The Way They Were

by Mary Campisi

  “That makes no sense.”

  “I knew my mother’s witching hour came every night around ten o’clock. Why do you think I always stopped home for a half hour when we were out?”

  “You said she was lonely and you had to settle her in for the night.”

  Pain laced his next words. “I had to settle her in with five milligrams of Valium and twenty minutes at her bedside. She couldn’t drift off if I wasn’t there. It was like that every night since my dad died.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  He lifted a large shoulder and shrugged. “I tortured myself for weeks.” He met her gaze, held it. “But the really sick truth was that I wouldn’t have changed a thing.”

  Her heart tumbled back to the night on the lake…to him wrapped around her, over her, inside her…

  “What kind of son admits something like that?”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “You didn’t trust me very much, did you?”

  “I didn’t have the luxury of time to trust you.”

  His voice dipped. “I wish I had known.”

  “What were you going to do, drop out and play dad? Your aunt never would have stood for it.”

  “I would have married you.”

  His words stung her heart. “Do not say that.”

  “I’m sorry you gave up on us so quickly.”

  If only he knew the truth. “It wasn’t just about us, there were other people to consider, especially Julia. I was not going to bring up an illegitimate child.”

  “So Clay came barreling to the rescue in his pickup. If I’d returned before you married him, would you have married me?”

  “You didn’t return, so what’s the point?”

  “Humor me.”

  Lie. But she couldn’t. She opened her mouth and let this one speck of truth fall out. “Yes.” The tension on his face eased a fraction. Why did it matter now? Why did any of this matter now? “Face it, Rourke, you’re a bachelor leading a bachelor’s life. You don’t have room in your life for a child. Before Clay’s death, you didn’t even know Julia existed.”

  “You’re right, but now I’ve seen her, now I know she has my eyes, and my smile. Do you really think I can just walk away from that?”

  “You have to.”

  “If you think that, then you’ve seriously underestimated me. I may have missed the first thirteen years of my daughter’s life, but I won’t miss the next sixty.”

  Kate’s heart skipped two beats. “You’re moving to Montpelier?” she whispered.

  “No. Julia’s moving to Chicago.”

  Chapter 22

  “Speaking of marriage, do you love her?”—Julia Maden

  Rourke tucked the button-down shirt inside his jeans and fastened his belt. He glanced at his watch and grabbed a jacket. He had a date in fifteen minutes and he hadn’t been this nervous since the first time he asked Kate out. Julia had called and invited him to Sophie’s Diner for hot fudge Sundaes. Not that he’d be able to eat anything, but food wasn’t the reason for the meeting.

  He locked the door to his room and headed down the wide staircase to the parking lot and his rented Mercedes. He’d read Kate’s journal three times already and would read it at least twice more before bed, and still he couldn’t uncover the truth. What if it really had been just the fantasy of a lonely housewife? Then again, what if it had been the truth? A sick ache gripped his stomach and he unrolled the window to suck in several deep breaths.

  When he reached Sophie’s, he parked the car and glanced through the large stenciled window of the diner. Julia sat in a booth, long hair pulled in a high pony tail that accentuated her cheekbones and reminded him of the way Kate used to wear her hair. He gulped another breath and opened the door. She spotted him as soon as he walked in. Her small lips turned up in a half-smile and he forced his own lips to stretch until they hurt. “Hello there.” He hesitated a half second wondering if he should kiss her cheek or hug her. He decided against both and slid into the booth opposite hers. “I like your shirt.”

  She scrunched her nose. “You don’t think it makes me look like a candy cane?”

  “No. And if it did, I like candy canes.”

  “I wasn’t going to get it but Mom said,”—she faltered and cleared her voice—“she said it would look good on me.”

  “She’s right.” Was this the beginning of the most awkward night of his life? Maybe he should have invited Abbie and Maxine. At least Abbie would have kept the conversation going with her never ending comments. “What do you want to eat?”

  Julia shrugged. “I’m not really very hungry.”

  So, she was nervous too. “Well, I remember Sophie used to have the best hot fudge sundaes around and I think the last time I had one was here.”

  Her gray eyes filled with doubt. “When you lived here?”

  He nodded. “Light years ago.”

  “Okay, I’ll have one if you do.”

  Rourke ordered their sundaes and turned to his daughter. Calm, stay calm. “Thank you for inviting me. I’m sure you have a lot of questions.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Did you used to live on Oliver Street?”

  He blinked. “I did. How did you know?”

  “She used to make me ride my bike down there with her all the time. I hated it because there were too many hills. I complained enough so she finally stopped.”

  “She is your mother.” Kate said the journal was all a lie. Maybe that was the lie.

  “And you’re my father, right? Only I had a father but he’s dead and now you’re here.”

  “Sort of.” Rourke had no idea where this was going.

