by Anna Adams
She fought it. She had the upper hand here. Owen was at her mercy because she’d already established his weakness.
If only she didn’t care what her desperate actions did to Ben. If only she didn’t wish this could be their life, taking care of the son they’d made when they’d loved each other. Sharing a home and hopes and dreams.
“Lilah?”
She turned, pretending she hadn’t been twisting a damp dish towel until her hands and fingers were sore.
“Is he asleep?” she asked.
“I wonder if he’s catching another cold. He slept on the plane and all the way from the airport.”
“He must have run like a wild child while you had him,” she said.
Owen smiled as if he liked that idea. “He was born to live in those mountains.” He closed his mouth, and even she could see he wished he hadn’t spoken the words. “I’m not trying to pressure you,” he said.
“What do you want? You were always honest. Just tell me what’s on your mind.”
He nodded, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Now that I’m here, I feel as if I’ve learned from my mother, like I’m trying to say things I shouldn’t.”
“You don’t have to.” She cleared her throat. “You’re going to fight for Ben in court. You’ve only been unkind that once to me, but you have to make me seem like the unstable one because you want Ben as much as I do.”
Owen’s head went back as if she’d struck him. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m sick of the negotiations, too.”
“And they’re getting us nowhere.” He pulled his hands out of his pockets. As if he couldn’t face her, he moved to push the chairs in at the table. “But I didn’t come to threaten you or blackmail you into coming back.”
She sagged with relief, even as her heart broke a little. “You’re giving up?”
“Never.” He turned then, his face fierce. “I came to tell you I won’t give up. Maybe I misunderstood what was happening between us in Tennessee. I thought you were learning to love my place. I thought you were remembering that you cared for me.”
She had been. She cared for him, and she’d finally had to be honest and admit to herself that his home enchanted her. From the snow-crusted hollows to the mountains with their wet, shiny granite and dark winter trees. “It doesn’t matter how I feel about—”
“I thought you were learning to trust me.”
“You know I did.” She remembered her anger. “Until you drank again.”
He stepped in front of her, confronting her with a broken expression that cut her deeply. She had to clench her hands to stop herself from touching the face that looked so hurt, and hurt her, with his pain.
“Lilah, my name is Owen, and I’m an alcoholic.”
She stopped breathing.
“I’m not your psychologist or your—”
“You’re the woman I loved.” He took a deep breath that didn’t seem to ease his tension. “The woman I love. Maybe I never stopped loving you. There hasn’t been anyone else, no matter how much I wanted to forget you.”
“No.” She put up her hand to cover her face. “This is some new trick. Because you think it’s the only way you’ll get Ben back into your life.”
“I’m not that unkind,” he said. “Not anymore. I wouldn’t do that to you or to him.”
She wrapped her arms around her waist. “I don’t understand.”
“I tried to stop drinking in rehab because I loved you.” He shook his head. “That didn’t work. I tried to stop because I was shaming my family. I realized no one cared about my family’s shame as much as my older brother and I did, so I drank some more. Then I tried to stop because Noah got me a job that would restore my reputation and give me a chance at a better life. I didn’t drink for a couple of months, and when I learned about Ben, I thought I’d never drink again because I’d do anything, give up anything, I’d offer anything I have, to be his father.”
She remembered that night on the mountain, under a sky of fireworks, believing things could be better than before, that she could trust Owen with Ben and with herself. “Then why did you do it?”
“You took Ben away, and I knew you’d never willingly bring him back. I didn’t have it in me to force you again, so I knew we’d have to go to court and fight like two people who’d stopped loving each other.”
“I just wanted to keep him safe until he was old enough to understand how dangerous the mountains are.” She shrugged. “Until you drank that wine.”
Owen smiled at her gently, but she saw the despair that he tried to hide. She even saw his amusement at her expense.
“Don’t you hear how crazy that sounds?” he asked. “I grew up in those mountains. How many children have survived the normal bumps and bruises of childhood, even when they run away from their parents’ arguments?”
“I’m not crazy.” She bit out the words. “But I’m not going to live any life that puts Ben at risk. You would have been welcome here anytime.”
“Lilah, I don’t live here. You came to escape me. Your life here excludes me. My family is in Bliss. My job is there.”
“And you expected me to uproot my life.”
“One last time,” he said. “I hoped you’d want to come live with me, and with all the people you met. They felt familiar to you from the moment you met them. Even I could tell that,” he said, and she remembered them all. The worn faces of the artists, the beautiful hope, their welcoming invitations and the dickering they’d done over exquisite objects that drew her back there now, as the works of art arrived, piece by piece, at the gallery.
“Every artist you met,” Owen said, “my family, my mother and my sister and brothers—you came to care for them all, even when you tried not to. And you remembered how it felt to care for me.”
“Until I heard the familiar sound of your voice when you’ve been drinking.”
