The Prodigal Cousin

“I’m all right, Daddy.”

He hoped she would be—that Eliza and her family would accept Nina and Tamsin even if they resented him. His own parents had loved him, but they hadn’t been good at the expansive, arms-wide affection the Calverts offered even to guests.

Standing, he brushed grass off his knees. “Thanks again, Molly.” Emotion unexpectedly deepened his voice, making her curious and him uncomfortable.

“Go ahead,” she said.

He found Eliza alone in the dining room, standing beside his plate. “You’re not hungry?”

“I am.” He couldn’t choke down even a swallow of coffee, but he sat, hoping to make her stay. She eased around the table to watch the woman and girl outside.

“Nina’s a lovely child. You’re obviously doing a good job with her.”

Neither of them mentioned Tamsin, his greater worry.

He filled up his coffee cup from the carafe on his table. “She’s latched on to Molly. She might be a nuisance.”

Eliza shook her head. “Molly’s wonderful with children.” How could she remain blind to his rising tension? “She’s a patient teacher, creative, eager to get involved. Her students feel how much she cares for them.” Eliza broke off with a nervous laugh. “I’m proud of her.”

“Naturally.” He left the table to stand beside her at the window. “You have no other children?”

“No.” Her lack of hesitation slashed like a knife.

A nice, clean wound. It would heal.

“I’m afraid I have to disagree with you, Mrs. Calvert.”

She didn’t answer. Her silence lasted so long Sam finally checked to see if she’d fainted. She was rooted at his side on the patterned rug of her cozy dining room.

He would remember this moment for the rest of his life—the smell of fried bacon and rich coffee, the tick of a grandfather clock that guarded the far corner, the slight tang of a fire that had burned to ashes the night before.

And Eliza Calvert, trapped in stillness like a photo of herself. His wound might take a little longer to heal than he’d estimated.

“Who are you?” She closed her eyes for the briefest moment. “Don’t answer. I know. Since last night, I’ve tried to remember who you remind me of, but now I know. I’ve wondered about you for so long—wondered if you’d show up, if you hated me, if you were happy.” She jerked her head toward the window, and he followed her gaze, watching Molly hand Nina a fat green balloon. “I wondered if you had children of your own.”

“I don’t know what to say.” He couldn’t tell from her delicate, frozen features what she felt. “I couldn’t locate my birth father.”

She took a deep breath. “Neither could I. He told me he wanted to help, that he wanted you even if he couldn’t marry me. He came along to my first doctor’s appointment—the day before he and his family left town in the middle of the night. He wanted to be a lawyer—kind of ironic when you consider I eventually married a judge. His mother wanted a good career for him and his father refused to let him pay for my sins. I guess they didn’t think I was the proper appendage for him…. But I shouldn’t tell you this.” She looked horrified. “You don’t want to know about—”

“I want the truth.” He pivoted toward the window, ashamed that his birth father had discarded her. Nina and Molly were drawing on the green balloon with a dark blue marker. “I came because of the girls.” He took a deep breath, hiding grief that still squeezed his heart. “When my wife and parents died, I realized Tamsin and Nina would have no one else if I…weren’t around.”

“So you want me to…”

She stopped, and Sam turned his head to look at her, tempted to take the trembling hand she’d raised to her mouth the way he would comfort a patient to whom he’d given bad news. But she wasn’t a patient.

He dropped his hands. He was a stranger. He couldn’t comfort her. She felt no attachment to him.

“I won’t ask for anything. I’m offering you the chance to know Nina and Tamsin.”

“And you.” Joy flashed in her eyes, giving him a second’s astounding relief. In the time it took him to feel disloyal to his adoptive parents, Eliza’s joy changed to panic. “Do the girls know?”

He lifted one eyebrow. “Does it matter?” At her openmouthed groan, he relented. “Tamsin knows. She found the file.”

“I don’t want to hurt her.” She pressed her hand to her throat, staring over his shoulder. “Or my husband. Molly…”

He empathized, though sudden anger shook him. Even at his age he wanted Tamsin and Nina and him to matter most. But he was no child. Eliza’s concern for her present family meant she was a loving woman. She had the right to turn him away. She’d arranged for him to have a healthy, happy life. She’d done all a sixteen-year-old girl could do.

“Were you happy?” she asked.

