The Vineyard of Hopes and Dreams

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.