She didn’t like talking about her son with him, for a hundred different reasons. “Yes. He has grown into a fine man,” she answered, her voice rather more short than she intended.
He was a fine man, not because of anything his mother had done. She hadn’t protected him when she should have. She hadn’t given him the safe, warm childhood every boy deserved. Instead, she had put him in a terrible situation, one filled with uncertainty and pain.
Russ was quiet for a long moment, then he gave a heavy sigh, a sound so full of sorrow that she looked away from the road and her own grim thoughts.
“You’re never going to tell me the truth, are you?”
Her heart began to pound as she took in the suddenly harsh lines of his face. No. He couldn’t...
“I...don’t know what you mean,” she began.
“Lydia. For the love of God. Enough.”
Though his voice was low, it vibrated with emotion, a fierce, barely controlled anger she had never heard before.
No, she had heard it, she suddenly realized. It had been there for a long time, simmering just below the surface like the churning, superheated waters of a dormant geyser, waiting to burst free.
An instant later, Russ turned into a small empty scenic pullout on the road, with a few picnic tables and a trash can. Across the lake, the Redemption Mountains rose in all their amazing beauty, jagged and raw—exactly like her nerves.
No. Not now. Were they really going to have this conversation now? She couldn’t do it, not after all the years of lies and secrets.
He put the Range Rover in Park but didn’t turn off the engine. The air-conditioning blew on her and she was suddenly so very cold, she was afraid she would turn to pure ice.
“For more than twenty years, I’ve been trying to convince myself you would tell me eventually.”
“T-twenty years?” Dear God. Had he known that whole time?
“I was certain you would tell me, when you thought the time was right. I knew you had your reasons for keeping the secret and I had to respect your wishes. Maybe it was better not to have it out in the open between them. I thought for sure you would tell me after Lily died, then again after your divorce. Then Joe died and I thought, surely she’ll tell me now. Even last year when you came to Joanie’s funeral, I was certain at last you would tell me. Today, just now, I’ve finally faced the truth that you never planned to tell me anything. If you had your way, you would go to your grave with this always between us.”
The headache she had been halfway pretending earlier growled to life in actuality, pulsing through the veins of her temples as if it had a life and a heartbeat of its own.
How had she made such a huge mess of her life and that of others? So many lives had been damaged, some irreparably, because she had once been so very weak and afraid.
She tried one more time, clinging to the pretense that had sustained her all this time.
“I...don’t know what you’re—”
“Shut up. Just shut up. No more!”
The geyser burst through the thin surface, hot and bubbly, terrifying and beautiful at the same time.
She had a flashback to the last half of her marriage, to all those times she had cowered like the weak, pitiful creature she had been as Joe spewed venom and anger and filth at her.
Whore. Bitch. Slut.
She wrapped her arms tightly around herself. Though she wanted to shrink back against the seat, to become small and invisible and meaningless, she had come too far to sink into old habits. She forced herself to straighten her spine and face him head-on.
“Please don’t speak to me like that,” she said.
To his very great credit, he looked sick, his skin suddenly pasty and his eyes haunted.
“I’m sorry. You’re... I shouldn’t have... I’m sorry. I’m just... I’m so tired of the lies, Lydia. Please. For once, in thirty-five years, don’t you think I deserve the truth?”
He was still handsome. Noble, even, though that seemed a ridiculous word to use for a man in the twenty-first century. Age had been extraordinarily kind to him. He hadn’t gained a paunch, his bearing was still tall and straight, his features even stronger than they had been when he was a young man.
She had loved him for so very long but she had never been worthy of him. She had let fear make every decision for her and now he would hate her, as she deserved.
She had a sudden flashback to another summer afternoon, the two of them hiking up into the Redemptions with a couple of blankets in a bedroll, a canteen and the eager thrill of anticipation shivering through their veins. All they wanted was a place to be alone together and they had found it in a beautiful secluded clearing. She had loved him more than she ever believed possible and with every ounce of her heart, she had given herself to him in those beautiful fumbling moments before he left.
Now she drew in a shaky breath and wiped away a tear she hadn’t even realized had escaped.
“How long have you known?” she asked quietly.
“Oh, no. I’m not going to let you talk around the subject. Say it, Lydia. For once, just say it. I deserve to hear you tell me the truth in your own words, after all these years.”
“Fine. I’ll tell you. Ben is yours.” The words seemed strange, rusty after all these years of being buried so deeply inside. “I was pregnant when you left that last time. I was pregnant two months later when I married Joe. But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
As she had feared, throwing the words into the open between them gave them power and weight, made them more real and terrifying.
“How?” he demanded. “We were only together a handful of times and we were...careful.”
“Not careful enough, apparently. And you’re the physician. You know it only takes once.”
She had always thought it must have happened that last magical night before he left, when her heart had been aching. She had wanted their relationship to go on forever but even then she had known it must end. He was obligated to the army, for medical school first and then his obligatory service with them.
