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Eddie raised his hand.
“Come in, please,” he said. “And bring your mother and Mr. Abbott.”
Sawyer knew Chief Albert Weston from the hospital board. He was average in height, but wide and balding, and he’d honed his police presence to a fine art. Sawyer had seen him talk to a knife-wielding man whacked out on drugs and alcohol for three hours. By the time the city had sent a hostage negotiator, Weston had the man in the back of a police car, sobbing out his rage over a lost girlfriend, a lost job, a lost life.
Weston’s office was like a room in a law enforcement museum. He had photos and citations on the wall from his years as a police officer in the city. He’d come to Losthampton ten years ago.
On a shelf behind his desk were trophies from the Long Island Officers Bowling League, and taped to the wall was artwork his grandchildren had created. Sawyer knew he and his wife were raising a nine-year-old abandoned by their daughter, who was living with a musician somewhere in L.A.
Weston arranged four chairs in front of his desk and put the children in the middle two. Eddie, who’d been smiling and generally unconcerned to this point, now looked big-eyed and worried. Emma climbed into Sophie’s lap.
“My officers are very busy,” Weston said, shuffling through the paperwork on his desk. “Just today, six officers have answered sixty-three calls. How many is that apiece, Edward?”
Eddie sat forward. “Um…ten,” he replied, “and three left over.”
The chief suppressed a smile. “That’s right. One was a robbery of a couple of cars at the beach, one was a tourist stranded on the rocks, two were traffic accidents, one was a man having a heart attack, one was a domestic…” The chief stopped, realizing the boy wouldn’t know what that meant. “I realize you don’t understand that, but they all take a lot of—”
“I know what a domestic is,” Eddie interrupted. His worried expression deepened. “It’s when a dad beats up a mom. It happened to us a couple of times.” Then he turned to Sophie with sudden concern, as though afraid he’d said the wrong thing.
The pink in her cheeks vanished, but she drew a breath and put a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “That’s all right. I’m sure Chief Weston wants you to tell him the truth. And he wants you to understand that it’s bad to waste the time of his police officers, because they have important things to do.”
As Sawyer dealt with equal parts of rage and sadness, he saw the chief’s jaw drop for an instant.
Eddie nodded. “I didn’t think about that when I saw Sawyer in the market. I just thought about how you need to have a husband that’s nice to you instead of mean, and how cool it’d be to have a dad who likes us. So me and Emma gave him the test.”
Sophie’s eyes brimmed with tears, and Sawyer was very grateful that Chloe had drummed into all her sons the old-fashioned notion that gentlemen carried handkerchiefs, if not for themselves, for the ladies they took to sad movies or sandy benches at the beach.
He handed her a white square of linen with a gray monogram. As she turned to accept it, a tear spilled over.
“The test?” the chief asked Eddie.
“Yeah. Our dad yelled a lot. And when my bike broke, Mom fixed it. When Emma got lost, Mom went to find her. When Gracie got in trouble at school—”
Sophie put a hand on his knee. “He understands, Eddie.”
“Who’s Gracie?” the chief enquired.
“She’s our big sister,” Eddie said. “She’s ten. She’s grumpy ’cause she doesn’t have any boobs yet. She stayed to watch a Jennifer Lopez special with Kayla Spoonby across the road.” Apparently thinking her whereabouts required explanation, he added, “We don’t have cable.”
The chief nodded gravely. “I see. So, telling Sawyer…Mr. Abbott…that you were kidnapped was part of the test?”
“Yeah. ’Cause one time I heard Mom talking to Grandma Berry and she said she never wanted to get married again unless she could find someone who’d rescue the children. That’s me and Emma and Gracie. And rescue means save, right? So we had to see if he thought we were in trouble he’d save us.”
The chief opened his mouth to respond, and obviously had no idea what to say. The boy had clearly misinterpreted what he’d heard, but cleverly created his own solution to what he perceived to be the problem.
Sophie groaned and put Sawyer’s handkerchief to her eyes for a moment. Then she lowered it and took Eddie’s hand.
“I meant…rescue you from not having a dad. From having to go to ball games with me instead of a dad. From Emma having no one to carry her on his shoulders, and from Gracie having no one to tell her she’s pretty.”
Eddie obviously didn’t get that, either. “But, she’s ugly,” he said seriously.
Sophie laughed, which was a good thing. Even the chief seemed relieved. Sawyer wanted to take Sophie and her children away to Shepherd’s Knoll, wrap them in fleece and shut out the world.
