Silver Linings

“So the town has a plan?”

“Right.” But no way was the town going to grow fast enough for an extra attorney to make a living for herself and her daughter. “And maybe I can come back someday.”

“Come back? Are you leaving?”

She should have kept her mouth shut. She had just opened herself up for the “Why aren’t you an attorney?” question again.

She took a large bite of her sandwich, too impossibly big to speak around, and she chewed.

They ate in silence. It was shocking how fast a submarine sandwich could disappear when one was trying to make it take a long time.

She frantically tried to open her pickle until Hunter stilled her hands with his and took the pickle from her.

“Do I get an answer?” There was an edge of quiet anger in his tone. The same as when he confronted her at her office earlier, but he opened the pickle, drained the juice into a couple napkins and handed it back to her.

“It’s complicated.” She took a bite and resolutely stared out the window, now icy enough from condensation on the inside to blur the beacon from the lighthouse.

“You have a daughter.”

She couldn’t tell whether it was the vinegar or the surprise that made her sputter.

She shouldn’t have been caught off guard, though. In a casual office environment like Morrison and Morrison one needed only to stand anywhere near the break room to hear about everyone’s life, whether one wanted to or not.

“I do. Her name is Brianna.”

“A six-year-old daughter.” The smoke of a smoldering fire nearly poured from his ears.

Oh, no. He thought Brianna was his child. She breathed a sigh of relief. This was a simple problem, easily fixed.

“She’s not your daughter.”

In the light from the dashboard, horror flooded his features instead of the relief she’d expected. He turned away, and a moment later when he turned back, his face was a sculpture of pleasant disagreement. This would be the face he put on when the opposing attorney presented a shocking and damaging piece of evidence. She knew it was only because his guard had been down so far that she’d seen anything at all.

“You know that for certain. You have DNA results.” They weren’t questions. They were statements, as if this was the evidence he would need for proof. Her verbal assurances would fall short. Dark-haired, dark-eyed Brianna was her proof, but she wasn’t putting her daughter before an angry man for judgment.

“I don’t have to give you any sort of answers.” He had a legal right to his daughter, but with Brianna the only right he had was the moral right to know that a child was not his.

“If she’s not my daughter, then you...”

“Don’t. Don’t you even say those words.” He was her first and the only man she’d loved. Micky had been there after her heart had been broken into so many pieces she’d thought she would never heal. She had not left one man’s bed and gone directly to the other. “If we’re not careful, some of the things we say to each other might not be forgivable.”

He stayed silent, but his gaze never left her face.

“Would it help if I told you Brianna was born prematurely?”

She could tell he was trying to hide the scorn, but it was leaking out through his attempted mask of indifference. She would not fault him for that, either. Scorn had been what she had felt for herself starting the day Micky left. She and Micky had done nothing but combine bodies; there was not the commingling of souls Delainey had always thought making love should be.

She had made love with Hunter.

He did not speak.

He was using the silence technique. Give a witness enough time and she might say something incriminating or at least telling to fill the void.

She had thought they would use the time tonight to reacquaint themselves, maybe to recapture some of their old rapport.

She wasn’t sure there was anything to recapture and silence worked well on her. “You left me.”

He turned and looked out the windshield into the darkness. Silence would not work again. She put her seat belt on and started the car. When they reached the Murphys’ house, he paused before getting out of the car.

“We’ll have to finish this.”

When he bid her good-night and disappeared into Shamus’s house, her only thought was...he’d left her again.

After the first time, it should have gotten easier.

It had not.

CHAPTER FIVE

HUNTER HUNG HIS overcoat in the foyer closet, glad the Murphys’ house was quiet and mostly dark.

You left me.

He’d left her and she’d created a child. A child of hers that could have been his.

He wandered into the kitchen and tossed the wrapper from the sandwich into the trash bin. The trash bin. A real metaphor for the state of his personal affairs these days.

Connie appeared in the doorway with a glass in her hand. When she saw him, a look of concern fell over her face and he let his own relax. He smiled as he crossed the kitchen to where she met him halfway.

“Hello, Connie. I didn’t expect you to be up.”

“Oh, my dear Hunter, don’t give me that smiley look. What’s wrong?” she asked as she put a frail hand on his arm and looked up into his face with true concern.

