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He felt slightly stunned, as if her attitude were an unexpected jab to the gut. He had really been a romantic idiot, hadn’t he? All this time he’d secretly thought that, if they were ever to meet again, even if it was by accident, on a crowded street, some irresistible force that had survived the whole heartbreaking mess would draw them together.
Like some sad sack in a chick flick, he had actually believed that, if he ever got the chance, he could make things right.
He looked straight into her blue eyes. “God, Hayley. Are you really as indifferent as you sound?”
“Yes.” She shrugged. “I’ve had seventeen years to make peace with what happened. I’m not saying I wasn’t angry at first. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard. But it’s over. Life goes on.”
She didn’t so much as blink. He couldn’t detect even a microscopic flinch that might have suggested she lied. She still looked only tired, cold and slightly irritated.
“Fair enough,” he said, refusing to be thrown off his course, even by that total apathy. “But the truth is, I’m still looking for the peace you say you’ve found. I’ve done a lot of soul searching over these years. And I think the reason I can’t get over…over what happened…is that I was to blame.”
She didn’t contradict him. She just waited.
“What I did was indefensible, Hayley, and I’ve never had a chance to apologize. I’ve never had a chance to make it right.”
He thought he might have seen a sudden flare of color in her cheeks, but when she moved, the light changed and the pink disappeared. She shook her head once, crisply. “Those are children’s words, Colby. There’s no making it right. In the real world, there are some mistakes you can’t undo.”
“Maybe. But I still need to say it. I need to tell you how sorry I am. From the minute you told me you were pregnant, I knew the baby was mine. I knew there hadn’t been any other men—boys…”
He cringed at the awkward phrasing. Where had all his fantasy speeches gone? In his dreams, he was so eloquent he moved her to forgiving tears. Where had all those powerful words gone now that he finally needed them?
She still didn’t move a muscle. But she was clearly listening. And that was something, he supposed.
“I was a coward. Partly, I was afraid of what my grandparents would think.”
Hayley’s news had come only three months after his parents’ deaths. He’d been eighteen, grieving, both for his beloved mom and dad, and for the loss of his sheltered, idyllic life. His grandparents, who were the strongest people he knew—then or now—had been devastated by the death of their son and daughter-in-law, but they’d rallied for the sake of the boys.
How could he tell them he’d let them down already? How could he add another disaster to their burden? That’s actually how he had thought of the baby: a disaster. And so he’d jumped through the one escape hatch he could find. He and Hayley had always been off-again, on-again. For a teenager, the forty minutes between San Francisco, where Colby lived, and Sonoma, where Hayley lived, might as well have been half a world away.
He’d met her the summer he was sixteen, when he’d been sent to the little Sonoma town of Ridley to work in the Diamante just opened there. They’d dated all summer, and they’d hung out sometimes over the school breaks, too—Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, spring break. Then the next two summers, he’d requested the Ridley assignment again, and picked up right where he left off with Hayley.
But that last summer, they’d broken up. A fight about Colby going away to college. The gossip that had been circulating among their friends was that she’d taken up with her old boyfriend, who was consoling her in the time-honored way.
Colby’s pride had been wounded when he heard the rumors, and he wasn’t in the mood to believe her when she came to him, crying and saying she was going to have a baby. He told himself she was just trying to trap him. She’d been needy all summer, fearful that he’d forget her when he left for college in the fall.
So that’s what he had told his grandparents—that, even if her story was true, and she was pregnant, Hayley had probably slept with another boy. She was just trying to pin it on Colby because he was richer and a better catch.
Whether they believed him or not, they backed him. They’d met with Ben and Evelyn Watson and told them that their grandson felt he was being wrongly accused. They requested a paternity test.
Nana Lina and Grandpa Colm had seemed satisfied, and reported that the meeting had been more civilized than they’d expected, given Ben Watson’s temper. But that night, without a word to anyone—including Colby—Evelyn Watson and her two daughters had driven off into the night, never to return to Foggy Valley Vineyard.
He’d been shocked, but selfishly, a little relieved. Colby had told himself, and his grandparents, that her flight was proof enough that she’d been lying.
It made him wince to think of all that now. Who did that kind of thing? He’d been one mixed up young man that year, but that was no excuse.
Hayley seemed to have been digesting his statement about being afraid to tell Nana Lina and Grandpa Colm. Her jaw and mouth had a hard, cynical set—and he suddenly realized he had seen that look before. That was the look she had turned on him when he asked her if she was sure the baby was his.