“I thought I’d lost you both. I can’t explain—the relief of him being safe, and then immediately, you were running for cover. You told me that being with me put him in danger, and I couldn’t disagree. I knew you’d fight me every step of the way. I couldn’t face the battles and the accusations. Not from you.”
He straightened, shame fleeing his face as suddenly as it had come. In its place was a certainty that startled her. Unexpected, but real as the ground beneath her feet.
“I ran in my own way,” Owen admitted, “but I’ll never run again. Not because I’m proving something to you. Not because I want the job that still means a new life. Not even because of Ben, and I’d die for him. Just as you would, Lilah.”
She swallowed. “I would die for him, but I won’t be fooled by a man as desperate as I am to be his parent.”
“And I won’t lie to you.” Owen shrugged, his body language showing that he’d offered her the truth, even if he couldn’t find words to make her believe. “I am sober. I’ve gone to AA, and this time, it’s because I know I need help. I will be sober. And when I’ve been sober long enough to make you believe this is who I am from now on, I’ll come back to you and ask you to try to love me again.”
The promise shocked her. And then his words registered. How many times had he refused to promise anything? But then the rest of what he’d said registered.
“You’re leaving?” Joy should have been her response. Instead the ground seemed to open up. “You’re giving in?”
“Not a chance.” He tipped up her chin with one finger and held her gaze. “We’ve managed to work out visitation between us. Unless you want to change it, our current arrangement about Ben works for me. We can both fire the lawyers, or you keep yours fighting if that’s your choice. But I want you and Ben in my life. Both of you.”
“Both?” Some of that magic from the night on the mountain came back to her. If only she dared hop
e. If only she dared risk believing in the new man who stood before her.
“When you’re ready,” he said. “When you can trust me again, you tell me.”
She told herself to resent his arrogance. But how could she, when this was the certainty she’d wanted from him from the second she’d known she was carrying his child?
“I don’t trust easily,” she said. His drunken voice, accusing her, wasn’t easy to forget.
“There’s no deadline.”
He started toward the hallway but came back, and she glimpsed the old Owen, the swagger and the sweetness, as he curved his hand behind her head and smiled at her with staggering tenderness.
“I won’t push you,” he said, just before he touched his firm mouth to hers in a gentle kiss that promised more. “I’ll be waiting if you’re brave enough to try again.”
Brave enough? She watched him, willed herself to stand perfectly still and not follow him. Not speak to him. She didn’t want to fight, and she didn’t need to prove her courage to anyone.
He grabbed his coat off the stairs before he opened the door and stepped over the threshold into the cold. Snow swirled around him out of the darkness.
“Owen,” she said, too full of a confusing mixture of longing and dread to understand herself.
He looked back, flakes of snow already glittering in his dark hair and on his shoulders.
“How do you know you won’t drink again?” she asked.
“I don’t.”
His bleak face somehow gave her hope. He still wasn’t making empty promises. He wasn’t threatening her. He was just honest.
The door closed, and he was gone, but he’d left a storm behind. Raging inside her.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“MOMMY, WHY ARE you so sad?”
Lilah turned from the stack of clothing she’d sorted from Ben’s dresser. Perched on the edge of his bed, with a plastic airplane in his lap, he studied her.
“I’m not sad, baby,” she said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. She was unsettled. At loose ends. Her life felt open-ended. She gathered the little jeans and shirts he could no longer wear and stood, balancing them in front of her. “We should have done this a long time ago.”
“Throw my stuff away?”
He sounded offended, and she laughed. “And my stuff, too. We have a small house, and it’s filled up with things we can’t use anymore.”
“I don’t get it, and I’m hungry. I want pizza.”
“Then let’s get out of this house and go have a pizza.”
“I want pizza from Tennessee.”
She pretended that wish didn’t trouble her. Ben seemed more attached to Tennessee than he was to his own bed in his own home. But it wasn’t just the place he missed.
“I want my daddy, Mommy.”
“I know you do, sweetie.” There’d been several visits. Ben always came back exhausted, happy to see her and more than ready to go back to his father in Tennessee as soon as possible. “He’s coming on Thursday so you can hang out with him before you both leave on Friday.”
“I want to show him more of my favorite things to do. He likes my school. And duck bowling.”
“He’ll like everything you do.”
“I wish you weren’t mad at him all the time.” Ben set his plane on the small table in the center of the room.
“Buddy, I’m not mad at your father.” Her young son, the very best part of her and certainly the best thing that had ever happened to her, had put her on the defensive. “I’m a—”
She choked off the word before it could escape, but it screamed in her head with the strength it had gathered all the weekends she’d spent alone.
Afraid. Just as Owen had said. Even Suzannah was right.
She was afraid of Ben getting hurt in those hazard-filled woods, terrified he’d get lost again, and she’d never find him. She was afraid she’d love Owen with all her heart, and he’d throw her love away, and she’d never find herself again.
One last harsh truth finally cut through the cocoon of detachment she’d tried to cloak herself in. She was more than a little gutted that Ben might love his fun-to-be-with father more than his overprotective mother.
