“You will, you know,” Brad insisted softly. “I know you too well, Lydia. You won’t be able to keep this buried for long. It just isn’t in your nature.”
I scoffed at him, but I realized he was probably right.
6
CHAPTER
ELISE BEAUMONT
Elise discovered that she was looking forward to starting the sock class. Without letting her daughter know, she’d purchased yarn to knit David, her son-in-law, the first pair. It was a small way of showing her appreciation for his kindness in allowing Elise to live with them during this legal mess. According to a recent update from the attorney, there hadn’t been much progress yet; patience was advised. She still felt mortified that, after all her careful planning, she’d ended up living with her daughter and son-in-law, no matter how temporary that arrangement was.
The afternoon before the Tuesday class, Elise sat on the patio reading, an activity that never failed to satisfy her. Her love of books went back to when she was a child. She was an early reader, and could remember sitting in her crib with a book in her hands, utterly content. That love of books had served her well through the years.
Today she was rereading Jane Austen’s Emma, something she did every decade or so. There were books like that, the true classics she returned to time and time again. Austen, the Brontës, Flaubert and her favorite, George Eliot. These writers described women’s lives and emotions in ways that still resonated a century or more later. She’d just reached the scene where Mr. Knightley chastises Emma when Aurora opened the sliding glass door and stepped onto the patio to join her. “Can we talk for a few minutes, Mom?” she asked tentatively. Aurora sat on the chair next to the chaise longue where Elise reclined with her legs stretched out. Her daughter held a tall glass of tea, ice cubes clinking. She was obviously nervous.
“Of course.” Elise carefully inserted her bookmark and closed Emma. Judging by the way Aurora leaned forward, this was important.
“I want to talk about Daddy,” her daughter informed her, diving headfirst into the most unpleasant of subjects.
Elise was always cautious about anything to do with her ex-husband. Maverick was a slick and dangerous man, personable to the degree that it was difficult to refuse him whatever he might want. “I suppose that would be all right.” Her daughter knew the basic story of how Elise had met Maverick, fallen stupidly in love and married him. The marriage hadn’t lasted eighteen months, two years on paper.
Oh, how that man could talk. Elise swore he could charm a rattlesnake. From the time she was a teenager, she’d known she wasn’t a particularly attractive woman. Maverick had adamantly claimed otherwise, and being young and naive, Elise had delighted in those compliments, swallowing them whole. She’d believed him because she so badly wanted to be as lovely as he said she was. When she was with Maverick she felt beautiful, but it didn’t take her long to realize she was living a fool’s dream.
“What about your father?” Elise asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible.
“You loved him once, right?”
That was a tricky question and difficult to answer. Maverick had come into her life when she’d been at a vulnerable age, when hormones had overruled common sense. At the time, she’d believed she was in love but later acknowledged that it had been lust they’d shared and not love. Love lasts. What they shared didn’t. Yet, all these years after the divorce, she still dreamed of him, yearned for him and wished with everything she held dear that their marriage had turned out differently. The relationship might have worked if Elise could have found a way to accept the man he was.
Unfortunately she hadn’t and it was too late for them. Over the years he’d flitted about the country and, in her view, wasted his life. In some respects she had, too, Elise recognized sadly.
“Mom, you did love him, didn’t you?” Aurora repeated anxiously.
“Yes, I did.” So much that even now it frightened her to admit it.
Her daughter relaxed visibly. “We keep in touch, you know.”
Elise was aware of that. Maverick lived among the dregs of society, as she liked to put it, making his living from card-playing and God knew what else. But apparently he was successful—enough to support Aurora all her life and through college.
Besides his regular payments and then tuition, he’d always sent extra for their daughter’s birthday and at Christmas. The first seventeen years following their divorce, he wrote Aurora once a month but they were never long letters. Mostly he sent postcards to let her know where he was and if he was winning. Winning had always been important to Maverick. In fact, it was everything to him. He lived in search of the elusive jackpot that would set him up for life. To the best of Elise’s knowledge, he’d never found it.
“If you want to keep in touch with your father, that has nothing to do with me,” she primly informed her daughter. Elise had read those postcards, too, and wished she hadn’t—because she was afraid it meant she still cared, still hungered for what was destined never to be.
“Dad and I talk every now and then.”
Elise knew that too. When Aurora was a child, she’d been so excited whenever her daddy called. As an adult, she reacted the same way. Aurora hadn’t been disillusioned by her father yet, and Elise hated the thought that eventually her daughter would face the same disappointment she had. Maverick didn’t intend to hurt those he loved. He was simply careless with the feelings of others; the people he claimed to love never came first with him. He just couldn’t be trusted. If he said he’d be home by nine, he meant he’d be home at nine unless there was a card game going. His moods were dictated by whether he won or lost. If he won, he was elated and jubilant, swinging Elise in his arms and planning celebration dinners. If he lost, he suffered fits of anger and despair.
“He’s coming, Mom,” Aurora announced. She looked directly into Elise’s eyes.
“Coming,” Elise repeated as a numbing sensation spread through her. “To Seattle?”
Aurora nodded.
“Is there some big poker tournament taking place here?” Not that she was likely to know about it.
“He’s coming to see me,” Aurora added with more than a hint of defiance.
“How … fatherly,” Elise murmured sarcastically. “Once every five or ten years he—”
“Mom!”
“Sorry.” Elise clamped her mouth shut before she could say something she’d regret.
“This is what I never understood about you and Dad.” Her daughter seemed to be struggling to hold on to her composure. “You make me feel like I’m being disloyal to you because I choose not to ignore my father.”
“I do that?” This was a painful revelation, and Elise swallowed hard. All she’d wanted was to protect Aurora from certain disillusionment.
Aurora nodded and the tears that brightened her eyes were testament to the truth of her words.
“I’m so sorry. I never realized … I—I did that.” The guilt was nearly overwhelming.
“But you do. Never once in all the years I was growing up did I hear my father say a negative thing about you. Not once, Mom, and yet I can’t remember you ever saying a kind word about him.”
“That is not true.” Elise had tried hard to hide her feelings toward Maverick from their daughter. Surely she’d succeeded—hadn’t she? Gazing into her