“Looks as if someone could use a drink,” Shamus added from the doorway. He was never far from Connie except when he went into the office without her.

Connie nodded her agreement and led the way to the den, where a fire burned, reminding him of the one he had just left. Last night they had sat before this fireplace and Shamus and Connie had told him why Shamus had suddenly decided to retire. Connie had been diagnosed with leukemia. She disguised her trips to the clinic in Portland as some of the many trips she used to take with her sisters.

Shamus had wanted to leave the law firm the minute he found out, but Connie would not hear of his leaving Harriet and the workers in the lurch. When Connie suggested he call a Morrison, Hunter, the only attorney from the family, Shamus had.

Without giving too much detail, Hunter had hinted during their first call he might be available for an indefinite period of time. Hunter had become the perfect candidate and the two of them had begun to court him, Shamus in person, Connie on the phone.

At the time, he had no idea why. He would have been on the next plane if they had told him. He didn’t know Shamus and Connie well, but he knew their reputation as good people.

Shamus tended bar for the three of them. Easy enough. Clear still water for Connie and two fingers of neat scotch for each of the two men.

Hunter poked the fire and tossed on another log before he sat down to his drink.

“Now, my boy, your secrets are safe with us and it would not harm you to have someone to tell them to.”

Hunter swirled the scotch around in the tumbler and then put it to his nose and inhaled deeply. The heady fumes went straight to his brain and he took a sip of the smooth, fiery liquid.

“I made a judgment call.”

“A judgment call. The choices must have been big ones.”

Hunter let out a derisive grunt. “As you know, my family moved back to the Midwest after I graduated from high school.”

“The town missed all of you. Your mother was a well-thought-of music teacher and your father would have been wonderful on the town council—progressive,” Connie said between sips of water.

“During Christmas break my senior year in college, my parents asked me to go to law school near them. My dad was having heart problems and my mother said she would feel much more ‘at ease,’ as she put it, if I lived nearby.”

“So you did. Northwestern University was very near your parents’ home in Chicago.”

“Yes. I had already been accepted at all the law schools to which I had applied, including Northwestern, so the process wasn’t an arduous one.”

“And you did quite well, as I understand it, dear.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Connie waved her glass of water in the air. “You know what I told you about the ma’am stuff.”

“Of course, Connie.

“I came back to close down my grandmother’s estate because Dad hadn’t been feeling well and he knew it might be a long time until he got to it. So I spent almost a month here right after I graduated.”

“Saying goodbye to your friends.” Shamus smiled as if remembering friends of his own.

Hunter hesitated. He hadn’t meant to say goodbye that way to Delainey, but he’d done his best to explain and that was all he’d thought he could do at the time. He’d been so young, ambitious...selfish even, although he didn’t see it then.

“Delainey,” Shamus said.

Hunter looked up at the older man. Shamus’s mostly gray eyebrows stood out on his face almost like wings. His shock of gray hair bristled no matter what he tried to do with it, but Hunter doubted there was a kinder face on the planet. “As you might have figured, the judgment call didn’t turn out well for me.”

He hadn’t been able to see how Delainey would fit in his life, and it wouldn’t have been fair to her on so many levels until he could. Besides, she loved Bailey’s Cove and had had a lot going on here—whereas he no longer had. At least, that was what he’d thought.

She had said the child wasn’t his, but she had offered no real proof. Premature. Who had decided this? The only real way to tell was DNA testing.

If she had still been the same person he knew in high school, he would have taken her word for anything. If she said the child was not his, it would not be. He wasn’t sure he knew this Delainey. What had happened to her since then?

What had happened to him?

If he had always been such a cynic, Delainey would have let him know in her teasing “Are you sure about that?” kind of way.

“She’s a good woman, Hunter.” This was Connie, who was now sitting on the edge of the couch leaning toward him to emphasize her words.

“I’m sure she is.”

“Her daughter is a lovely child.”

“Too bad the father isn’t in the picture,” Shamus spoke up.

Hunter wondered who the father of the child was if not him, and knew he could easily find out if he wanted to. He did not. If he knew, he’d be looking around every corner for the man, wanting to punch the guy’s lights out.

