“You might take some time to think over your next steps. Whatever you decide to do will have consequences in both your lives, you know.”
“What if she doesn’t want to know me? What if she doesn’t want anything to do with me?”
“What if she does?”
Jamie fell silent, then gathered her bag and stood. “Thank you, Grace. For everything.” She hugged her.
“Where will you go, dear?” Grace seemed to know instinctively that Jamie was leaving.
“I’m not sure. I guess to my house in Princeton.” She leaned on the back of the chair she’d been sitting in and told Grace about her discovery of the adoption.
“Oh, dear Lord, what a terrible way to find out.” Grace was clearly sympathetic. “Though surely your parents had their reasons—oh my, still, that must have been very difficult for you.”
“My aunt—my mother’s sister—thinks that my mother wanted to believe she was my only mother. My real mother.”
“And so she was.”
“I wish she’d given me the chance to tell her that. She’s the only mother I ever knew. I wish she’d trusted me with the truth.”
“Well, now you have the truth. Only you can decide what to do with it.”
“I think about how my mom would feel about me searching for my birth mother. Would she be angry? Would she be hurt? My father would be supportive, I think, but my mom . . .” Jamie shook her head. “I don’t know how she’d deal with it.”
“Speaking as a mother, I would say that you need to do whatever your heart tells you to do. I don’t think your mother’s opinion is the one that should count right now. Finding the woman who gave birth to you was important enough for you to put your career on hold and travel here. Only you can decide if you want to pursue this any further. Only you can know what it is you want from this woman.”
“I never really thought about wanting anything. I just wanted to know who she was.”
“Oh, my dear, I think you want much more than that. You have questions you want answers to. Answers you can only get from her. How badly do you want those answers?” Grace shrugged. “Only you can decide. If I were to give you any advice at all, it would be to follow your instincts. In the end, you will do the right thing. I think you just need some time to decide what that might be.”
“Thank you, Grace.”
Jamie hugged Grace again, then left the office and went straight to her room. She packed her belongings, then called down to the desk for a bellhop. She was half hoping, half fearing that Dan would show up at her door. What reason could she give him for leaving? He knew this woman—her birth mother. How could she tell him her story without giving away a secret that someone else had kept for thirty-six years? Better to just leave, so that no explanations were necessary.
She retrieved her car from the lot while the bellhop brought down her things. Parked outside the lobby doors, she eased her suitcase into the backseat, all the while looking over her shoulder for Dan. She knew he was interviewing prospective employees, but she didn’t know how long he’d be tied up. She hated the feeling that she was running away, but at the same time, she could not fight the urge to flee.
She tore a page from her notebook, scribbled a short note, and ran back into the inn to slip it under his office door, then ran back to the car.
Behind the wheel, Jamie paused. She hadn’t been ready to leave here, and a part of her wanted very badly to stay. But she needed neutral ground while she sorted through everything she knew, so she followed Charles Street through the center of town, past the shops she’d come to know. Jamie didn’t dare so much as look at her place as she drove on. She was afraid she’d be tempted to stop, tempted to walk in, and, like the child who makes a loud and inappropriate announcement in a public place (“Mommy, when are you and Daddy going to get married?”), make an announcement that would change everything. Now that she knew, there were other decisions to be made, other people’s lives to be considered. She needed to be alone, to give careful regard to her next move while she became accustomed to her newfound knowledge.
From the day Jamie arrived in St. Dennis, she had felt the air of history that surrounded the town. She’d wondered if part of her shared in that history, and now that she knew for certain it did, she wondered why she still felt rootless. She would have thought that the certainty of her lineage would have given her a sense of belonging, but now more than ever, her emotions made her feel that she had been set adrift, as if she belonged neither here nor in Caryville.
She followed the signs for Route 50 and, from there, the interstate that would take her over the bridge to New Jersey, to her house in Princeton. While it had never really felt like home to her, she had nowhere else to go.
“MOM.” DAN APPROACHED the table where his mother was preparing to dig into a small steak.
“Hello, son. How did the interviews go?”
“Fine. They went fine.” He glanced around the dining room. “Have you seen Jamie? She was supposed to meet me here at seven.” He glanced at the phone he held in his left hand. “It’s twenty after. She’s not in her room. I even checked your office, but I can’t find her.”
“Oh.” Grace placed her fork quietly on the side of her plate and looked up. “I’m afraid Jamie has left.”
“Left?” He frowned. “Left the building? Did she go shopping? Did she say what time she’d be back?”
“No. She left the inn. She checked out this afternoon.”
“What are you talking about? I was with her this morning, and we made plans for dinner.” He stared at his mother for a moment. “Is something wrong? Is she sick? Is someone else sick?”
“Sit down, Dan,” Grace said gently.
He looked as if he were about to protest, then he pulled out the chair next to hers and sat. “What’s this all about, Mom?”
“Something came up that Jamie needs to deal with. Something very . . . complicated.”
“If it’s complicated, we can help her.”