Meeting her tumultuous gaze, he considered lying. He couldn’t. He’d lied enough to last a lifetime. “Happy, yes, but my parents had tried to have their own child for years. My mother told me once that she’d heard a lot of people had babies after they adopted. She expected to get pregnant as soon as they took me. Naturally, she was disappointed when she didn’t, but I think they were afraid to give everything to me. They wanted something left over for their real child.”

Eliza frowned. “Adoption is a strange fertility treatment.”

He wasn’t capable of saying anything else against his adoptive mother. “Being infertile wasn’t just a medical condition for her.” Her restraint had colored his father’s feelings for him. Sam couldn’t help wondering why they hadn’t been as grateful as most adoptive parents to have a baby.

He nodded toward the garden. “You must have wanted a child, too.”

“You know we adopted her?”

“I hired a detective.”

“I don’t expect you to understand.”

Not the wholehearted effort to help that he’d hoped for. If he was going to stay in touch with this family for the sake of his daughters, he had to know they could love Tamsin and Nina with a generosity his adoptive parents had never achieved.

Eliza’s mouth quivered, apprehension obviously chipping away at any joy. “I can’t explain about Molly until I talk to her.” She backed away from him. “And to my husband. I never told Patrick….”

With a muffled cry, she turned and left the room. Sam didn’t try to stop her. He just listened to her low heels thudding up the stairs.

As they faded, Tamsin appeared in the doorway.

“Well?” she said. “Are you happy now?”

“Where were you?”

“I bumped into her. I guess she wants us.”

He wasn’t so sure. “Are you angry?”

As she shook her head, tears filled her eyes, terrifying him. She’d cried for weeks after Fiona’s death, but her silence ever since had been harder to take. He steeled himself to tackle whatever Tamsin needed him to handle.

“Honey, we don’t have to stay.” He reached for her, and she didn’t fight for once. “If you want to leave, we’ll go.”

“I want my mom. I want my grandpa and grandma and my mom.”

She fell on him, and her sobs broke his heart. No fifteen-year-old girl should ever have to learn the true meaning of forever. His own loss lodged in his throat. No one should have to feel this way.

He stroked Tamsin’s head and held her, praying Nina wouldn’t walk in. Tamsin’s grief unsettled her sister almost more than their mother’s death. To Nina, Fiona’s absence was as confusing as it was painful, but her longing came in nightmares that worsened when she was afraid for her sister.

“Tamsin, I’ve been trying to make things better for you.”

“You think these people can take Mom’s place?”

“No one will ever replace your mom. Not for you and Nina. Not for me. I just wanted to give you family, but if you don’t want that, we’ll go. You and Nina matter most.”

“Then why did you drag us here?”

“If I’d realized you thought I was trying to replace your mother and grandparents, I wouldn’t have.”

“Daddy.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders the way she had when she was Nina’s age. “Sometimes I think I’m falling apart.”

Sometimes he feared he was, too. “You’re fine, Tamsin. You’ve had to face too much for a girl your age, and I’ve made you remember it again.”

IN HER ROOM, Eliza ran to the window on thick carpet that dragged at her feet. She bumped her head against a pane of wavy glass that distorted her view of Molly and Nina. Finally, another figure joined them. Sam.

He leaned down to speak to his daughter. His parents had taught him to be a good father. Forty years of living without her son filled Eliza’s eyes with hot tears of resentment toward that couple who hadn’t loved him the way they’d promised to.

She should have been the one to teach him everything. She should have changed his diapers and walked the floor with him when he was sick at night, and listened to his stories of school days and sports and whatever else boys shared with their mothers.

A sob threatened to escape. She’d never know those things—unless she found a way to include her son now. How many times had she daydreamed about contacting his adoptive parents, begging for news of him?

But she’d chained herself into a corner. Her parents had ousted her from their home when she’d asked for help with her pregnancy. She’d finished her GED while she was in a home for unwed mothers, waiting for Sam’s birth. From there, she’d worked her way through the University of Tennessee.

After she’d started teaching in Bardill’s Ridge, she’d met Patrick, an ambitious attorney on his way to being a judge, like his father. She’d believed he couldn’t love a woman like her, so she’d never told him about her past.