Those woods and all the so-called normal things that had happened to Ben in Tennessee threatened her. What if Ben preferred his life there? She might lose control. And it wasn’t just Ben’s safety that concerned her. Being in Tennessee herself, close to Owen, brought back all those other feelings she’d kept so long at bay.
She had been reckless—for her—when she’d known Owen, but pregnancy had transformed her into the frightened survivor, that five-year-old girl who’d somehow found the courage to escape her abductor.
Childproofing and alarm systems and her preference that Ben’s friends come to their house for playdates instead of his going to theirs. Had she been standing still for years? So locked inside the fear of doing something that might jeopardize Ben’s safety that she’d done nothing at all?
She’d told herself she was protecting him from a father who might show up in his life and then disappear because he loved drinking more. Owen had admitted he still felt a powerful urge to seek out the oblivion he found at the bottom of a bottle, but she’d found her own refuge in the bland, stultifying environment she controlled to ensure Ben’s safety.
Neither of them could be hurt because they’d loved unpredictable, unreliable Owen if they never had anything to do with him.
“Mommy, are you okay?”
“Huh?” She backed into the dresser behind her before she even knew she was moving. Ben’s concern, plain and inescapable in blue eyes exactly like his father’s, got through to her. “I’m fine.”
Fine, if she never wanted to love again, if she was happy to stagnate in a life with no highs or lows, and none of the blinding joy she wanted her child to feel one day when he grew up and met the person who made him complete.
But she had kept him safe, whispered the quiet voice in the back of her mind.
So why had he flourished in the weeks since he’d met his father? Why had he gone from being shy of strangers and slow to leave her side to an extroverted runaway?
Because Owen had given him confidence. Owen and his assumption that Ben could get himself out of trouble around the farm with a few simple lessons. Owen and his family of scatterbrained siblings and an interfering mother. Owen and his love.
“I’m going to make Daddy a picture,” Ben said.
She nodded. “A picture of what, baby?”
Ben turned his father’s reproving gaze on her. “I’m not a baby.”
“So I notice.” But he was barely past the toddler stage. Maybe she’d made the right decisions until now.
“Daddy knows I’m a big boy. He lets me do stuff.”
Maybe she hadn’t.
“What kind of picture are you going to make for Owen?”
“Me and Gomer that day we got lost.” He ran to the tray of drawing paper on his shelf and grabbed crayons and a blank white piece of butcher paper. “When we were climbing the mountain before Gomer got tired and went home.”
The day he’d run away to escape her argument with Owen. He’d tried to get back on his own. Like his father, Ben hadn’t given up that day. He’d kept fighting to find his way home.
Owen had said he was fighting for a home for all of them, together. He’d stumbled along the way, lost some important battles, but he had never given up—not when he’d tried to be sober because she’d asked him to. Not when he’d tried because he needed to build the clinic for his town. Not even when he’d tried to stop drinking for their son.
Owen might have given in for a moment, when she’d taken Ben from him a second time, but he’d come back swinging.
She was the one who’d ducked straight back into the safe world
she’d made where she tried so hard to forget love and pain and fear. And the deep happiness she’d felt that night on the mountain, just the three of them beneath a dazzling canopy of fireworks—a happiness that was fighting to be recognized inside her right now.
“Draw your picture, ba—Ben.” She corrected herself this time. “And maybe we can take it to Daddy after you finish?”
“Tonight?” Ben clutched the paper and crayons to his chest.
She immediately lost her nerve, but for the first time she didn’t run for safety. Instead she took a lesson from her son and from Owen.
She wouldn’t change her mind. No woman should keep putting up a fight to feel nothing at all.
“I have to talk to my friends at work about taking care of the shop,” she said. “Maybe we can go tomorrow night. I have things I’d like to tell Owen.”
It was time to run toward life, instead of trying not to live at all.
* * *
OWEN CAME OUT of the courthouse basement door. The meetings helped keep him on track, but he had yet to walk through those doors at the end of one and not think how badly he wanted a drink.
Tonight as he walked out, breathing in the crisp, cold air, he had a hallucination. When he lifted his gaze from the icy ground beneath his feet he saw Lilah and Ben sitting on a bench across the road.
He’d never had hallucinations, even when he drank.
“Daddy.” With a shout, Ben launched himself off the bench. Lilah jumped up after him.
So a hallucination could actually be a dream come true.
“What are you doing here?” He crossed the road and caught his boy as always, in midleap.
Lilah laughed at them, her gaze frightened, her hands twisting together in front of her heart.
“I thought for the first time since I was five years old, I might have to run into traffic and see if the only man I will love all my life would be there waiting for me.”
He held on to Ben, who stared goggle-eyed at his mother. Owen tried to speak, but he couldn’t believe she’d come to him. He couldn’t believe the two people he loved most in the world were here, where he could touch them and talk to them.