“No, son. It’s something she has to work through on her own.”
“What? What’s so important that she had to leave without even telling me she was going?” He narrowed his eyes. “You know what it is, don’t you.”
“Yes, I do.”
“And you’re not going to tell me, are you.”
“No, I am not. You will have to hear that from her. When she’s ready to have that conversation with you, she will.”
“This doesn’t make any sense to me. She was fine this morning . . .”
“I’m sure she was. She just needs time, Dan, and we all have to give it to her. And while I know this is particularly difficult for you, you’ll just have to be patient.”
He frowned. If something was wrong with Jamie, why hadn’t he sensed it? If he’d inherited his mother’s eye, he would have known, wouldn’t he?
“What, son?”
“I’m just wondering why I didn’t know that something big was bothering her.”
“Why would you have?”
“Sometimes I sense things. Sort of like . . . well, like you do.” He lowered his voice and leaned in. “I think I have it. You know, the sixth sense that you have?”
His mother stared at him for what seemed to be a long time. Finally, she said, “No, son, you don’t.”
“Mom, sometimes I think I know what people are going to do—”
She gestured for him to stop with a wave of her hand. “That’s called intuition. Lots of people have well-defined intuition.”
“Isn’t that what you have?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly.”
“So you don’t think I—”
“No.” She patted him on the hand. “And don’t look so disappointed, Daniel. It can be a great burden. Sometimes it’s more of a curse than a gift.”
“Like when?”
“Like
when I know things about other people that I wish I didn’t know.”
He sighed. “So what do I do about Jamie?”
“Figure out what it is you feel for her, then tell her.”
“I already know what I feel. I would tell her if she hadn’t taken off.”
“Just give her a little room right now when she needs it.”
“Do you think she’ll come back?”
“Oh, yes. She’ll be back. As soon as she puts all the pieces together in the right order, she’ll be back.”
“Miz Carter said something to her this morning. Something like The end is near. It freaked Jamie out a little. She thought it sounded a bit ominous.”
“Ruby was just seeing the journey Jamie’s on. She saw the end of it, as I do.”
Dan met his mother’s gaze. “Can you at least give me a hint?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, dear. You’ll just have to wait and hear it from Jamie when she’s ready.”
He nodded and got up from the table, his appetite gone, and headed toward his office. All those phone calls he was going to have his assistant manager handle so that he’d have a little more free time—he might as well deal with those himself. What good was free time if Jamie wasn’t here to help him fill it?
He’d had a lot of time to think over the past few days. He and Jamie were on the road to something big, something good and important. He knew it, and he was certain she knew it, too. For all his mother’s denial, he was pretty sure that this was one of those times when something stronger than intuition had been in play.
He’d planned on tonight being a night they’d both remember, a night that would mark a turning point in their relationship. Jamie was the reason he’d just hired an assistant, so that he wouldn’t feel obligated to do every single damned job at the inn himself. Ironic that he’d seen the light on the very day Jamie chose to pick up and leave without a word to him. He’d thought they’d been well on their way to forming more of a bond than that. What had been so important that she couldn’t have said goodbye?
Maybe he’d misread her all along. Maybe he had just been a way to pass some time while she was in St. Dennis. Maybe she really did have someone else back in Princeton or wherever. Maybe she missed him—this other nameless, faceless person—and couldn’t wait to get back.
In about as foul a mood as he’d been in a very long time, Dan unlocked the door to his office and switched on the light. Stepping into the room, he almost missed the folded piece of paper on the floor. He bent down and picked it up, opening it while he walked to his desk.
Dan ~
Will be in touch ~
JLV
He dropped the brief note on his desk at the same time he dropped into his chair, and wondered what was going on with this woman and how long he would have to wait to find out.
His gut told him that Jamie’s sudden departure had something to do with the conversation he’d overheard between her and Curtis Enright.
I wish you’d leave this thing alone and go back where you came from, the lawyer had said. No one is going to tell you what you want to know.
Jamie’s response had been an assured I will find out.
So had she found whatever it was she was looking for? Had someone told her what she wanted to know? And what, he wondered, had that been?
He could kick himself from here to Maine for not pressing her when he had the chance—when he’d known she was lying.
Women with secrets, he reminded himself. When would he learn?
His mother had told him that Jamie needed time to sort things out. Well, he’d give her time. He’d wait until he couldn’t wait anymore, and then he’d do whatever it took to bring her back.
Chapter 17
JAMIE drove in a daze. She had no recollection of passing over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, nor of getting onto the New Jersey Turnpike. She’d gone several miles too far before realizing she’d missed her exit and had to take back roads to her lakeside home on a small side road off Route 27. She was surprised when she realized she was pulling into her own driveway. She turned off the engine and sat for a moment and stared at her house. Even this place, this place that was all hers and only hers, seemed foreign. Leaving her suitcase on the backseat, she got out of the car and walked to the red front door, unlocked it, and went inside. She gathered up the pile of mail that had come through the slot during the time she was gone and went through it quickly, searching for a letter from the adoption court telling her whether her birth mother would unseal her records, but there was nothing except bills, magazines, and the usual amount of junk mail.