How could she tell Patrick the truth now? He valued his position, the respect people here held him in, the mornings he spent “jawing” with his friends about how to improve county government. She couldn’t admit she’d come here to pay penance in a needy school.

How could she explain to Molly, who’d worshipped her as though she were a saint?

Eliza pressed her fists to the chilled glass. She could not abandon her son—even grown—a second time.

She’d made the right decision for Sam. But what would her husband say when she told him she’d regretted letting someone else care for her baby? What she’d done had been right for Sam but wrong for her. She’d wanted him back every day since she’d placed him in a sweet-smelling nurse’s starchy-stiff arms.

She needed him far more than he needed her. She wanted to be his mother, to try to ease the pain that drove a young man to believe he needed backup in case his daughters lost him.

She had to tell Patrick first, and then Molly. Sam needed her, too, and she wasn’t capable of putting him out of her heart again.

For the first time since they’d opened the bed and breakfast, Eliza left dishes in the sink and snuck out the kitchen door.

She found her husband in his usual late-morning spot on the bench across the square from the courthouse. From there, he and Homer Tinsdale got a clear view of every miscreant—both the members of the legal profession and their clients—who set foot inside the building.

Patrick stood, alarmed the second he saw her. She’d never been good at hiding her emotions. He grabbed her by both arms, his fingers biting into her skin. “What’s wrong?”

She wanted to blurt “My son found me,” but she loved her husband and couldn’t bludgeon him with the truth in front of his friend.

CHAPTER THREE

ELIZA PUSHED ASIDE the orange-leafed branch of a maple.

“I need to talk to you.” She glanced at her husband’s friend, who’d also risen. “Alone, if you don’t mind, Homer.”

“Let’s get a coffee,” Patrick said.

He was still holding her too tightly, almost hurting her, but she said nothing. This might be the last time he would touch her. Grass whipped around their ankles like grasping fingers until they stepped onto the sidewalk. Dimly, she noted cars and people and the chirping of a few hardy birds that hadn’t fled with the approach of cool weather.

At the crosswalk she stepped in front of a slow-moving vehicle whose driver hit his horn and his brakes, shouting insults she couldn’t hear.

“Damn out-of-towner.” Patrick yanked her closer. “What’s wrong with you, Eliza?”

She memorized every beloved line on his face, the concern in his warm green eyes. “I’ll tell you when we sit.” Even God couldn’t begrudge her a few more moments of her husband’s love.

Patrick stared. “You’re worrying me. Are you ill?”

“No—nothing like that. I’m… Let me tell you inside.”

He waited for her to precede him through the doors of the Train Depot Café. Over the years, they’d divided the work at the B and B so that she did most of the morning shift and Patrick manned the evening desk. Patrick spent the cold mornings of winter at the café with Homer and sometimes with his father, Seth. Eliza often joined them for a late breakfast. The café’s owner waved at them now as a signal that she’d bring their usual orders.

“Just coffee,” Patrick said, and Becky Waters nodded.

Patrick pulled a vinyl-upholstered chair away from one of the Formica tables. Eliza sat, avoiding her husband’s gaze until Becky brought their coffee.

“Tell me,” Patrick said.

The truth trembled on the tip of her tongue, astounding her with the promise of unexpected relief. Sam had been a hard secret to keep for forty years. She looked at her husband, but his wary eyes made her hesitate. “You won’t like it.”

“After twenty-seven years of marriage, what are you afraid to tell me?”

“You’re an honest man, Patrick, a blunt man.” Another of his friends strolled past, clapping him on the shoulder and greeting Eliza. The second he saw her face, he cut his welcome short and sped to his own table. She leaned across the Formica, lowering her voice. If she didn’t get this out now, she’d never say it. “I haven’t been honest.”

As if Patrick sensed the dangerous secret she was about to disclose, he leaned back, adding several inches of distance between them. The morning grew cooler. Desperate to keep her old life even as she forced her way into a new one, Eliza peered around at the walls. She cataloged the familiar menus and feed store advertisements, calendars that featured Jesus praying in the garden and others with scantily clad women sprawled on tractors.

This town had become her home. She’d have to leave if Patrick couldn’t accept her and Sam. She took a deep breath. How could she doubt her husband? Gary Masters, Sam’s birth father, had abandoned her to deal with consequences alone, but Patrick had always stood at her side.