She couldn’t follow him, as much as they both had wanted that. How could she? Her mother had just died a few months earlier and her father was struggling so much with her six younger siblings. Daddy not only needed her income as a secretary at the boatworks but he also needed her help in the evenings with the others while he worked the night shift and took care of the small needy flock of his Baptist congregation.
“When did you figure it out?” she asked.
“Lily,” he answered.
The single word clarified everything. When Lily was first diagnosed with cystic fibrosis around age six, they had pursued genetic testing. As part of that, Ben’s blood was tested as well to see if he was a carrier of the condition.
Everything had changed. That was when Joe had found out Ben wasn’t his, too, when their semblance of a happy home had disintegrated into accusations and bitter betrayal.
She should have realized Russ would know. Though he hadn’t performed the genetic testing—that had been done at the children’s hospital in Boise—as Lily’s primary care physician, he would have had access to all her records.
“All these years,” she whispered. “More than two decades.”
“Forever,” he answered and she had to close her eyes at the pain in his voice.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Lyddie?”
“I didn’t know myself until I was more than a month along. That was a few weeks after the letter from you, if you’ll recall, telling me in no uncertain terms to date someone else and move on with my life.”
“I remember.”
“I didn’t want to date anyone else. I only wanted you. But when Joe started asking me out—the son of my boss—I didn’t know how to tell him no. We had only gone out a few times when he...told me he was falling in love
with me. I wanted to break things off. It was too fast, too soon, and I wasn’t ready. My heart was still yours. Then I found out I was pregnant.”
Her heart pulsed with remembered terror. “You have to realize the position I was in. The daughter of a Baptist minister, alone and frightened.”
“Lyddie.”
“I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t kill our baby, even though that would have been the...logical choice. I thought about running away, going somewhere far away where no one knew me and giving up the child for adoption, but I didn’t know if I could do that to my daddy, who was still grieving and lost, struggling with all those kids.”
She gazed out the window at the mountains and the lake, this place she loved. She couldn’t look at Russ while she told him the next part. “Around that time, Joe started begging me to marry him. His father was pressuring him to settle down because of his health issues, so that Joe could take over at Kilpatrick’s. It seemed the perfect solution. I finally agreed and he was...so happy. I just felt sick at what I had done—lies upon lies upon lies—but by that time, I didn’t know how to get out of it.”
She twisted her hands together in her lap. “We had Ben seven and a half months after we were married. He was small for his age, I guess, though you’d never know now by looking at him, and Joe never realized he was full term. As I held my baby and saw how proud and pleased Joe was, I resolved I would be a good wife, to make up for my terrible deception. I was. I promise. Though some part of my heart always belonged to you, I tried to love my husband and make Snow Angel Cove a home for us.”
“And then Lily was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.”
“Yes.” She sighed. “Everything changed the year she turned six, when we received the diagnosis. Ben was ten. By then, you had returned to town and opened your practice. It was so hard not to tell you. I wanted to, a hundred times, but you had married Joan and the two of you were obviously happy. She was pregnant with your second child and I couldn’t see ruining more lives.”
“And your marriage to Joe? How was it?”
It was a question she didn’t want to answer. By necessity, she had become an intensely private person and didn’t even like looking at these facets of her life herself, let alone sharing them with him.
Though she had tried to love her husband, she had never quite been able to pull it off. She had pretended as best she could but when one person loved the other more, things never turned out well. Joe must have sensed the truth. Eventually he started pulling away, finding passion with other women, which made her even less able to care for him.
“We were falling apart, even before Lily’s diagnosis,” she admitted quietly. “And then...well, things went sharply downhill.”
She drew in a breath, fighting down emotions that clawed at her chest to be free.
“The worst was Ben. He and Joe had always had a...great relationship. Joe would take him fishing, they would go out on the boats, they would go on camping trips. Joe took such pride that Ben was a natural athlete, good at baseball and basketball and soccer. And he was so very smart, always with his nose in a book. When he found out after Lily’s diagnosis that Ben couldn’t possibly be his, it was like Joe turned off every positive emotion he had ever felt toward him. He became cold and harsh, yelling at him over the smallest infraction. I know it was...bewildering and hurtful for Ben, to go from having a father’s love to losing it overnight. He had to stand by and watch Joe give all that love and care to Lily and absolutely none to him.”
She was weeping now, her nose dripping, her eyes streaming. She didn’t care. She deserved every splotch, every tear. “I should have left, packed up both children and gone somewhere. I saw what it was doing to Ben, how something good and bright inside my wonderful, kind son was shriveling more every day. Instead, again I did nothing. I never protected him. I kept him in that house and let Joe emotionally batter my baby, day after day.”
She shuddered out a sob and then another.
“You were in a difficult position.” Russell reached for her hand and folded it in his much larger, warmer one.