Of course, he knew that wasn’t healthy. But he had to do something.
“Okay.” The chief cleared his throat, then did it again. “Well. Now I understand what you were thinking when you scared your mother that way, but the next time you get an idea like that, I want you to promise me you’ll think twice. You know what that means?”
“Think twice,” Eddie repeated, considering. “Think about it two times so…so if there’re bad parts in the idea, you’ll see them.”
“Exactly,” the chief praised. “’Cause I’m sure your mom worries about you all the time. Moms usually do. And there’s enough real stuff to worry about without making things up that just scare people. Understand?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said.
Weston focused on Emma. “Do you understand, Emmaline?”
She nodded. “We don’t want to scare Mommy.”
“That’s right. Okay.” The chief stood and shook hands all around. “I’ll get an officer to take you back to your car.”
“We had walked to the market,” she said. “But if someone could take us home…”
“I’ll do that.” Sawyer shook the chief’s hand.
“Mr. Abbott, maybe it’d be better…” She began to object to his plan, but the children skipped after him as he’d thought they might as he walked out of the chief’s office, through the police station and down the steps to the parking lot. Sophie had little choice but to follow them.
He opened the back door of his deep-plum-colored PT Cruiser for Eddie and Emma and then scrambled in. They pulled on seat belts as he held the passenger door for Sophie.
“What if we all go out for pizza or burgers?” Sawyer suggested as he pulled out of the lot. “It’s after seven. Kind of late for you to start cooking.”
The children began a chorus of, “Please, Mommy! Can we? Please?” which he’d have caved to had he been in charge. But she was obviously made of stronger stuff.
“Thank you, but we have to go home,” she said firmly. “Gracie’s at the neighbor’s, and—”
“Can’t we just pick her up and take her along?”
Sophie shook her head. “No, but thank you.”
Eddie and Emma whined a little louder. “We never get to do anything fun! We never get to go out to eat! We never—”
“You know the rule about whining,” she interrupted.
Sophie was determined to get out of this without a further commitment or connection of any kind to Sawyer Abbott. As sweet and charming as he was, she wanted never to see him again. Ever.
“Which way home?” he asked as they reached the road that ran through Losthampton.
Funny, she thought. She’d been asking herself that question for years. When everything had gone bad with Bill, she’d sort of run in place for a long time, trying to find the road back to the way things had been before he’d fallen in with bad cops and become someone different from the man she’d married. She’d been lost in a nightmare for so long that when she finally escaped, she still felt as though she was getting nowhere.
The move from Boston to Losthampton had been intended to help her break free, to put Gracie in a new place, where the old memories would fade in the light of new experiences.
But Gracie was having as much trouble forgetting as Sophie was, so it felt as though they were still stuck in place.
Only Eddie and Emma provided the occasional breath of fresh air with their irrepressible good humor and direct approach to life. If she could just get through to them that their daddy search was hopeless.
She wondered idly if an uncle would appease them.
“Sophie,” Sawyer prompted. “Which way?”
She was a little surprised to hear her name on his lips. There was something nice about hearing it quietly spoken rather than shouted at full volume with a threat in it.
Something inside her made her want to lean toward him, tell him how nice it would be to have pizza or burgers and feel certain that the need wouldn’t erupt into an ugly event with the children crying and her wondering what on earth had happened to her life.
But life with Bill had changed her, and she had nothing left to give a man—even over pizza. So she just had to live with that, focus on her children and not mess up anyone else’s life.
“We live on Blueberry Road,” she said finally. “That old cottage right at the end.”
“Oh, yeah.” He turned in that direction. “I heard somebody’d moved into that place.” He smiled apologetically. “Small-town rumor mill, you know. It’s been vacant a long time.”
“Yes. I cleaned up the living room and the kids slept there for two months until I could make their bedrooms livable. Now I’m slowly working on the rest of it.”
“Nothing like an old house,” he said. “Ours has been around since the mid-1800s. Belonged to my mother’s family.”
“Was your mother a native New Yorker?”
“She was from an old Texas family, actually. They used to summer here. Her great-grandfather built the place and called it Bluebonnet Knoll after the flowers from home. When she left with the chauffeur, she signed the place over to my father—to assuage her guilt, I suppose.”
Sophie could imagine running away, but from circumstances, not from the kids.
“How old were you?”
“Ah…three. Killian was five. Then my father married a designer who worked for one of his clothing companies, and they had two children together.”
