The Prodigal Cousin

“I want the truth.” He pivoted toward the window, ashamed that his birth father had discarded her. Nina and Molly were drawing on the green balloon with a dark blue marker. “I came because of the girls.” He took a deep breath, hiding grief that still squeezed his heart. “When my wife and parents died, I realized Tamsin and Nina would have no one else if I…weren’t around.”

“So you want me to…”

She stopped, and Sam turned his head to look at her, tempted to take the trembling hand she’d raised to her mouth the way he would comfort a patient to whom he’d given bad news. But she wasn’t a patient.

He dropped his hands. He was a stranger. He couldn’t comfort her. She felt no attachment to him.

“I won’t ask for anything. I’m offering you the chance to know Nina and Tamsin.”

“And you.” Joy flashed in her eyes, giving him a second’s astounding relief. In the time it took him to feel disloyal to his adoptive parents, Eliza’s joy changed to panic. “Do the girls know?”

He lifted one eyebrow. “Does it matter?” At her openmouthed groan, he relented. “Tamsin knows. She found the file.”

“I don’t want to hurt her.” She pressed her hand to her throat, staring over his shoulder. “Or my husband. Molly…”

He empathized, though sudden anger shook him. Even at his age he wanted Tamsin and Nina and him to matter most. But he was no child. Eliza’s concern for her present family meant she was a loving woman. She had the right to turn him away. She’d arranged for him to have a healthy, happy life. She’d done all a sixteen-year-old girl could do.

“Were you happy?” she asked.

Meeting her tumultuous gaze, he considered lying. He couldn’t. He’d lied enough to last a lifetime. “Happy, yes, but my parents had tried to have their own child for years. My mother told me once that she’d heard a lot of people had babies after they adopted. She expected to get pregnant as soon as they took me. Naturally, she was disappointed when she didn’t, but I think they were afraid to give everything to me. They wanted something left over for their real child.”

Eliza frowned. “Adoption is a strange fertility treatment.”

He wasn’t capable of saying anything else against his adoptive mother. “Being infertile wasn’t just a medical condition for her.” Her restraint had colored his father’s feelings for him. Sam couldn’t help wondering why they hadn’t been as grateful as most adoptive parents to have a baby.

He nodded toward the garden. “You must have wanted a child, too.”

“You know we adopted her?”

“I hired a detective.”

“I don’t expect you to understand.”

Not the wholehearted effort to help that he’d hoped for. If he was going to stay in touch with this family for the sake of his daughters, he had to know they could love Tamsin and Nina with a generosity his adoptive parents had never achieved.

Eliza’s mouth quivered, apprehension obviously chipping away at any joy. “I can’t explain about Molly until I talk to her.” She backed away from him. “And to my husband. I never told Patrick….”

With a muffled cry, she turned and left the room. Sam didn’t try to stop her. He just listened to her low heels thudding up the stairs.

As they faded, Tamsin appeared in the doorway.

“Well?” she said. “Are you happy now?”

“Where were you?”

“I bumped into her. I guess she wants us.”

He wasn’t so sure. “Are you angry?”

As she shook her head, tears filled her eyes, terrifying him. She’d cried for weeks after Fiona’s death, but her silence ever since had been harder to take. He steeled himself to tackle whatever Tamsin needed him to handle.

“Honey, we don’t have to stay.” He reached for her, and she didn’t fight for once. “If you want to leave, we’ll go.”

“I want my mom. I want my grandpa and grandma and my mom.”

She fell on him, and her sobs broke his heart. No fifteen-year-old girl should ever have to learn the true meaning of forever. His own loss lodged in his throat. No one should have to feel this way.

He stroked Tamsin’s head and held her, praying Nina wouldn’t walk in. Tamsin’s grief unsettled her sister almost more than their mother’s death. To Nina, Fiona’s absence was as confusing as it was painful, but her longing came in nightmares that worsened when she was afraid for her sister.

“Tamsin, I’ve been trying to make things better for you.”

“You think these people can take Mom’s place?”

“No one will ever replace your mom. Not for you and Nina. Not for me. I just wanted to give you family, but if you don’t want that, we’ll go. You and Nina matter most.”

“Then why did you drag us here?”

“If I’d realized you thought I was trying to replace your mother and grandparents, I wouldn’t have.”

“Daddy.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders the way she had when she was Nina’s age. “Sometimes I think I’m falling apart.”

Sometimes he feared he was, too. “You’re fine, Tamsin. You’ve had to face too much for a girl your age, and I’ve made you remember it again.”

IN HER ROOM, Eliza ran to the window on thick carpet that dragged at her feet. She bumped her head against a pane of wavy glass that distorted her view of Molly and Nina. Finally, another figure joined them. Sam.

He leaned down to speak to his daughter. His parents had taught him to be a good father. Forty years of living without her son filled Eliza’s eyes with hot tears of resentment toward that couple who hadn’t loved him the way they’d promised to.

She should have been the one to teach him everything. She should have changed his diapers and walked the floor with him when he was sick at night, and listened to his stories of school days and sports and whatever else boys shared with their mothers.

A sob threatened to escape. She’d never know those things—unless she found a way to include her son now. How many times had she daydreamed about contacting his adoptive parents, begging for news of him?

But she’d chained herself into a corner. Her parents had ousted her from their home when she’d asked for help with her pregnancy. She’d finished her GED while she was in a home for unwed mothers, waiting for Sam’s birth. From there, she’d worked her way through the University of Tennessee.

After she’d started teaching in Bardill’s Ridge, she’d met Patrick, an ambitious attorney on his way to being a judge, like his father. She’d believed he couldn’t love a woman like her, so she’d never told him about her past.

How could she tell Patrick the truth now? He valued his position, the respect people here held him in, the mornings he spent “jawing” with his friends about how to improve county government. She couldn’t admit she’d come here to pay penance in a needy school.

How could she explain to Molly, who’d worshipped her as though she were a saint?

Eliza pressed her fists to the chilled glass. She could not abandon her son—even grown—a second time.

She’d made the right decision for Sam. But what would her husband say when she told him she’d regretted letting someone else care for her baby? What she’d done had been right for Sam but wrong for her. She’d wanted him back every day since she’d placed him in a sweet-smelling nurse’s starchy-stiff arms.

She needed him far more than he needed her. She wanted to be his mother, to try to ease the pain that drove a young man to believe he needed backup in case his daughters lost him.

She had to tell Patrick first, and then Molly. Sam needed her, too, and she wasn’t capable of putting him out of her heart again.

For the first time since they’d opened the bed and breakfast, Eliza left dishes in the sink and snuck out the kitchen door.