A Daughter's Story

Rose nodded.

Her mother’s expression wasn’t crumpling. Or, worse, filling with fear. She almost had a hint of a smile on her face. And she was nodding!

Had the whole world gone mad? Or only Emma’s portion of it?

“What? You knew he was seeing someone?”

“Of course not. I’d have told you if I’d known that. I just knew he wasn’t right for you.”

That almost made her angry. As angry as she could ever get with the woman who’d suffered so horribly. And tried so hard to love Emma enough. “You thought Rob was wrong for me?”

“Yes.” Rose squeezed her hand. “But regardless of what I thought, you loved him and you most definitely didn’t deserve to be cheated on. I know it hurts and I’m so sorry about that.”

Shaking her head, Emma ignored the compassion in her mother’s voice. This was no time to open her heart and give in to the weakness there—a desperate need to be loved, in spite of everything.

She was better off if she kept her walls up.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” She concentrated on the facts that perplexed more than they caused pain.

“Because I knew you’d figure it out on your own and that you would be so much stronger for having done so. Acting on my say-so could have crippled you.”

“I’d have married him, Mom.” If Rob hadn’t kept putting off choosing a date. A location. Colors. Anything at all to do with them actually saying “I do,” rather than just “I’m going to.”

Rose shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“But if I had? You’d have let me?”

Rose studied her and then said, “I’m not sure. There was always the chance that I was wrong.”

“You liked him. From the first time we met him at that fingerprinting clinic, you liked how he took a real interest in our quest.”

“He was a big help. And had good ideas. He was a pleasant conversationalist, but that doesn’t mean I thought he’d make you happy. I did like that he kept you here in the area, close by. I liked that he was willing to spend time with us together. That we could do family things.”

A given. Rose had lost one daughter. And ever since that day, until Emma had met Rob, it had always been just the two of them.

“I’m not going to leave you, Mom, you know that,” Emma said. “Not for anything, or anyone.” But for the first time, the words didn’t flow from her heart as easily as they flowed past her throat.

For the first time, she wished, just for a second, that she could be as free as other women her age.

And then, ashamed of herself, she gave her mother a hug.

Emma missed Claire like she’d miss an arm or a leg. And she’d only been four when her little sister had been taken. Rose, a single mother who’d lost her baby, had suffered so much more.

Emma’s job, as the one left behind, was to be there for Rose. Period.

She wasn’t herself right then. Who knew, maybe she wouldn’t ever be exactly herself again. But her role in her mother’s life would not—could not—change.

“Never say never, Em. You have a life to live,” Rose said, sadness mingling with the compassion in her tone. “You have to go where it takes you.”

“My place is here. With you.”

“I hope it is. But if it’s not, you have to go.”

Her mother was talking crazy. She wasn’t going anywhere.

“You don’t mean that. You need me here.”

“Yes.” Rose’s expression was completely sober. “But my life doesn’t take precedence over yours. Or it shouldn’t. And I’ve begun to see that maybe, in spite of all of my intentions to the contrary, it has.”

Emma didn’t know what to say. Her mother was right about one thing. She did have a life to live. And she hadn’t been living it.

Any other time her mother’s words would have frightened her. Tonight, they seemed to make a confusing kind of sense.

* * *

CHRIS SKIPPED THE CHURCH meal that followed the funeral, though he did keep his head low—in deference to his mother who would be disappointed in his manners if she were still alive—as he made his way back to the new black Ford truck he’d bought the previous spring.

He wasn’t in a hurry to be anywhere. Late-afternoon sunshine usually signaled waiting his turn to meet with Manny, Comfort Cove’s lobster dealer, and exchange the day’s catch for the current pitiful rate of three dollars per pound. And then there were always things to do on board the Son Catcher to occupy his time until dusk—like keeping the aging engine running until the economy recovered enough to shoot lobster prices back up to a price lobstermen could afford to work for.

Today, for the first time in memory, the dock didn’t call to him. His first Friday off in months and, while he missed the water, the exertion, the thrill of the catch, the dock was not a happy place that day. They’d lost one of their own.

It could happen.

Wayne Ainge had been far too young to die. By all accounts he’d worshipped the ocean. And she’d been fickle to him.

He might have been driving aimlessly, but Chris’s new truck already seemed to know Chris. Without any conscious decision making, he ended up at Citadel’s, an upscale lounge and eatery in the middle of Main Street, the part of the tourist district the city council had sunk all the city’s money into.

Fishermen didn’t frequent Main Street.

Chris parked in his usual Friday-night spot—albeit a few hours earlier than normal—and, pausing to check out the thronging visitors on both sides of the street he slowly pocketed his keys, went inside and took a seat at the bar.

He was one of two people there. The other, a woman of indiscriminate age, eyed him up and down as though analyzing how much he’d bring per pound.

“Hey, Chris, what’s up?” Cody, the bartender, distracted him from a mental rundown of random ways to avoid hookers. “I’ve never seen you in here before dark.”

“Day off work,” Chris said, shrugging, and then remembered his attire. He looked just as he always did on Friday nights—like a white-collar business man relaxing after a long week of work. Not like a man from the docks after a long hard day. “Pour me a double,” he said.

A good bartender, Cody reached for the bottle of high-end scotch that Chris favored and poured twice the amount of Chris’s preferred drink without saying another word.

Tipping his glass to the younger man, Chris sipped, in memory of a twenty-year-old kid he’d barely known. And to men that he’d known all his life. Fellow lobstermen, fishermen, who risked their lives every day earning a living in spite of the vagaries of an ocean that was more powerful than all of them.

And halfway through the glass of amber liquid, he drank to her, too. To the mighty Atlantic. The ocean. The reason he would never have a woman in his life.

CHAPTER THREE

“I HAD A CALL, MOM.” Emma was helping her mother make a chicken Caesar salad she didn’t want. Because it was her and Rose’s favorite meal. A feel-good meal. Security food.

“From who?”