“I did something I’m not proud of. Before I met you, when I was sixteen, I gave birth to a child.” That wasn’t what she meant. She wasn’t ashamed of Sam—though she had been ashamed, the smart young girl who’d gotten in trouble with a boy who’d almost immediately left her.

Patrick’s mouth opened on a sigh that might have been a groan. Eliza couldn’t stop.

“A son,” she said, “whom I gave up for adoption. My parents refused to help me. I went to a home for unwed mothers, but it wasn’t like what your mother and Sophie do for the girls at the Mom’s Place. I can’t tell you how awful—”

“What are you saying?”

“You have to listen to me.” He’d heard, but a blank expression betrayed his shock. She tried again. “I have a son. I gave him up—”

“I can’t believe what you’re saying.”

“You have to.”

He wiped sweat off his upper lip. “That’s why you always slip Mom money.”

“You knew?” Her donations were supposed to have been her secret.

“Molly noticed. She thinks you do it because she was one of those girls. She gives her grandmother what she can as well.”

Eliza covered her face. “What will Molly think of me? What will this do to her? Me, falling off my pedestal.”

Patrick eyed her with the neutral expression he offered defendants in unwieldy court cases. “I was going to ask if you’d told her.”

“Not before I told you.” How could he think that?

“You’re so close I thought you might have…. What made you speak up after all this time? Certainly not an obligation to come clean.”

His unexpected taunt nearly strangled her. She left it hanging, poisonous in the air between them until she managed to gasp a short breath. “I wanted to tell you many times, but I’ve been afraid.”

“After lying to me all these years, you should fear the truth.” He sipped his coffee as they stopped being a couple and turned into two separate people.

“Sam is my son.” Best to tear the Band-Aid off in one quick motion. Screaming inside, she allowed herself no outward reaction to her husband’s hand falling limply from the table or to his eyes dulling in shock. “Nina and Tamsin are my granddaughters. Sam brought them because he was afraid they’d have no one else if something happened to him. I want to know them, Patrick.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Sam?”

“Sam is my son.”

“Sam at the Dogwood, with the two little girls?”

“Patrick, are you all right?” Had she caused him to have a stroke or something?

“I’m lost. You had a baby, and the baby grew up to be Sam?”

“I need him. He thinks he wants something from me, but I’m getting a second chance I can’t turn down.”

“Even if it costs you Molly and me?”

“Patrick, Tamsin knows—and she needs us. Sam and his girls could have all of us.”

“I’m sorry about Tamsin, but I don’t see us as one big happy family.” As he straightened, he looked like a stranger. Patrick had never been a man who could withhold love for the sake of revenge, but his anger felt like hatred.

Her world splintered. She closed her eyes for the briefest moment, but she had no time for fear. She’d been afraid and given up Sam. Look where that had brought them.

“I can’t stand to lose you, but I can’t turn my back on my son again,” she stated. “Think of Tamsin. She troubled you, too. She needs a family’s love.”

“My family’s? How can I accept them? How can I even accept that you’ve hidden Sam’s existence?”

“Try to understand. I’ve missed Sam every day of his life, but I could never tell anyone.” Her eyes filled with tears. “You admired me because I came up here to the middle of nowhere to teach. You thought I was someone better than I’ve ever felt. How could I tell you?”

Her fear brought life back to Patrick’s eyes, but not forgiveness.

“I won’t speak for Molly.” Standing abruptly, he threw money on the table. “But I can’t fall in with this little change you’re making in our lives. You’re not the woman I married.”

“Where are you going?”

“You have no right to ask.” His cold gaze pronounced her guilty. “You never trusted me.”

Patrick rushed to the door of the café, stumbling against a table edge, bumping a rack of property rental magazines. Her heart broke. She pressed both hands to her chest as if she could catch the pieces.

Cast off again.

It hadn’t happened in such a long time, she didn’t know what to do. Cry or run after Patrick? Go to her son?

She couldn’t do either. She had to talk to Molly. The world spun crazily. How could she face disillusionment in her daughter’s eyes?

THE BALLOONS LAY in pieces on the floor. Molly swept them up, spreading a cloud of dust that smelled of wet children and dirty shoes and musty books.

