew deep in her heart that nothing and no one could alter the bond between herself and her father.
Nothing and no one, she thought now, but the mother she’d thought was dead.
The shock of betrayal was warring with a cold, stony rage as she fought her way through rush-hour traffic toward the lush, palatial estates in Potomac, Maryland. She’d rushed out of her apartment without her coat, and had neglected to switch on the heater in her Spitfire, but she didn’t feel the chill of the February evening. Temper had whipped color into her face, adding a becoming rosy glow to the porcelain complexion, a snap to lake-gray eyes.
She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel as she waited for a light to change, as she willed it to change so she could hurry, hurry. Her mouth was clamped in a thin line that masked its lush generosity as she fought to keep her mind a blank.
It wouldn’t do to think now. No, it wouldn’t do to think that her mother was alive, alive and living hardly an hour away in Virginia. It wouldn’t do to think about that or Kelsey might have started to scream.
But her hands were beginning to tremble as she cruised down the majestically tree-lined street where she’d spent her childhood, as she pulled into the drive of the three-story brick colonial where she’d grown up.
It looked as peaceful and tidy as a church, its windows gleaming, its white trim pure as an unblemished soul. Puffs of smoke from the evening fire curled from the chimney, and the first shy crocuses poked their delicate leaves up around the old elm in the front yard.
The perfect house in the perfect neighborhood, she’d always thought. Safe, secure, tasteful, only a short drive to the excitement and culture of D.C. and with the well-polished hue of quiet, respectable wealth.
She slammed out of the car, raced to the front door, and shoved it open. She’d never had to knock at this house. Even as she started down the Berber runner in the white-tiled foyer, Candace came out of the sitting room to the right.
She was, as usual, immaculately dressed. The perfect academic wife in conservative blue wool, her mink-colored hair swept back from her lovely, youthful face to reveal simple pearl earrings.
“Kelsey, what a nice surprise. I hope you can stay for dinner. We’re entertaining some of the faculty and I can always use—”
“Where is he?” Kelsey interrupted.
Candace blinked, surprised by the tone. She could see now that Kelsey was in one of her snits. The last thing she needed an hour before her house filled up with people was one of her stepdaughter’s explosions. Automatically she shifted her stance.
“Is something wrong?”
“Where’s Dad?”
“You’re upset. Is it Wade again?” Candace dismissed the problem with a wave of her hand. “Kelsey, divorce isn’t pleasant, but it isn’t the end of the world, either. Come in and sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit, Candace. I want to talk to my father.” Her hands clenched at her sides. “Now, are you going to tell me where he is, or do I have to look for him?”
“Hey, sis.” Channing strode down the stairs. He had his mother’s strong good looks and a thirst for adventure that had, according to his mother, come from nowhere. Though he’d been fourteen when Candace married Philip Byden, Channing’s innate good humor had made the transition seamless. “What’s up?”
Kelsey deliberately took a deep breath to keep from shouting. “Where’s Dad, Channing?”
“The Prof’s in his study, buried in that paper he’s been writing.”
Channing’s brows lifted. He, too, recognized the signs of a rage in the making—the spark in the eye, the flush on the cheeks. There were times he would put himself out to bank that fire. And times he would indulge himself and fan it.
“Hey, Kels, you’re not going to hang around with these bookworms tonight, are you? Why don’t you and I skip out, hit a few clubs?”
She shook her head and tore down the hall toward her father’s study.
“Kelsey.” Candace’s voice, sharp, annoyed, trailed after her. “Must you be so volatile?”
Yes, Kelsey thought as she yanked open the door of her father’s favorite sanctuary. Yes.
She slammed the door at her back, saying nothing for a moment as the words were boiling up much too hot and much too fast in her throat. Philip sat at his beloved oak desk, nearly hidden behind a stack of books and files. He held a pen in his bony hand. He’d always maintained that the best writing came from the intimacy of writing, and stubbornly refused to compose his papers on a word processor.
His eyes behind the silver-framed glasses had the owlish look they took on when he amputated himself from the reality of what was around him. They cleared slowly, and he smiled at his daughter. The desk light gleamed on his close-cropped pewter hair.
“There’s my girl. Just in time to read over this draft of my thesis on Yeats. I’m afraid I might have gotten long-winded again.”
