“How’d you get here?”
“I walked.”
The hair on his arms rose. He lived two miles from town, down a secluded dirt road. “It’s dark,” he stated, unnecessarily.
“I know, but I couldn’t stand it anymore and my friend Susanne is going somewhere with her folks this weekend and Aunt Rianne has company and…and I wanted to come here.”
She swiped the back of her hand under her nose. Her face was a thin, pale shape in the night.
Vulnerable. Innocent.
Seth wanted to drop his lunch box, pick her up like he once had ten years ago, hold her against his heart. She was his little girl, his baby. But divorce and years of slow distancing stood between them.
You could still do something about it.
Like what?
Like get to know her again.
But will she want to know me?
He held out a hand. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
She climbed to her feet without his assistance. He tried to ignore the scratch on his heart. In the confined mudroom, the dog headed for its dish in the corner and lapped water. Seth plunked his lunch bucket down on the kitchen counter. “Did you tell your mother you were coming here?”
Hallie frowned. “No.”
He nodded toward his office down the hall. “Call her.”
“She doesn’t care where I go.”
“Well, I do. Call, honey.”
The girl slipped out of her backpack, let it thud to the floor. “She was going out with jerk-o Roy-Dean.”
“Leave a message on the machine.” This time, he pointed. He didn’t want her on the kitchen phone where he’d hear her one-sided conversation with the woman he wished he’d told to hit the road sixteen years ago.
Young lunatic, that’s what he’d been, thinking with his tropical anatomy. Melody Owens had come on to him faster than a starved cougar. He’d been twenty-two. She’d been eighteen going on forty-six. Fooling the bouncers about her age. Fooling him.
He snorted. Admit it, Seth. You couldn’t keep your eyes off her, much less your hands. Or anything else, when all was said and done. At the time, she’d been the hottest bit he’d seen in his entire life. Oh, yeah. She had burned him good.
Three months of fun. Three months of sex. Then one morning, she’d stood on his doorstep, informing him she was pregnant. He still recalled gawking at her like a lummox. Sowing your oats didn’t mean forgetting safety between the sheets.
Except he had. Once.
Five minutes of play in the backseat of his old Impala had transformed into sixteen years of pain.
Not that he’d shirked the responsibility for what they’d done. No. Exit shock, enter love overload when, in mere months, a small toothless being with big blue eyes stared up at him. Seeing Hallie had sent his dreams into overdrive.
Dreams dumped in the mud of his marriage.
He, who worked earth and stone, who wore boots and dripped sweat, hadn’t been good enough. Not for Melody’s daddy, or her.
But her belly had cultivated his DNA. His sweet Hallie. Tying him forever to Melody.
He thought of the woman tonight— Breena of the crafts shop—and recollected her quiet, rueful voice. Her soap scent. Her long black hair. All, different from Melody. So damned different.
He strode to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. Forget the woman. Forget Melody. Only Hallie mattered.
In the fridge, he found a mixture of vegetables and leftover meat loaf and arranged them on a plate, then shoved the entire concoction into the microwave.
Hallie returned, resignation in those summer-blue eyes so like his own. She shrugged off the Gore-Tex jacket he’d bought her last April, tossed it over a chair. “She wasn’t there.”
What could he say? Your mother is an idiot? Better yet— Your mother needs to accept she has a teenager living in her house?
Mouth shut, he set the table, hauled out the bowl of food when the microwave buzzed. In silence they sat and ate. Finished, he took the plates to the sink and flipped on the tap.
Hallie came beside him, catching the tea towel hanging on the oven door. “Can I stay with you tonight?”
His heart rolled, sweet and painful. Wish and you might receive. How many times had he yearned for her to voluntarily choose him? Though not through distress.
He looked down at her dark head just shy of his shoulder, at her smooth, pale forehead, the slant of her small, straight nose. “You don’t have to ask, Hallie. This is your home, too.”
She dried both plates together, set them on the counter. “Mom’ll stay at Roy-Dean’s, anyway.”
“She do that a lot? Leave you alone overnight?”
“Just since she’s been dating him.”
In other words, since last August, when Melody, his daughter in tow, had relocated to Misty River from Eugene. Two months.
Why hadn’t Hallie told him before?
Roy-Dean Lunn, eight years younger than Melody.
A pretty boy she paraded through town like a talisman for her aging face.
Lunn worked road maintenance, fixing highways and secondaries; winters, he ploughed snow in northeast Washington and Idaho. Down times, he blew his money on women and booze. Now he blew it on Melody while she blew off her responsibility—her legally assigned responsibility—to Hallie.
Whose fault is that?
Mine, dammit. I should have fought harder when I had the chance.
Except, he had fought hard—as much as his meager savings had afforded a decade ago. But Melody stemmed from second-generation money and politics and influence; her daddy owned Misty River Chev Olds and Seth, standing in front of a female judge who pitched her tent in the mama-bear-protecting-her-cub camp, had lost his footing.
Hearing she’d won the full right to raise their daughter, Melody had volleyed tears in front of the judge and Seth, seeing his ex’s wet gratitude, could only bow to the decision. Hallie was five years old. Much as it killed him, he knew his work hours weren’t conducive to a tot in kindergarten. His baby girl needed her mother, and that was that.
In the end, he got “visitation” every Sunday and was awarded joint legal custody, which granted a say in the child’s education, health care and other major facets of her life.
Then, five years ago, Melody—wanting her “last big chance at life”—had moved to Eugene, near her brother. A three-hour drive away. Where visitations with Hallie were chewed up by motel costs and travel time that disintegrated her belief in him. Even his phone calls couldn’t rectify the ever-widening gap between him and his daughter as she trudged through her teen years. His fault, of course. All his fault.
Well, he couldn’t alter the past, but he could do something about Roy-Dean Lunn.
“From now on when he shows up,” Seth said, “call me and I’ll come get you.”
Hallie tossed the utensils into the drying rack. “It’s okay. I can crash at Susanna’s or Grandma Owens when I know he’s coming. Tonight we… Mom wasn’t expecting him, that’s all.”
Seth drained the water. “I want you to come here, Hallie. Don’t bother your grandmother or your friend.” You’re mine, not theirs.
“Dad, it’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” He faced her. “It’s not okay.