She didn’t want his kindness, his understanding. She didn’t deserve even a portion of it.
“That’s what I told myself. I had a hundred excuses for staying there. Joe never touched Ben with his fists, so it wasn’t really that bad, right? Besides that, Lily adored her father and he was a different man with her. How could I choose between my children, to protect one at great cost to the other? Anyway, where could I have taken them, me with no education and no resources, and still be able to provide the medical care she needed?”
“So you stayed.”
“I stayed. I tried to shower Ben with the love his father withheld with such cruelty but...it was never enough. Somehow, despite me, despite Joe, despite all my terrible choices, Ben has grown into a good man. A man anyone should be proud to have as his son.”
“I am,” Russ said quietly. “I have always been proud of him.”
She looked back now and saw a hundred kindnesses over the years that she had somehow overlooked. Russ going to Ben’s ball games, sitting by himself in the bleachers. Russ showing interest in his activities and interests, always taking a moment to stop and visit with Ben when he would come to the house to check on Lily.
She was overwhelmed, suddenly, when she realized how much love and concern he had showered on the son he had secretly known was his.
As he handed her a tissue from a box in the car’s inside door panel, she wiped at her streaming eyes, seeing everything through a new perspective.
He had known, all this time, and hadn’t said a word.
“Of course he would be a good man,” she whispered. “How could he be anything else? He’s the son of the best person I have ever known.”
“Lyddie.”
He was crying, too, she suddenly realized. His eyes were red and swollen and his fingers clenched hers tightly.
They sat for a long moment, fingers entwined together as they used to do during movies and plays and hamburgers at Serrano’s, back when they were young and innocent and deeply in love.
“I am so sorry, Russell. Sorry I didn’t tell you all those years ago, sorry I didn’t tell you when you came back to Haven Point, sorry I didn’t tell you a thousand times over.” She drew in a shaky breath and faced him with all the love she had never lost for him in her expression. “But I will never, for one moment, be sorry I had the incredible chance to be your son’s mother.”
He gazed at her, eyes brimming, then he reached for her. As she slid into his arms, they cried together for all those years, for the pain of the past and for mistakes and missed chances while the July breeze murmured in the pines and rippled the healing waters of Lake Haven.
CHAPTER TEN
AS MCKENZIE AND BEN left the marina, the adorable old-timers from Serrano’s were heading in. She stopped to talk to them for a moment, kissed their cheeks, then hurried on her way to city hall. She didn’t miss the way Edwin gave a semi-friendly nod to Ben as they left.
“You know, you really didn’t have to leave,” she said after a few moments. “You seemed to be enjoying the boat races. You should stay.”
“Do they still do the toy sailboat race?”
“Yes, over at the pond by Hell’s Fury Park.”
“That used to be my favorite. I’d completely forgotten it. It was the highlight of my year. I would start planning next year’s boat the day after Lake Haven Days ended and I worked hard on it all year.”
“Did your dad help you?”
It was obviously the wrong thing to say. His mouth tightened and he looked over the water. “No,” he said shortly. They lapsed into silence and she winced at her own stupidity.
Of course his father hadn’t helped. Why would she ask such a question, other than that her own father had helped both her and Devin make sailboat
s each year for the toy boat races? Joe hadn’t been that sort of father.
His father had been a jerk, but his mother was a sweet, kind woman. Why the distance between them?
“Can I ask you an extremely personal question that is absolutely none of my business?” she asked as they walked.
He gave a rough-sounding laugh. “In my experience, when somebody starts a train of conversation with a leading question like that one, it’s very hard to pull the brakes and shove them off.”
She smiled, mostly out of relief that he seemed more amused than offended. She was already being nosy. She might as well go all the way. Blame it on that really annoying habit she had of trying to fix things.
“Your mom. She’s terrific. Lydia was always so nice to me when I was a kid and everybody in town admires her. You, on the other hand, act like you can’t stand being in the same time zone with her. What gives?”
She held her breath as a wealth of emotions crossed his features like egrets skimming the surface of the lake. He was so very good at containing them that she only caught a glimpse before his features turned stony again.
“You’re right. That is an extremely personal question. And you’re also right, it’s absolutely none of your business.”
“I told you. What’s the answer?”
Again, he gave that rough laugh that made all her nerve endings flutter. That laugh seemed to shiver between them, forming a tensile, strong connection.
She didn’t want to be connected to Ben Kilpatrick. McKenzie frowned at herself. If she were wise, she would be doing everything she could to protect herself, not finding more things to tug her toward him.
“This isn’t a conversation I can have with you while we’re walking down Lake Street with half the town listening in.”
He hadn’t completely ruled out that he would tell her, she realized.
“Fine,” she answered. “You can tell me later. Maybe at the fireworks. And don’t think I’ll forget, either. When I want to know something, Dev says I’m like a pit bull with lockjaw. But cuter.”
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