He looked so normal, was all she could think. So perfectly normal sitting there in his tweed jacket and carefully knotted tie. Handsome, untroubled, surrounded by his books of poetry and genius.
And her world, of which he was the core, had just shattered.
“She’s alive,” Kelsey blurted out. “She’s alive and you’ve lied to me all my life.”
He went very pale, and his eyes shifted from hers. Only for an instant, barely a heartbeat, but she’d seen the fear and the shock in them.
“What are you talking about, Kelsey?” But he knew, he knew and had to use all of his self-control to keep the plea out of his voice.
“Don’t lie to me now.” She sprang toward his desk. “Don’t lie to me! She’s alive. My mother’s alive, and you knew it. You knew it every time you told me she was dead.”
Panic sliced through Philip, keen as a scalpel. “Where did you get an idea like that?”
“From her.” She plunged her hand into her purse and dragged out the letter. “From my mother. Are you going to tell me the truth now?”
“May I see it?”
Kelsey tilted her head, stared down at him. It was a look that could pick clean down to the bone. “Is my mother dead?”
He wavered, holding the lie as close to his heart as he held his daughter. But he knew, as much as he wished it could be otherwise, if he kept one, he would lose the other.
“No. May I see the letter?”
“Just like that.” The tears she’d been fighting swam dangerously close to the surface. “Just a no? After all this time, all the lies?”
Only one lie, he thought, and not nearly enough time. “I’ll do my best to explain it all to you, Kelsey. But I’d like to see the letter.”
Without a word she handed it to him. Then, because she couldn’t bear to watch him, she turned away to face the tall, narrow window where she could see evening closing in on the last bloom of twilight.
The paper shook so in Philip’s hand that he was forced to set the sheet on the desk in front of him. The handwriting was unmistakable. Dreaded. He read it carefully, word by word.
Dear Kelsey:
I realize you might be surprised to hear from me. It seemed unwise, or at least unfair, to contact you before. Though a phone call might have been more personal, I felt you would need time. And a letter gives you more of a choice on your options.
They will have told you I died when you were very young. In some ways, it was true, and I agreed with the decision to spare you. Over twenty years have passed, and you’re no longer a child. You have, I believe, the right to know that your mother is alive. You will, perhaps, not welcome the news. However, I made the decision to contact you, and won’t regret it.
If you want to see me, or simply have questions that demand answers, you’d be welcome. My home is Three Willows Farm, outside of Bluemont, Virginia. The invitation is an open one. If you decide to accept it, I would be pleased to have you stay as long as it suited you. If you don’t contact me, I’ll understand that you don’t wish to pursue the relationship. I hope the curiosity that pushed you as a child will tempt you to at least speak with me.
Yours,
Naomi Chadwick
Naomi. Philip closed his eyes. Good God, Naomi.
Nearly twenty-three years had passed since he’d seen her, but he remembered everything about her with utter clarity. The scent she’d worn that reminded him of dark, mossy glades, the quick infectious laugh that never failed to turn heads, the silvery blond hair that flowed like rain down her back, the sooty eyes and willowy body.
So clear were his memories that when Philip opened his eyes again he thought he saw her. His heart took one hard, violent leap into his throat that was part fear, part long-suppressed desire.
But it was Kelsey, her back stiff, facing away from him.
How could he have ever forgotten Naomi, he asked himself, when he had only to look at their daughter to see her?
Philip rose and poured a scotch from a crystal decanter. It was kept there for visitors. He rarely touched anything stronger than a short snifter of blackberry brandy. But he needed something with bite now, something to still the trembling of his hands.
“What do you plan to do?” he asked Kelsey.
“I haven’t decided.” She kept her back to him. “A great deal of it depends on what you tell me.”
Philip wished he could go to her, touch her shoulders. But she wouldn’t welcome him now. He wished he could sit, bury his face in his hands. But that would be weak, and useless.
More, much more, he wished he could go back twenty-three years and do something, anything, to stop fate from running recklessly over his life.
But that was impossible.
“It isn’t a simple matter, Kelsey.”
“Lies are usually complicated.”
She turned then, and his fingers clutched reflexively on the lead crystal. She looked so much like Naomi, the bright hair carelessly tumbled, the eyes dark, the skin over those long, delicate facial bones flushed luminously with passion. Some women looked their best when their emotions were at a dangerous peak.
