A Daughter's Story

At least the first she knew of…

Thoughts sped through Emma’s mind as she stood frozen and watched the slender long legs disentangle themselves from the man and the sheets.

Rob rolled to his side and Emma pulled the ring off her left hand. He noticed her standing there.

The instant consternation on his face couldn’t have been faked. Nor could the sorrow in his eyes.

“Emma, baby, I…”

Ignoring the woman who was in Emma’s peripheral vision pulling on sweatpants and a T-shirt, Emma approached the bed and held out the ring to Rob.

“I see she dressed up for the occasion,” she said calmly, as if they were discussing what color to paint the bedroom walls.

“Emma, please…” Rob, looked at her pleadingly, holding the sheet around his naked midsection despite the fact that both women in the room clearly knew what the covered parts looked like. He didn’t reach for the ring. But he’d expect it back. He was an accountant. Money mattered.

She placed the two-carat promise on the corner of the dresser. Grabbed a hanger out of the closet that held one of her three-piece suits—the tailored black slacks and jacket and red short-sleeved blouse—grabbed her most expensive black pumps and marched toward the door.

“I’m going back to work,” she said, facing the open door, effectively blocking the blond woman’s escape. “I’ll go straight to Mom’s afterward, spend the night there and return here in the morning to meet a locksmith who will be changing the locks.” She owned the place. She could do this. “You have until then to clean out anything of yours you want to keep. The furniture all stays. The payments you helped make are in lieu of rent for the past two years.”

She heard her voice and wondered at the woman speaking. She didn’t recognize a thing about her. But, damn, her words felt good.

“Emma…”

She heard scrambling behind her, a thump as Rob’s feet landed on the floor, and then his footsteps behind her.

“Emma!”

Head high, she just kept walking. Down the stairs. Out the front door. Knowing he couldn’t follow her. He hadn’t had time to pull on his pants.

In a nearby gas-station bathroom, as she changed her clothes, Emma crumpled, half dressed, on the toilet. She started to cry. To panic. To hurt.

But she didn’t go back.

And that afternoon, when she left school, she didn’t back down.

* * *

THE FUNERAL WAS SO CROWDED that early September Friday afternoon that more than half the attendees had to stand. Forty-year-old Chris Talbot was one of those standing, holding his place in a back corner of the big old Comfort Cove church with shoulders grown thick from a lifetime of lobstering. Fishing was a dangerous business. The most dangerous in the world if you believed what you saw on television.

To Chris it was a way of life. The only way of life.

It had been that way for Wayne Ainge, too, though Chris had barely known the young man whose funeral he’d given up a day of work to attend. Wayne was only twenty. He’d arrived in Comfort Cove from Alaska that summer. Had signed on with one of Chris’s competitors. And three days ago he’d gotten his foot tangled up in a trapline and was pulled from his boat to the bottom of the ocean. He’d drowned before anyone could get to him.

The accident had not been the boy’s fault. It hadn’t been anything he could prevent. A wind had come up, a wave, just as he’d been hoisting a trap overboard, forcing him into one small step to keep his balance. The one small step had cost him his life.

His wasn’t the first industry death, by a long shot.

But it was Comfort Cove’s first in more than fifty years. The first in Chris’s lifetime.

Wayne’s father spoke. His brother did, too. A man of the cloth—Chris wasn’t a churchgoing man so he wasn’t sure if the man was a priest or pastor or what—read from the Bible and asked them all to pray.

Chris bowed his head out of respect for Wayne’s family, who’d flown in from Alaska to bury their son where he’d said his heart was—the Atlantic Ocean. And then, as people began to file out, he shook hands with his fellow fishermen and their families.

None of them looked one another in the eye.

Every fisherman knew that any one of them could be in that casket up there. It was only by the grace of God that they made it safely home each day.

CHAPTER TWO

“WHAT’S WRONG?” Fifty-six-year-old Rose Sanderson frowned. The expression did nothing to mar her exquisite beauty. Just as all the years of anguish had never done.

As long as Emma didn’t look in her mother’s eyes. There wasn’t a lot of beauty there anymore. Only worry. Angst. Sadness. And pain.

“Sit down, Mom.” Emma pulled out one of the metal-rimmed Naugahyde chairs in her mother’s kitchen—chairs that matched the metal-rimmed Formica-topped table that had been in that same exact place in the same exact house for the past twenty-five years.

Emma had been able to convince her mother to update the rest of the house over the years. But not that table. It was the last place that Rose had seen her baby girl alive—kneeling on one of those chairs at that table eating her breakfast like a “big people.”

Rose wouldn’t change that table, and she would never move—no matter how much the neighborhood changed. Rose couldn’t leave the only place Claire would know to come back to.

As though she would remember; Claire had been two when she was abducted.

Rose’s crystalline blue eyes were wide and worried as Emma sat and folded her hands at the table. “Tell me.”

She had to tell her mother about Detective Miller’s phone calls. Most particularly the last one.

She’d been deliberating for a couple of days about what she was going to say.

Tonight, with Rob’s infidelity a fresh and burning sting, she couldn’t seem to find the usual decorum, the caution, with which she couched everything she told her mother.

She didn’t recognize herself in the woman who was pushing her to do something more. To be something different.

To change what Rose wouldn’t have changed.

“I’ve spent my entire life playing it safe.” They weren’t the words she’d come to say.

Rose’s frown deepened. “What do you mean?”

“I settle,” Emma said. “Or maybe I don’t, I don’t know.” This was her mother. She could only say so much.

Or stray too far from herself…

She was in no state to tell her mother about Ramsey Miller’s phone call—about the horrible mistake she and Rose had made, believing all these years that Frank Whittier, her mother’s fiancé at the time, had abducted Claire.

“I broke up with Rob today.” And that was not a mistake. No matter how badly Rose took the news.

Rose’s eyes held a spark of…something…as she watched Emma, saying nothing. But the woman wasn’t falling apart so Emma continued.

“I came home and found him with another woman in our bed. I gave him until tomorrow morning to get out.”