A big splash of green balloon reminded her of Nina. The children in her class had written the letters they knew on their balloons. Earlier that morning Nina had written her name, and Sam’s and Tamsin’s with only a little help. She’d added Molly’s name, remembering it well enough to write it again after Molly had spelled it for her only once.

Moments like that reminded Molly why she loved to teach. Children who were eager to learn made the mind-dulling business sessions and the fight for funding, even in such a small school, worthwhile.

Her thoughts returned to Sam’s girls. Nina’s curiosity charmed the daylights out of her, but Tamsin’s Goth clothing and makeup alarmed her. In Nina’s big sister, Molly sensed the quiet desperation that had once been her constant companion.

Molly often wondered if her colleagues worried about their students’ home lives, but she never asked. Asking would expose one of those traits she wasn’t sure every woman shared. Where “normal” people assumed their friends, their families, even the children they taught lived in safety, Molly prepared herself for…not the worst, but not the best, either.

Eliza and Patrick had taken her into foster care after Eliza discovered that the dirty-haired, unkempt girl who’d once inhabited a corner of her classroom was “living” in an empty house on the edge of town. Molly had been alone for seven months by the time Eliza realized her so-called parents had abandoned her to live their separate lives in Knoxville.

After several inconvenient visits from Child Protective Services, Bonnie, Molly’s birth mother, and Mitch, her father, had been more than willing to give up their daughter. Eliza had made Molly feel special when the girl had wanted to hide in humiliation.

Molly had assumed no one could love her. Patrick and Eliza Calvert’s home had been paradise—a most unreliable situation so far in Molly’s short life. She’d tested her foster parents with behavior that horrified her in retrospect. But they’d kept loving her.

After the miscarriage, Patrick and Eliza had adopted her. In return for their kindness—and as penance for her own unforgivable mistakes— Molly had finally learned to consider every possible consequence before she made a move.

“Molly?”

She straightened, immediately alarmed. Tears had marked her mother’s cheeks. “Mom.” Aware only of an urge to fix whatever was bothering her mom, she crossed the room, taking her hands. “You’re crying.”

Eliza touched a lace hanky to one eye, smearing mascara. “A little. May I come in?”

“Why would you ask?” She forced a smile, but the floor seemed to tilt. She hated anything that hurt her mother.

Eliza floated into the classroom. She was still wearing the soft green dress she’d worn at breakfast, but a grease stain formed a circle just above her belted waist. Molly frowned. Her mom believed in the Southern tradition of chiffon and pearls for outside the house. She never wore grease.

“What’s wrong?”

Eliza sniffed the air, showing a sweet profile that only became more lovable to Molly with each passing day. “No more chalk dust. I miss it.”

Molly pointed at the long, shiny surface that had taken the chalkboard’s place. “Whiteboard. Smell the markers?”

“Not the same,” she declared, avoiding the real subject she’d come to talk about. She was starting to shake.

Molly negotiated a path through the wooden desks and helped her to a chair. “I’ll get you some water. What have you been doing?”

“I hardly know. I’ve walked and thought, and now I need to talk. I don’t want water.” With a sudden return of strength, Eliza pushed her into the closest seat. “Let me tell you about myself.”

“What?” Adrenaline lifted Molly’s voice several decibels. Something bad was coming. She gripped her mom’s hands again, reminding herself not to crush the delicate bones. “You’re scaring me.”

“Your father’s furious.”

“Daddy?” She was eight years old again. In the way. Totally expendable. “What’s happened?” For some reason, she thought of Sophie’s mother. Aunt Nita’s affair had nearly destroyed Sophie and Uncle Ethan, but Molly’s mother would never have an affair. Not this mother, anyway. The one who’d cut all ties with her would have considered an affair small potatoes.

“It’s Sam,” her mom said. “And me—and something I did when I was a young girl.”

“Sam?” Molly’s mind went blank. “What does Sam have to do with you?

“I’ve kept the truth from you and your father.” She licked her dry lips. Molly wanted to get her that water, but she couldn’t make her feet move.

“What did you ever do that you’d have to hide?” Suddenly, Sam’s eyes, dark, watchful and worried looking, swam in Molly’s mind. He’d reminded her of her mom. That fast, Molly knew. She’d also been pregnant too young. If any woman on earth had lived a life that prepared her to accept her mother’s confession, Molly had.