“Mom? Whatcha doing?”
Mel glanced up, smiling for the slightly frowning ten-year-old—her life, her love, her reason for living—standing on the porch, all turn-of-the-century charm fallen on hard times, and her heart turned over in her chest. Heaven knows she’d made a boatload of mistakes in her life—oh, let her count the ways—but the skinny fifth-grader with the wild red hair currently standing with her hands planted on her skinny, not-at-all-like-Mama’s, hips wasn’t one of them.
Although the circumstances of her conception? In a class by itself.
“Unpacking. And good news! You can come play pack mule.” Because there was no way she was leaving that half-finished cheesecake to rot back in Baltimore while they were here. Or the pumpkin soufflé. Or the …
Okay, she liked her own cooking. So sue her.
They carted the various Tupperwared goodies into the kitchen, at which point Quinn gasped, bug-eyed, then shook her head.” Looks like you and me have got some serious cleaning to do.”
“You might say,” Mel said as she cautiously opened the doors under the sink to find—booyah!—six half-empty containers of Comet and as many boxes of garbage bags, a bucketload of desiccated sponges and enough Lysol to disinfect a cruise ship. And, praise be, two unopened packages of rubber gloves. The good Lord will provide, she heard her mother say, and tears threatened. Not going there, either, Mel thought, standing and handing her daughter a pair of gloves, a sponge and one of the Comets.
“Start with the sink.” Gloves donned, Mel yanked out a garbage bag and faced the fridge. “This puppy is mine.”
“Got it.” Quinn dragged over a step stool to better reach inside the sink, wriggled into her own gloves and got to it, determination oozing from every pore in her little body … as she started to sing, loudly and very badly, a song from Wicked.
What a little weirdo, Mel thought, chuckling. A little weirdo, she thought on a sharp intake of breath, she’d protect with everything she had in her.
Especially from people who wanted to pretend she didn’t exist.
Looking up from Jenny O’Hearn’s chart, Ryder Caldwell stared at his father’s white-coated back, the words barely registering.
“What did you say?”
David Caldwell slid his pen back into his top pocket, then directed a steady, but concerned, gaze at Ryder before removing the coat and snagging it onto a hook on the back of his office door. “That Amelia left the house to the girls.”
Not that this was any surprise, Ryder thought over the pinching inside his chest as he watched his dad shrug into the same tan corduroy sport coat he wore to work every day, rain or shine—much to Ryder’s mother’s annoyance—then yank down the cuffs of his blue Oxford shirt. Made perfect sense, in fact, Amelia Rinehart’s bequeathing the house to the three cousins who’d spent, what? Nine or ten summers there? At least?
What was a surprise, was his reaction to the news. That after all this time the prospect of seeing Mel again should provoke any kind of reaction at all. After all, stuff happened. People grew up, moved on—
“You okay?”
Ryder glanced up at his father. Although David’s lanky form stooped more than it used to, and silver riddled his thick, dark hair, it often startled Ryder that it was like seeing an age progression image of what Ryder himself would look like in thirty years. Unlike his younger brother Jeremy, who’d inherited their mother’s fair skin and red hair. Among other things.
“Of course, why wouldn’t I be?” he said, flipping closed Jenny’s file, then striding down the short hall to the empty waiting room to leave it on Evelyn’s desk to tend to the next morning. Outside, a light rain had begun to speckle the oversize windows of the small family practice clinic on Main Street his father had started nearly thirty years ago, where Ryder had joined him—again, much to his mother’s annoyance—after completing his residency five years ago. The clinic, his practice, had been the only constants in a life clearly determined to knock him flat on his butt with irritating regularity. Good thing that butt was made of rubber, was all he had to say. “But how did you—”
“Golf. Phil,” his father said behind him, rattling his keys. “Far as he knows they’ll be here today or tomorrow. To decide what to do with the place.” He paused. “Just thought you should know.”
“Because of Mel?”
A slight smile curved his father’s lips. “That little girl worshipped the ground you walked on. Never saw a pair of kids as close as you two were.”
Slipping into a tan windbreaker nearly as old as his father’s jacket, Ryder turned to the older man, now standing by the front door. “That was years ago, Dad,” he said over the twist of guilt, an almost welcome change from the pain he still lugged around after nearly a year. “We haven’t even spoken since that summer.” Another twist. “After her father died—”
“There’s a child, Ry.”
Again, the words weren’t making sense. How—why—did his father know this? And what on earth did it have to do with Ryder? “So she has a kid—”
“She’s ten.”
And that would be the sound of pieces slamming into place. “And you think she’s mine? Excuse me, Dad, but that’s not possible—”
“I know she’s not yours, Ry,” his father said wearily. Bleakly. “She’s your brother’s.”
His head still spinning, Ryder sat across the street from the massive quasi-Victorian, set well back on its equally massive, and woefully neglected, lot. He’d been there a while, parked in the dark, dead space between the street lamps and not giving a rat’s ass that the damp from the now full-out rain had seeped into his bones. He had no idea, of course, if the little white Honda with the Maryland plates was Mel’s or not, if the lights glowing from the kitchen window meant she was in there.
With her daughter.
You know, you tell yourself what’s past is past. That time inevitably fades reality. If not warps it into something else altogether. Then something, anything—a word, a thought, a scent—and it all comes rushing back.
His father hadn’t said much, muttering something about how his tail was going to be in a sling as it was. Meaning, Ryder surmised, that his mother had been behind whatever had gone down. No shocker there, given her obsessive protectiveness of his younger brother. Who, according to Ryder’s father, had known about the baby—
Holy hell. After an hour, the shock hadn’t even begun to wear off. He pushed out a short, soundless laugh—he’d finally gotten to the point, if barely, where he no longer felt as though he had a rusty pitchfork lodged in his chest, and now … this.
Even if he had no idea yet what “this” was. If anything.
Frankly, if the child had been his—if that had even been a possibility, of course—he doubted he could have been more stunned. Or furious. Hell, Ryder couldn’t decide which was eating him alive more—that Jeremy had knocked Mel up or that everybody had kept it a secret all these years. That Mel hadn’t told him—
You feel betrayed? Really?
The front door opened. Ryder slouched behind the wheel like some creepy stalker, even as he silently lowered his window to get a better look, rain be damned. So, yeah, the car was Mel’s—even over the deluge he could hear her still-infectious laughter before he saw her, and the memories flooded his thoughts like soldiers charging into battle. Somehow, he steeled himself against them as the kid emerged first, her tall, thin frame swallowed up in a lime-green down vest, the feeble porch light glancing off a headful of blazing curls before she yanked her sweatshirt hood up over them. She tramped to the edge of the wide porch to glare over the railing. At the weather,