“Your grandparents worshipped the three of you,” she said. “Their perfect young lions. They might have been angry, but they would never have stopped loving you. They would have supported you, no matter what.”
She was right, of course. His fear of letting them down had been only part of his motivation for being such a fool. The other part was even less admirable.
“I know,” he admitted grimly. “The truth was, I simply didn’t want to believe the baby was mine. I was spoiled, and I was excited about going away to college—the girls, the parties, the whole frat-boy experience. I didn’t want to be tied down with a wife and baby.”
“No,” she said, her tone dry. “Of course you didn’t.”
He didn’t blame her for the sarcasm. It was a lot less than he deserved. In fact, he might have felt better if she had yelled at him, or slapped him or burst into tears. The idea that he was too unworthy to hate made him feel cold, and strangely empty inside.
“At first,” he went on, “when I heard you were gone, I was actually relieved. I know how it sounds, but it’s the ugly truth. I thought I’d dodged a bullet.”
“Charming way to put it,” she said evenly. “But tell me. When, exactly, did you have this epiphany? When did you change your mind about the bullet? Seventeen years ago?” She smiled. “Yesterday?”
“It happened gradually,” he said, trying to be as honest as possible. But there was no easy answer. At first, he’d been in deep denial, joining a fraternity and partying like a madman, collecting great-looking coeds the way little boys collected baseball cards. He hadn’t let his grades slip, either. Straight A’s all the way, right through Stanford Law. It was as if he had to do everything, have everything, be everything—to justify not being the father of Hayley’s baby.
“I think it really started when I got out of law school. Before that, I kept so busy, and I was focused on that grand prize, the big law career. When I got a job at my first-choice firm, I expected to be completely happy. But I wasn’t. I started trying to figure out why.”
She made a dismissive sound. “The quarter-life crisis. Everybody has one. I think it’s rather classic, when you first start spending all day behind a desk, to wax sentimental about the carefree days of youth.”
“That’s fair,” he said, determined not to argue. “I’m sure there was some of that.”
He’d thought exactly the same thing, at first. Quarter-life crisis. The “is that all there is?” moment. He’d started playing handball on his lunch break, sailing the MacGregor, the family sailboat, every weekend, and finding even more beautiful women to date. He’d cut back on sleep, so that there could still be plenty of time for fun.
He got exhausted. But he didn’t get happy.
“Anyhow, that was when it started.” He wondered if he should tell her about the private investigator, but immediately decided against it. This was an uphill battle already. “But it was more than that. Finally, I just stopped kidding myself. I had been a selfish bastard, and I was going to have to pay for it the rest of my life. I was never going to forget about the baby you were carrying when you left that night. I was always going to be haunted by the knowledge that, somewhere, someone was raising a child who should have been ours.”
For the first time, she looked confused. “Someone? What do you mean ‘someone’?”
“The…people, the family…” he said, stumbling in the face of her transparent bewilderment. What did that mean? Was she shocked that he knew? “The people who adopted the baby.”
She drew her head back. “What makes you think I gave the baby up for adoption?”
“Because—your father said…” He couldn’t seem to form words correctly. “Your father said you did.”
“Ah.” She smiled coldly. “My vicious, drunken father? And you believed him?”
“Yes.”
“I see,” she said. “Did this piece of information by any chance come with a price tag?”
He shook his head. “He told me that much for free. If I wanted to know how to find the adoptive family, though, he said that was going to cost me five thousand dollars. But I never got the information, and he never got the money. He died before I got the chance.”
“Well, that’s a bit of good luck. Because you would have paid all that money for nothing. He might have given you a name, maybe even an address. But it would have been bogus. You should have known that. Like so many alcoholics, the man was a consummate liar.”
He frowned. “How can you be so sure it would have been bogus? Are you saying you didn’t give the baby up for adoption?”
His mind was reeling. When his investigator found Hayley, he had reported that she was single, living with her mother and sister and no one else. Eventually, when Colby finally stopped kidding himself that the pregnancy had been fictional, he’d assumed she’d decided on adoption. It had made a cruel sense. Alone, on the run, three women supporting themselves with menial jobs that required little documentation… How could Hayley have done right by a child in that scenario?
