Falling For The Single Dad

“Who’s that, Mimi?” His eyes were so like Lindi’s. “She looks like the other sister in the picture above the fireplace. The one you told me not to mention around Granddad.”

Caroline flinched.

Seth’s blue-green eyes, the color of Amelia’s, too, flashed. “Don’t worry about learning her name. She probably won’t be around long enough for you to get used to using it.”

Caroline and Honey had inherited their mother’s dark brown eyes. Caroline frowned at the thought of her mother and pushed yet another memory out of her mind.

Amelia shifted the baby to a more comfortable position. “First, let’s see why she’s here.”

“Please...” Caroline whispered.

Her father snorted. Then the tough, old codger scrubbed his face with a hand hard with calluses. “Come to rub our noses in her highfalutin jet-set lifestyle.”

She lifted her chin. “You don’t know anything about my life.”

“Whose fault is that, girl?”

He’d yet to say her name, Caroline couldn’t help noticing. As if he wanted no part of her. Her insides quivered. She wrapped her hand around the cuff of her left sleeve.

Seth crossed his arms over his plaid shirt. “There’s two kinds of people born on the Shore, Max, my boy. Best you learn now how to identify them both.”

Caroline gritted her teeth.

“Those who don’t ever want to leave...”

She knew if she didn’t get out of here in the next few minutes, she was going to implode into a million, trillion pieces.

“And those, like my runaway daughter.” Seth speared her with a look. “Who can’t wait to leave and who never return.”

“Until now, Dad. Caroline’s come home.” Always the peacemaker, her sister Honey. Far more than Caroline deserved from the baby sister she’d abandoned.

Caroline examined the set expressions on her family’s faces. What had she expected? What else did she deserve?

“She never returned after her mother died,” Seth growled. “Not for her sister’s funeral. Not during Max’s chemo. Not after the storm almost leveled our home.” He clenched his fist against his jeans. “Not for a wedding. Or a birthday. Not even a postcard, much less a phone call.”

And Caroline suddenly understood that nothing she could ever say would erase the damage she’d inflicted. Nor wash away the hurt of the past. This... This illadvised, ludicrous attempt at reconciliation was for naught. She spun on her heel.

“Don’t go,” Honey called.

“Let ’er go,” Seth grunted. “Let ’er run away like before. It’s what she does best.”

“Daddy... Stop it,” barked Amelia.

Caroline wrested the car door open and flung herself into the driver’s seat. Whereas she’d found mercy and forgiveness in God, with her family there’d be none of either. She jerked the gear into Drive.

In a blur, she fishtailed onto Seaside Road. She pointed the car south and drove until the shaking of her hands wouldn’t allow her to drive any farther. She pulled over on the other side of the Quinby bridge and parked.

Her shoulders ached with tension. Spots swam before her eyes. She leaned her head on the headrest, and struggled to draw a breath as her throat closed.

This had been a mistake. A terrible, perhaps unredeemable, mistake. She felt the waves of the darkness she’d spent years clawing her way out of encroaching. Like an inexorable tide, ever closer. A headache throbbed at her temples.

Her breathing came in short, rapid bursts. Hand on her chest, she laid her forehead across the steering wheel. Willing the anxiety to subside and the blackness to erode.

But the waves mounted and towered like a tsunami. Cresting, waiting to consume her whole. To drag her under for good this time into the riptide of blackness.

God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

Where was her purse? She fumbled for the tote bag in the passenger seat. The pills. It’d been so long since she’d relied on them.

She hadn’t suffered an anxiety attack in several years. But with her so-called reunion facing her this morning, surely she’d had the foresight to tuck them inside her purse in case of an emergency.

Digging around through the detritus that filled her life, she came up empty. She slammed her hands on the wheel. Of all the days not to...

She breathed in through her mouth and exhaled through her nose in an exercise she’d learned from the counselor. And she repeated the Scriptures she’d memorized at the suggestion of a friend, a marine biologist working in the Bahamas.

Until the dizziness passed. Until her vision cleared. Until the pain in her lungs subsided.

Dripping with sweat, she took a few steadying breaths before shifting gears. Lesson learned. Despite the size of Kiptohanock, she’d avoid contact with her family.

One summer. The two-month pilot program. She’d lie low. Something she was good at.

And like Thomas Wolfe had said, you couldn’t ever go home again. Or at least, not her.

* * *

“Daddy! Come quick! Daddy!”

Weston dropped the hammer and raced out of the former lightkeeper’s cottage. He ran toward the beach, where the incoming tide lapped against the shoreline. Where he’d left his nine-year-old daughter alone... The librarian pegged him rightly. He was a terrible father.

“Isabelle!”

Panting, he plowed his way to the top of the dune. “Answer me.” The fronds of sea oats danced—taunting him—in the afternoon breeze.

On the beach below, she windmilled her arms to get his attention. He willed his heart to return to a semblance of normal. She’d gotten his attention, all right. He scrambled down the dune toward his daughter.

She clutched the straw hat on her head. “Look, Daddy.” With her free hand, she gestured to a set of tracks stippling the sand from the base of the dunes to where they disappeared around the neck of the beach. “Turtle tracks.”

Izzie bounced in her flip-flops, a redheaded pogo stick. “Maybe turtle eggs on our beach, too.” She clapped her hands together. The hat went flying.

He sighed, and watched it blow out to sea.

“We could have babies. Just like Max.”

His gaze flickered to his daughter. “If there are eggs, they won’t belong to us. Best thing we can do is leave them and their turtle mama alone.”

Izzie’s face fell.

He tickled her ribs. “Even Max will tell you to give new mamas a wide berth. They’re touchy. And ornery.”