“Is Killian the brother you’re meeting after you drop us off?”
“No, he and his wife are in Europe on a second honeymoon. I’m meeting Brian Girard. My mother was pregnant with him when she left.”
“So he was the chauffeur’s…?”
“No. His father is the owner of the neighboring estate.”
“Good heavens!” She put a hand over her mouth to stop a smile. “I’m sorry. I know it isn’t funny. It is your life, after all. But it sounds like a soap opera during Sweeps Week when they pull out all the stops to get the biggest audience share.”
He didn’t bother to hold back his smile. “There’s more,” he said. “Our little sister was kidnapped at fourteen months and we never saw her again. But about two weeks ago, a young woman appeared on our doorstep, who thinks she might be her.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I’m not. She’s dark-haired like Campbell—that’s my younger brother—and she and he squabble like real siblings, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she is.”
“Well…aren’t you going to find out for sure?” she asked. “A DNA test would do it, wouldn’t it?”
He nodded. “I think it will. But my stepmother’s in France, looking after her dying aunt right now, and we don’t want to do anything to upset her. So we haven’t told her China is here, and we haven’t gone for testing. China’s in agreement. She’s living at Shepherd’s Knoll with us and helping Campbell run the estate.”
“I thought it was Bluebonnet Knoll.”
“My father changed the name when my mother left. Our ancestors raised sheep in Massachusetts before starting a mill, so Dad wanted the place to reflect his heritage rather than hers.”
“How interesting,” she said, “to be able to follow your ancestry so far back. All I know is that my grandparents farmed in Nebraska, lost everything in a drought and moved back to Vermont, where my great-grandfather was and the family’s been there ever since.”
He smiled. “What brought you here?”
“I spent ten years in Boston after I got married. We vacationed here one summer and I loved it.”
She’d been telling everyone simply that she was a widow starting over. But he knew it wasn’t that simple. Still—she didn’t want him to know much more.
“Fresh start,” she said, relieved as he turned onto Blueberry Road.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked, glancing at her as he led the car down the long, straight road. “I mean…if you need anything for you or the children, I have connections everywhere.”
He didn’t appear to be boasting. “It’s kind of you to offer,” she replied, “but we’re doing fine.”
“I’m not doing fine,” Emma said petulantly. “My cookies are still at the market.”
Sophie groaned. “The groceries.” She wondered if her cart had been set aside for her, or if everything had been put back. She hadn’t had time to pay before the police had taken her and her children away.
“Well, you’ll have to be happy with fruit for a snack tonight,” she said. “We’ll go back to the store tomorrow. And if you don’t tell some stranger a made-up story about being kidnapped, maybe we won’t have to go to jail and can actually take our groceries home.”
“He’s not a stranger,” Eddie corrected. “He’s The One.”
Embarrassed by her children’s insistence that they’d chosen the second son of the prominent and wealthy Abbotts to be their father, Sophie closed her eyes, completely out of excuses for their behavior.
“I could use that as billing for my next stunt,” Sawyer laughed. “Sawyer Abbott—The One!” He gave the line dramatic flair as he turned into the driveway of her ramshackle but charming old house. The white paint was peeling and one gray shutter hung, but she was in love with the wide front porch and the window boxes, in which she’d planted yellow and purple pansies. The sight of them always cheered her.
She took a deep breath and faced Sawyer, prepared to thank him, then dismiss him.
But he was already out of the car, helping the children out of the back, looking over the house and the overgrown lawn. Eddie and Emma pranced along on either side of him, talking nonstop.
“Who’s that?”
Gracie stood near the car door as Sophie let herself out. Beside her was Kayla Spoonby, her best friend. Kayla’s father was the hospital administrator, and her mother, a schoolteacher.
Sophie recounted the story of the afternoon’s adventures for Gracie and Kayla.
Gracie watched Sawyer Abbott with suspicion and hostility. “They’re such dweebs. We don’t need a dad.”
“It’s nice to have a dad,” Kayla disputed. She was a short, plump redhead with a sparkling personality. Gracie was tall and slender, with her father’s blond good looks but Sophie’s shyness. “And Sawyer’s really cool. He’s a friend of my dad’s. Hi, Sawyer!” she called, running around the car to greet him.
He opened his right arm for her, Eddie permanently attached to his left. Emma, obviously feeling left out, began to do cartwheels for attention.
Gracie stayed well out of the way, though Kayla called her over to introduce her. She gave Sawyer a half wave but took a step back when he started toward her.