Besides, in his heart of hearts, he couldn’t believe that she would have raised their child, year after year, milestone after milestone, birthdays, and Christmases and acne and math, without ever sending Colby so much as a photo. Her heart couldn’t have been that hard, no matter how reprehensible his actions had been.
“Hayley, answer me. Is that what you’re saying? You didn’t give the baby up?”
“No,” she said flatly. “I didn’t give the baby up.”
He couldn’t take it in. “But—then—where is he?”
“He’s nowhere,” she said dully. “There is no baby.”
“I don’t believe it.” He shook his head stubbornly, not caring how stupid it sounded. “I don’t believe it. You weren’t lying to me that night.”
“No. I wasn’t lying. When I left here seventeen years ago, I was pregnant, and you were the father. But you’ve tortured yourself all these years for nothing. There is no baby.”
He took in a breath, trying to fill his lungs, though no matter how hard he tried, they continued to burn from lack of air.
“Why?” His mind suddenly latched on to an unthinkable answer. “Oh, my God, Hayley, surely you didn’t—”
“Damn it. No.” Her eyes narrowed. “Look, I don’t talk about that night, Colby. Not ever, not to anyone. But—because—well, let’s just say for old times’ sake, I’m going to tell you this. Though, as far as I’m concerned, you have no right to know. There is no baby, because that night—”
Her eyes sparkled where the moonlight touched them, though her face was still as hard as if she were a mannequin, made of plastic. “That night, before we even reached the California state line, I lost him.”
He was still shaking his head. He felt as if she spoke in some language he had never heard before. “Lost him?”
“Yes,” she said. “In the backseat of my mother’s car, surrounded by our suitcases and everything we could get out of the house without waking my father, I miscarried.”
She put out her hand. For a confused second, he thought she might be reaching for him, and he started to extend his own. But then he saw a key glint. She placed it neatly, deftly, in the lock and turned it. The front door opened with the squeak he’d last heard seventeen years ago.
“Go home, Colby,” she said, her tones frighteningly detached, though he suddenly saw that her face ran with tears. “There is no child, and there’s nothing more for us to say.”
CHAPTER FOUR
HAYLEY WAS TREMBLING when she shut the door behind her. She pressed her back against the wood, flattening her shoulder blades, as if she thought Colby might try to batter it down. Her breath came quickly, like a heroine in a horror movie who had escaped just in the nick of time.
She scoffed at herself for being so melodramatic, hoping she could force herself to calm down. But as she surveyed the room in which she’d taken refuge, she didn’t feel much better.
The foyer was dimly lit by a fake chandelier. Its dangling pieces of plastic, which had been cut to look like crystals, were furred with dust.
The entry area had seemed sad, pale and oddly smaller when she and Roland had dropped by this afternoon. It looked much different now that it was night, now that she was alone.
And it teemed with memories. She glanced toward the far end of the hall, where it led to the kitchen, half expecting to see her father stalking through the opening, a beer in his hand and fury in his face.
For several long seconds, she stood there, heart racing, caught between two unbearable memories. Colby hadn’t left the porch, she knew that from the utter silence behind her. But inside… She shut her eyes, as if that would keep her father’s ghost from materializing.
Oh, God, she shouldn’t have come back to Sonoma. She shouldn’t have set foot in the vineyard, in the graveyard or in this house. So what if her father had wanted to be buried here, on Sonoma soil? She hadn’t needed to come. She should have hired someone to clean the house, as Genevieve had encouraged her to do, and then hired a real-estate agent to sell the property.
But, no—she’d called that plan too cowardly. She’d been so sure she could handle returning home. It would be healthy, she’d told Genevieve. She’d been so confident that, after seventeen years, she’d grown up enough to put her old life into its proper perspective.
She shook her head, feeling her hair pulling free of its careful French braid as it snagged on the tiny splinters of the old door. This was her lifelong sin—the sin of idiot optimism and dogged pride. From the time she was a little girl, she had always believed she could do anything. Sleep safely in treetops, marry the handsome superstar, flout the alcoholic tyrant.
She could still remember the last night she’d ever entered this house and thought of it as home. She’d come in late from work—one of the other cashiers had called in sick. For once, she hadn’t even been thinking about her dad, and whether he would be drunk. She’d been locked in her own private hell, worried about the baby, and angry about Colby’s inexplicable reaction to the news.