She dumped it all on the console table in the foyer. Maybe tomorrow.
The three-hour drive from St. Dennis had left her exhausted and headachy, but she went into the kitchen and turned on the coffee machine, dropped in a pod, and waited for those three little words, Ready to brew. She took half-and-half from the fridge and gave it the sniff test before adding enough to the cup to turn the brew light golden brown. She opened the back door and stepped outside and took a deep breath of early-evening air, then walked toward the lake at the far end of her property.
Jamie had purchased the home not for its four bedrooms—though it had been nice to have a bedroom each for her mother and aunt when they both came to visit at the same time—but for the water view. It had been autumn when she first saw the house, and the blaze on the opposite side of Carnegie Lake had been breathtaking. The cobbled courtyard, accessed through French doors on three sides, and the remnants of an old stone wall, had sealed the deal for her—that and the large first-floor library overlooking the courtyard on one side and the water on the other; it made a perfect office. She rarely used the other rooms on the first floor, the formal living and dining rooms. She’d had to remodel the kitchen right after she moved in. When she was working, she drifted between the kitchen and her office, some nights falling asleep on the office sofa while she read through that day’s work.
“It’s an awful lot of money to pay for a house you’re going to barely live in,” her mother had told her.
“What do you mean, barely live in? I’m here almost all the time,” Jamie had protested.
“You live in three rooms, am I right? You work, you cook, you eat, you sleep.” Lainey had rolled her eyes. “Excuse me, you use the bathroom. Maybe two of them. Unless Sis and I are here, the rest of the house just sits. You could have gotten a condo for a lot less money and lived in the same amount of space.”
Jamie had put her arm around her mother’s shoulders and turned her toward the windows. “Ah, but then we wouldn’t have that view.” She’d pointed beyond the kitchen’s French doors. “And you wouldn’t have that garden you’ve grown so fond of.”
“All that shade out there, you needed shade plants. Whoever planted that other stuff had no idea what they were doing.”
“And now all is right in the plant world, and we can sit out in the courtyard and admire your handiwork.” Jamie had kissed her mother on the cheek, and Lainey had grinned.
“Well, I did an exceptional job out there, if I do say so myself.”
“Which of course you will,” Sis had muttered, and Jamie had laughed at the look of indignation on her mother’s face.
Times like those had made Jamie wish she’d had a sister. If not a sister, a cousin, someone who shared what Lainey and Sis shared.
And times like these, I wish I had someone who could tell me what to do.
She speed-dialed her aunt but had to leave a voicemail when Sis didn’t pick up.
Just as well, Jamie thought. Sis wouldn’t tell her what to do. Jamie could lay it all out for her, tell her what she’d learned, and Sis would say, “Follow your heart, sweetie.”
If she’d followed her heart, she’d still be in St. Dennis.
Jamie sat on the old stone wall and sipped her coffee. She’d wanted to belong in St. Dennis, she
really had. But not knowing how her birth mother would feel about her, not knowing if she’d want to keep their secret for the rest of their natural lives—who, Jamie asked herself, could take that kind of stress?
And then there was Dan.
Damn, but if he wasn’t the icing on the St. Dennis cake.
She reminded herself that if she hadn’t tucked tail and run, she would at this moment be sitting down to dinner with Dan. Afterward, they’d have . . . Maybe they’d have picked up where they were a few nights ago before he had to go, so his night clerk could leave on time. She had to grudgingly acknowledge that only a truly good man would be that concerned about his employee’s obligations.
There was no denying that Dan Sinclair was a good man, one she cared about in spite of herself. She couldn’t think of one thing about him that she did not like. Except, of course, the fact that he was tied to the inn and had a kind of tunnel vision where it was concerned. The inn was his anchor and always would be. And hers? Right now she had no anchor.
Though he had turned off his phone that morning so he could, in his words, focus on her. That was real progress, she thought. Maybe in time, he’d get rid of the damned thing altogether when he was with her. Okay, maybe that isn’t a realistic expectation, she told herself. After all, he did own the place. But letting someone else share some of the responsibilities once in a while—often enough to permit him to have a real life—that wouldn’t kill him, would it?
In retrospect, she thought, she probably should have waited for him to get back from the interviews, but she’d been so overwhelmed with what she’d learned that all she could think of was escaping from St. Dennis and from the conflict and emotions that had arisen within her. Her quest had been to discover the identity of her birth mother, but she’d never stopped to think how she’d feel if she did find her. She’d been stunned when she figured it all out, and the reality had taken her breath away, and it had frightened her. How many times had she asked herself, What if she doesn’t want to know me? Until today, the answer hadn’t really mattered, because until today, she hadn’t expected to find the truth.
That Chesapeake Summer (Chesapeake Diaries Book 9) Page 25