  “It’s like a bad soap opera. A woman sleeps with one man but marries a different one. Then that man dies and the first one returns and the daughter finds out about them. So she goes to her real father and tells him. And then what?” She bit her lower lip and he swore the tears were going to pour out any second, but a few blinks later she said, “If she didn’t love my father, she shouldn’t have married him.”

  “I think she loved him in her own way.” Now he was defending Kate’s feelings for Clay Maden.

  “Why didn’t you come back?”

  The sad longing in her voice pinged Rourke’s heart. “It was complicated back then, or at least I thought it was.” How could he make this child understand something he still didn’t? “My mother had just been in an accident, and my aunt, who I didn’t even really know, flew in and took me back to Chicago to live with her while my mother recovered.” Did she know about Georgeanne? If he were going to have a shot at making her understand, he had to tell her the truth. “Your grandmother was driving the car that hit my mother.” The shock on Julia’s face told him she hadn’t known. “She didn’t stop.”

  “You mean like a hit and run?”

  He nodded. Now Kate would really hate him but he would not lie to his daughter. “I was really messed up and angry. Then my aunt started dangling Princeton in front of me, and saying things that made me believe what your mother and I shared was just an infatuation and would pass.” He let out a sigh, wondering if the pain of recall would ever dull. “It took two months to realize she was wrong, but it was too late. Your mother was already married.”

  “Because she was pregnant with me,” Julia said quietly.

  “Yes.” She had his same quirky habit of moving her jaw from side to side when she was thinking.

  “A few years ago, I figured out my birthday and their wedding day were off, that’s how I knew she was pregnant when she got married.”

  “Your mother loves you very much.”

  “She should have told me.”

  “Maybe she was protecting your dad.”

  “Then she should have told you and if she couldn’t find you, she should have waited longer than two months to marry somebody else.”

  He didn’t disagree.

  The waitress plopped their sundaes in front of th
em and Julie nibbled a hunk of chocolate fudge before asking, “Do you think, I mean is it even possible that someday, maybe, you could love my mother again?”

  Bam, straight to the heart. He dug around for a spoonful of ice cream, getting just the right mix of fudge and ice cream before he answered, “Anything’s possible.”

  Chapter 23

  “If my daughter were traveling hundreds of miles with a stranger tomorrow, I wouldn’t be able to think either.”—Angie Sorrento

  “How could this happen?”

  The high pitch in her mother’s voice, the glitter in her eyes, the red around her neck, all reminded Kate of Georgeanne’s drinking days, but that was ridiculous. She’d promised on Julia’s life that she would never take another drink.

  “Kate? Answer me. How could this happen?”

  There was no way around it but to tell the truth. She could hedge though. “Mom, you know I loved Clay, right? No matter what happened before or anything else, you know I loved him.” Not a heart-stopping, once-in-a-lifetime love, but still, love.

  “Of course you loved him. What a ridiculous statement.” She rubbed her neck and made it even redder. “What I want to know is how that damn man ever found out about our Julia.”

  Because of my selfish, inexcusable stupidity. There was no other way around it. “Julia found my journal.” There.

  The glitter in Georgeanne’s eyes sparked. “You kept a journal? You wrote about you and Rourke Flannigan? That he was Julia’s father?”

  She made it all sound so sordid.

  “Answer me.”

  “I only wrote in it once a year.” As though that made everything right.

  “Once a year,” Georgeanne mocked. “Such restraint.” She massaged her leg, dug her fingers into the cotton material. “For how long?”

  Kate had expected anger and disbelief, but the bitterness outweighed both. “Mom—”

  “How long did you write about him?”

  “Fourteen years.”

  Georgeanne let out a strangled cry. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “I’m sorry. I know Clay deserved better—”

  “Clay?” her mother snapped. “I’m not talking about Clay though God knows that man did not deserve this. I’m talking about what you’ve done to me.” She pounded a fist against her chest. “I sacrificed everything to protect you and Julia and you threw it all away, and for what? Some silly words in a journal.”

  ***

  Kate hadn’t slept in two days. Julia was leaving for Chicago in the morning. It was unfair, and frightening, and yet Rourke had made it clear he’d fight for the right to be in his daughter’s life. The hardest part was Julia’s eagerness to go with him.

  Angie glanced up from her computer and said, “Why don’t you head home? You’ve been sitting there for twenty minutes and haven’t taken a single brush stroke.”

  Kate forced the brush along the railing of a mock colonial porch. “I’m just thinking about how I want it to look.”

  “Kate. Go home.”

  “I need to stay busy.” She bit her lower lip and concentrated on a spindle.

  “If my daughter were traveling hundreds of miles with a stranger tomorrow, I wouldn’t be able to think either.”

  “That stranger is her father.”

  “Sperm donor’s more like it. That man doesn’t have a parental bone in his body. It’s all a power play and you know it. He’s pissed you kept it from him and he’s pissed about the lawsuit.”

  Kate rubbed her left temple. “I wish I’d never pursued the case.”