They drank and talked, Hunter steering the conversation to Shamus and Connie’s children and grandchildren. Anything painless until enough time had passed that he could finish his drink and bow out.

When he finally drained the last swallow from his glass, he stood. “I’m going to leave the two of you alone. I’ve got some financial journals to catch up on.”

“Truly, it is time I retired.” Shamus laughed. “Because I’m weary of always trying to keep up with the world, as big as it is today. I don’t have any idea how you young people do it.”

“Specialization and lots of help,” Hunter said as he nabbed the empty glasses. “Good night. I’ll see you in the morning.”

In the kitchen alone, Hunter put the glasses in the dishwasher, then leaned both hands on the counter and dropped his head. There was no doubt about it. Unreasonably, he was disappointed he and Delainey had not made the child together.

* * *

ON SATURDAY MORNING, dark clouds hung low and threatening, but Delainey was happy for the two-day hiatus from the office.

She had a few more minutes before Brianna got up and so she sat in her breakfast nook drinking a cup of freshly brewed coffee. Dark days like today made her glad she had chosen to paint everything in her kitchen a cheery white with red-and-yellow accents.

After yesterday morning, she could use a little cheer. She had tried her hardest not to dread seeing Hunter at the office. She had, after all, done nothing wrong. She’d used poor judgment and had been stupid, but not wrong.

At work she’d kept expecting to see Hunter enter his office. When by ten o’clock it had not happened, she’d had enough waiting for the hammer to fall and contacted Shamus.

As she’d dropped the phone back into the cradle on her desk, she’d sat back and sighed with relief. Shamus had set up a series of out-of-the-office schmooze meetings for him and Hunter all day. With the pair out of the office, she’d been able to relax and do her work.

The boy in the file Carol had brought to her attention, Stevie Anning, was safe as far as she knew. She’d said a prayer he would stay that way.

She had finally told the office staff she had been accepted into law school to many congratulations and hugs, and Shirley had even rushed out and bought flowers.

She took a sip of her cooling coffee. We’ll have to finish this. Hunter’s parting words had kept her awake at night and haunted her during the day.

They would have to finish. She did not know what this “finishing” would entail, but there was always one person who came first. Her daughter.

If Hunter could see Brianna, he would find out for himself this dark-haired, dark-eyed and beautiful little girl could not possibly be his child. She thought carefully about arranging for him to see her without actually meeting her but decided there would be no harm in the two of them sharing a few words.

If Delainey and Hunter were to work at Morrison and Morrison, there would be occasion for him to meet Brianna.

Once he met her, talked to her, he’d forego the DNA testing. Brianna was very smart. Even at six, she would be able to figure out something was going on that the adults were not telling her.

Delainey leaned her elbows on the windowsill to watch the gray clouds lumber across the sky until they seemed to come to rest on the ocean.

If Hunter and Brianna met, all could be finished between Hunter and her, except for their relationship as colleagues.

Thinking Hunter and all could be finished in the same thought gave her a sinking feeling, as if something good and essential would disappear from inside her. They had been such great friends. Apparently, it was true—you could ruin a great friendship by trying to push a relationship beyond where it should go.

“Mommy, Mommy.” Brianna came running into the kitchen, her dark hair sticking up in a tangled knot on one side of her head, but she was dressed in a matching outfit and it was even appropriate winter attire, not a sundress or shorts. “I’m ready to go shopping for my material for my dress.”

“Oh, I think I’ll go back to bed, take a nap, maybe plant my garden first.”

“No, you won’t. No, you won’t. And you’re kidding me. It’s too cold for a garden.” Her daughter pulled on her arm until she got up from the table.

“Breakfast first, my darling one, and someone has to get that rat’s nest out of your hair.”

Brianna giggled, and put her hand to the usual spot where her hair tangled during sleep. “I’m making a fashion statement, Mommy.”

Now Delainey giggled. She had to admit she hadn’t giggled much as an adult until Brianna had started as a baby and the effect had been totally contagious. These days, her mother accused the two of them of being the same age, which made them giggle more until eventually even Grandmother started.

“Did you decide which pattern you want Grandma to use?”

“Can’t I get a new one?”

“Not this time. You’ve already got four to choose from. Maybe you can use one of the different collars or have Grandma choose the belted option for the pattern of that green dress she made last Christmas.”

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