But not yet terrified. She had no idea that the Malones had come here to see her parents. She’d believed that her secret was still safe. And, fool that she was, she believed that, once Colby got over his shock, he would come around. He’d do the right thing. He loved her. Sure, they’d fought, and they’d broken up, but everyone knew that was just temporary. They belonged together. He loved her.
The minute she shut the door and dropped her keys on the hall table, her father appeared out of nowhere.
“You disgusting slut,” was all he’d said, and then she felt something hard and cold crash against her head. Later, she learned it had been his full beer bottle. She didn’t even remember falling to the floor, and she didn’t remember the rest, either, thank God. Had he kicked her as she lay there? Or had he hauled her up by the hair and punched her? The next day she’d found her own hair all over her shirt, so maybe he had.
She only knew that, sometime much later, her mother had helped her into the living room—just to the right of this foyer—and onto the sofa. Her consciousness went in and out with a fiery, strobelike effect.
She didn’t ask why her mother wasn’t taking her upstairs and putting her into bed. She assumed that she wasn’t able to climb—one of her hips hurt so much she thought it must be broken. But hours later, when her mother woke her again and helped her limp in total silence out to the car, she realized that her mother had kept her downstairs because that would make the escape easier.
She knew, somehow, that she mustn’t cry out, though she had figured out by then that it was her leg, not her hip, that really was broken. As she exited the house, the moon was full on the vines. Genevieve already sat in the front seat, clutching her ballerina bear, her face like a white button at the window.
Her mother had brought pillows and blankets, and made a sort of bed in the backseat for Hayley. She lay gingerly down, hugging herself against the pain, and passed out again.
She woke somewhere near the Nevada line, screaming. Someone was stabbing her stomach with knives, and blood streamed out of her, soaking the denim of her jeans.
“No,” she had cried, squeezing her legs together in spite of the pain. “No…no…no…”
The sudden sound of a car engine snarling to life returned her to the present. She sagged against the door, relieved. Finally, Colby was leaving.
Somehow, just knowing she wouldn’t have to face him anymore tonight brought back a little of her courage. She moved away from the door, deciding it was time to do something practical.
She pulled out her cell phone and put a call in to Genevieve. To her surprise, her sister picked up on the first ring.
“I was just about to call you!” Genevieve’s musical tones sounded scratchy, as if she’d worked too many hours today. “I’ve been on since about six this morning, but they finally gave me a couple of hours to sleep. How are you? Did you make it through the funeral okay?”
“I’m fine.” And, as always, the sound of her little sister’s voice was enough to bring the world back into balance. “The funeral was uneventful.”
“Did you decide to stay at the house after all? I still think a hotel might be—”
“No hotels, silly. There’s a lot to do before we can put the place on the market, and I might as well get started.” Hayley had to smile at herself. Two minutes ago, she’d been seeing specters and barring the door against demons of the past, but now she was back to sounding like the bossy big sister.
“Honestly, I’m fine. The place isn’t as big a mess as I’d expected, actually.”
Genevieve sounded unconvinced. “Well, that’s good, but…”
“But nothing.” With her sister’s voice as company, Hayley marched resolutely up the stairs. “I want to hit the ground running in the morning. So I’ll just turn in early and—”
She stopped at the door to her old room. Confused, she swiveled on the landing, checking the layout to see if she’d become disoriented. But no, this was her room.
Had been her room, anyway. In Hayley’s mind, the room had never changed. It had remained exactly as she left it that final afternoon, when she dashed off, late to work as usual.
She could remember every detail. She’d bought a new pair of sneakers, because she got a discount now that she worked at the sports superstore. She’d stuffed the empty box into the trash can, but she hadn’t quite been able to make it fit, which she knew would make her father mad. The shirt she’d worn to school—white with a scoop neck trimmed with blue sequins, all the rage that year—had been tossed onto the foot of the bed, abandoned for her uniform shirt.
And, of course, all along the edge of the mirror were pictures of Colby. Laughing, confident Colby, with his arm around her, about to dunk her into the pond, or leaning over her, dangling a cluster of grapes just above her open mouth.
But none of that remained. Instead, a sea of boxes greeted her. Such a mess. She couldn’t have stepped two feet inside this pink-walled room if her life had depended on it.
It had become the rubbish closet. Maybe, she thought, that was where all the possessions they’d left behind had ended up. Maybe, somewhere in there, was her diary, which her father had undoubtedly found when he took the mattress off her bed. And the pregnancy test, which she’d wrapped in a bag and stuffed behind her winter sweaters.
