Sam pinched the bridge of his nose. He dearly loved Lauren. There had even been a time after his wife’s death when he hadn’t known how he would have survived without his sister. But the last thing he wanted was for her to get started on her favorite theme. He wasn’t being reclusive. He just didn’t have the time or the inclination to add anything—or anyone—else to his life.
“I’m involved with you and Zach and my kids,” he defended, forcing a smile into his voice. “That keeps me crazy enough.”
Taking the hint, Lauren chuckled. “We keep you sane. It’s Mom who makes you crazy. Just remember that she means well. And that she loves you. And, Sam,” she concluded, “T.J. is probably just the person you need. From what I’ve heard, she can deal with practically anything.”
T.J. wasn’t dealing well at all with what she’d just heard.
“Brad was here?” Her voice dropped to a disbelieving whisper. “On Harbor?”
Maddy O’Toole stood next to her in the cramped bookstore aisle between self-help and romance and lowered her voice another notch.
“I thought for sure he had come by to see you,” the forty-something redhead quietly declared. The he she referred to was Brad Colwood, the man who had fathered T.J.’s six-year-old son, then disappeared like smoke in a stiff breeze. “I mean, he was asking everyone around here about you. Edna at the ferry office. Linc over at the aquarium. Me and Mary and Alice,” she enumerated, adding herself and her waitresses to the list.
“I was here all day, Maddy. Libby didn’t work yesterday because Bert’s arthritis was acting up. I couldn’t even leave for lunch.”
“Your mom didn’t hear about him being here?”
“I didn’t see her yesterday. But she would have called if she had.” Crystal had about as much use for Brad as she did another bunion. “I’m sure she would have.”
“Well, I don’t have a clue what to make of his coming here, then. Actually, I wasn’t even sure what to make of him,” the puzzled woman confided. “I barely recognized him when he came into the café. His ponytail was gone, and the clothes he was wearing were straight out of GQ. I swear the watch he wore cost as much as Alice’s divorce. And his car—”
Canceling any further inventory, Maddy shook her head to get herself back on track.
“Anyway,” she murmured, “he spent a good twenty minutes working his way through his chowder and asking about everybody else he’d known here before he finally got around to asking about you. He said he’d heard you’d had a child and started asking questions about Andy.”
“He knew his name?”
Maddy hesitated. “I can’t remember if he mentioned it first. Or if someone else did.”
A sense of unease had hit T.J. in the stomach the moment Maddy said she’d seen Andy’s father. Now it balled into a knot of pure apprehension.
Grabbing Maddy by the wide pocket of her green Road’s End apron, T.J. tugged her friend farther down the aisle. Two teenage girls were giggling over a hottie on the cover of People magazine. Wanting to get out of earshot, T.J. came to a halt by a postcard carousel and cast a furtive glance toward the service counter angled against the back wall. Her son had flopped on the floor behind the counter and was coloring in his coloring book next to his pet de jour.
“What kind of questions did he ask?” she insisted.
“Mostly he wanted to know what kind of child Andy is. If he’s bright. What he’s interested in. That sort of thing. And he wanted to know if you’d ever married.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you worked here at the bookstore and that he should ask those questions of you.” Maddy’s protective concern turned to compassion. “He really sounded interested, T.J. When I told him to come see you, he said he wouldn’t know what to say. It was almost like he was trying to get the courage to see you again. Maybe he didn’t come here because he never got that courage,” she suggested. “It could be that he heard how well you were doing without him and he decided he didn’t have the nerve to face you after all.”
At Maddy’s hypothetical conclusion, T.J. shot another quick glance toward her son. “Is he still on the island?”
The café owner quickly shook her head. “He left yesterday afternoon. I saw him drive his red Jaguar onto the ferry myself. Hard to miss that car,” she explained, impressed despite herself. It wasn’t often that a luxury car showed up on the island with its gravel roads and rugged terrain. Even the newly monied who’d built million-dollar summer homes in the more remote areas drove modest SUVs or trucks. On Harbor it was considered bad form to be too ostentatious. “The 3:10 ferry,” she added, wanting to be as accurate in her account as possible.
Brad was no longer on the island. He’d come. Asked his questions. And gone.
T.J. should have felt relief knowing he was no longer there. And she supposed she did. She just didn’t feel enough to relieve the uneasiness still knotting her stomach.
“Take it from me,” Maddy said, all friendship and sympathy. “It’s never easy when your past turns up. Especially in the form of a man. The good news is that once they’ve satisfied their curiosity about whatever brought them back, they’re usually gone.”
T.J. forced a faint smile, as much for Maddy’s benefit as her own. “Do you think that’s it? That he was just curious about us?”
“It makes perfect sense that he would be. Any man with a soul doesn’t forget that he ran out on a woman who was going to have his child. Maybe something happened to make him turn philosophical, and he’s looking at where he messed up his life. Maybe he’s just come out of a relationship and wants to go back to something familiar. Or,” she suggested, brightening, “it could be that he finally smartened up, realized what a jerk he’d been and he’s finally wanting to make things right.”
It was clear enough to T.J. that Maddy, the ever-hopeful romantic, was seeing a hint of potential in the man. T.J. could practically hear the local matchmaker’s mental wheels grinding out her argument now. She would insist that Brad needed to do his share of groveling to properly prove how sorry he was. But, like the prodigal son, if he was sorry enough, he could be welcomed back into the fold. After all, he was the child’s father. And T.J. really had cared a great deal about him.
The thought that Brad Colwood might want to make up for abandoning her and her son would never have occurred to T.J. on her own. In all her twenty-seven years, she had never once known any man who returned to repair the damage he’d left behind. If a man came back at all, it was only to collect something he had forgotten, then move on again leaving a little more pain in his wake.
Reminding herself of that hard-learned bit of reality, hating the sense of foreboding it gave her, T.J. did her best to mask her growing trepidation. There was something Maddy didn’t know. Something T.J. had mentioned to no one.
Brad’s appearance yesterday wasn’t his first attempt to get information about her and her son. He had written to her three months ago asking how she was doing and if she would please tell him about their child. He’d wanted a picture.
That letter had been the first communication she’d received from him since he’d bailed out on her after learning she was pregnant. She’d ignored it, along with the sense of unease it gave her. Just as she had ignored a second letter that had come two weeks ago.
As far as she was concerned, Andy was hers and no one else’s. Brad had no right to information about him. Not now. Not after so long. She didn’t care if he had faced some sort of epiphany about himself or if his heart had been broken and he was seeking solace in an old relationship. She especially didn’t care if he was simply curious. She wanted nothing to do with the man who had refused to acknowledge his child and left