  “He would have come anyway. Damage control and all that.”

  “I just want him to leave.”

  “He will, don’t worry. Leaving is Rourke Flannigan’s specialty.”

  ***

  “Everything is set, Mr. Flannigan. I’ve made Julia’s plane reservation and contacted the house to prepare a room for her.”

  “Thank you, Maxine.”

  She cleared her throat. “The girls have asked me to take them to see Blades of Glory this afternoon if you have nothing else for me?”

  Rourke glanced up from his report. “Blades of Glory?”

  A hint of a smile flitted across Maxine’s lips. “I’ve always been rather fond of ice skating.”

  He wasn’t going to tell her the movie wasn’t really about ice-skating. She’d find out soon enough. “That’s fine. Make sure Julia’s mother knows we’ll be leaving at seven-thirty tomorrow morning.” He’d resorted to addressing Kate as ‘Julia’s mother’. How sad was that?

  “Yes, sir.” She hesitated. “I’ve sent her a copy of Julia’s itinerary with the appropriate phone numbers and street address.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He thought she was about to add something else, but she nodded twice, grabbed her purse and left. There was something different about Maxine. Her gait? Her hair? Then it hit him. The tweed was gone! In its place she’d worn a light gray sweater and black slacks, a first for Maxine since he’d hired her three years ago. Rourke was contemplating Maxine’s new look when the bell above the door jangled and Angie Sorrento stormed in. He tried to ignore the instant pain that jolted his right temple and said, “Well, if it isn’t my favorite nemesis.”

  She stalked to his desk and thrust both hands in her pockets—probably so she wouldn’t take a swing at him. “You really are an asshole, aren’t you?”

  He leaned back in his chair and smiled, just to annoy the hell out of her. “Is that a rhetorical question or would you like an answer?”

  “How can you do this to her?”

  “Do what? To whom?”

  Her dark eyes sliced him. “Doesn’t it bother you, even a little, that you’re tearing mother and daughter apart?”

  “Cut the theatrics, Angie. She played me and you know it.”

  “Just how did she do that, Mr. Brilliant? By getting pregnant?”

  “By keeping it from me.”

  “You’re right. I guess she should have started calling all the Flannigans in Chicago and surrounding suburbs, and maybe told them she was looking for the father of her baby?”

  The woman reminded him of a terrier with fleas. “How about she didn’t run to the altar with the first guy who came along?” He did not want to have this discussion with this woman.

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “And you do?”

  “I was there, buddy.” She jabbed her small chest. “You weren’t, were you? No, you were too busy having a blast at your big, fancy college.”

  He wasn’t even going to qualify that with an answer. He had been at Princeton but the thought of Kate or rather trying to forget Kate had consumed him.

  “And I’ll just bet you had fun with that journal didn’t you?”

  “If you were a man, I’d deck you.”

  “If it were legal, I’d shoot you.”

  That, he believed. “What do you know about the journal?” The one he’d become obsessed with and carried in his briefcase, even if none of it were true.

  Angie shrugged and narrowed her gaze on him. Someone did her wrong long ago, probably a man, and she’d lost her softness, If she ever had it. “I knew there was one. I was with her when she bought it.”

  “And you read it?”

  She squared her shoulders and challenged him. “Why do you ask?”

  He’d be damned if he’d let her see how much the book meant to him. “Kate said none of it’s true. She said it was just a fantasy.”

  “And I’m Abe Lincoln.”

  “She said she was bored and lonely, so she started creating ‘what if’ scenarios.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  He kept his voice casual. “Are you saying that’s not true?”

  Angie pulled both hands through the tangle of black mop she called hair and sighed. “Okay, I’m not going to lie. I never read the book, but I was with her when she bought it. Velvet. Blood red. She said she bought it so she could
jot down events in Julia’s life, but I saw the way she looked at it and I knew she was going to write something much more private in it.”

  “So you think it’s true?” Hope thumped in his chest.

  “I’m only going to tell you this so you ease up on her. Kate’s fragile right now. She lost her husband and now she’s worried she’ll lose her daughter. If that weren’t enough, you just danced back into her life. We both know you live in different worlds but there’s a part of her that’s always believed you belonged together.” She spit out a laugh. “Isn’t that absurd?”

  “Not really.”

  “Come on, you’ve got your Barbie-on-a-stick girlfriends and your Ferrari and your paparazzi. Where would a homegrown girl from Montpelier, New York fit in? Please don’t hurt her anymore than you already have. Let Julia visit but don’t tell everyone she’s your daughter. Not yet. The reporters would barrage Kate and she can’t handle that.”

  “I don’t want to hurt Kate.” She still cared about him. Maybe loved him?

  “Then prove it. Let her go to Chicago with Julia. You can make it look like she’s keeping an eye on Julia and Abbie while you work. You’ll think of something. You’re very good with the spin.”