So it had been with Naomi. So it was with her daughter.
“That’s what you’ve done all these years, isn’t it?” Kelsey continued. “You’ve lied to me. Grandmother lied. She lied.” Kelsey gestured toward the desk where the letter lay. “If that letter hadn’t come, you would’ve continued to lie to me.”
“Yes, as long as I continued to think it was best for you.”
“Best for me? How could it be best for me to believe my mother was dead? How can a lie ever be best for anyone?”
“You’ve always been so sure of right and wrong, Kelsey. It’s an admirable quality.” He paused, drank. “And a terrifying one. Even as a child, your ethics were unwavering. So difficult for mere mortals to measure up.”
Her eyes kindled. It was close, much too close to what Wade had accused her of. “So, it’s my fault.”
“No. No.” He closed his eyes and rubbed absently at a point in the center of his forehead. “None of it was your fault, and all of it was because of you.”
“Philip.” After a quick knock, Candace opened the study door. “The Dorsets are here.”
He forced a weary smile onto his face. “Entertain them, dear. I need a few moments with Kelsey.”
Candace flashed a look at her stepdaughter. Disapproval mixed with resignation. “All right, but don’t be long. Dinner’s set for seven. Kelsey, shall I set another place?”
“No, Candace, thank you. I’m not staying.”
“All right, then, but don’t keep your father long.” She eased the door shut.
Kelsey drew a breath, stiffened her spine. “Does she know?”
“Yes. I had to tell her before we were married.”
“ ‘Had to tell her,’ ” Kelsey repeated. “But not me.”
“It wasn’t a decision that I made lightly. That any of us made lightly. Naomi, your grandmother, and I all believed it was in your best interest. You were only three, Kelsey. Hardly more than a baby.”
“I’ve been an adult for some time, Dad. I’ve been married, divorced.”
“You have no idea how quickly the years go.” He sat again, cradling the glass. He’d convinced himself that this moment would never come. That his life was too staid, too stable to ever take this spinning dip on the roller coaster again. But Naomi, he thought, had never settled for staid.
Neither had Kelsey. And now it was time for truth.
“I’ve explained to you that your mother was one of my students. She was beautiful, young, vibrant. I’ve never understood why she was attracted to me. It happened quite quickly, really. We were married within six months after we met. Not nearly long enough for either of us to understand how truly opposite we were in nature. We lived in Georgetown. We’d both come from what we could call privileged
backgrounds, but she had a freedom I could never emulate. A wildness, a lust for people, for things, for places. And, of course, her horses.”
He drank again, to ease some of the pain of remembering. “I think it was the horses more than anything else that first came between us. After you were born, she wanted desperately to move back to the farm in Virginia. She wanted you to be raised there. My ambitions and hopes for the future were here. I was working on my doctorate, and even then I had my eye set on becoming the English department chairman at Georgetown. For a while we compromised, and I spent what weekends I could spare in Virginia. It wasn’t enough. It’s simplest to say we grew apart.”
Safer to say it, he thought, staring into his scotch. And certainly less painful. “We decided to divorce. She wanted you in Virginia with her. I wanted you in Georgetown with me. I neither understood nor cared for the racing crowd she ran with, the gamblers, the jockeys. We fought, bitterly. Then we hired lawyers.”
“A custody suit?” Stunned, Kelsey gaped at her father. “You fought over custody?”
“It was an ugly business, unbelievably vile. How two people who had loved each other, had created a child together, could become such mortal enemies is a pathetic commentary on human nature.” He looked up again, finally, and faced her. “I’m not proud of it, Kelsey, but I believed in my heart that you belonged with me. She was already seeing other men. It was rumored that one of them had ties to organized crime. A woman like Naomi would always attract men. It was as though she was flaunting them, the parties, her lifestyle, daring me and the world to condemn her for doing as she pleased.”
“So you won,” Kelsey said quietly. “You won the suit, and me, then decided to tell me she’d died.” She turned away again, facing the window that was dark now. In it she could see the ghost of herself. “People divorced in the seventies. Children coped. There should have been visitation. I should have been allowed to see her.”
“She didn’t want you to see her. Neither did I.”