She turned toward Edna. She’d given the girls the chore so that she could talk to the nanny privately. The questions in her head were multiplying. “You said that Dr. Sheffield was still hurting. Over his wife’s death?” Kennon guessed.
“Yes.”
She could see by the look in the older woman’s eyes that this was not an easy subject for her either. The doctor’s wife must have been a very special person to merit such fierce love and loyalty.
“He blames himself,” Edna told her simply.
“Why?” Kennon could think of only one reason. “Was he to blame?”
“No!” Edna cried with feeling. “It’s because she took his place.”
“His place?” Kennon echoed. She tried to make sense of the answer. “You mean like on a plane?”
Taking a deep breath, Edna started at the beginning. “Dr. Sheffield belongs to Doctors Without Borders. He joined because Dr. Nancy wanted him to. He was supposed to go to Somalia but at the last moment, his last triple-bypass patient took a turn for the worse a few hours after the surgery. The doctor didn’t want to leave the man in someone else’s hands, so Dr. Patterson—that was Mrs. Sheffield’s professional name—told him not to worry. She said she’d go in his place.”
“Dr. Sheffield’s wife was a cardiovascular surgeon, too?” Kennon asked incredulously.
Edna smiled with pride, tears shimmering in her eyes. “My Nancy was a general surgeon. In a pinch, she could perform almost any kind of regular surgery that needed doing.” Edna’s voice grew very quiet as she added, “When the tsunami hit, she was one of the ones who was swept away.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry to hear that,” Kennon told her, genuinely feeling the woman’s pain. But Edna had caught her attention with what she’d said before recounting the abilities of the doctor’s late wife. “Excuse me, you said ‘your Nancy …'” Kennon’s voice trailed off as she waited for a clarification. The girls’ nanny couldn’t mean that the surgeon’s wife was her daughter. Could she? Dr. Sheffield wouldn’t be treating his former mother-in-law like one of the servants, would he?
The tears that shone in Edna’s eyes threatened to come spilling out. She blinked them back with effort, but a few fell, sliding down her cheek.
“I raised that girl from the time she was an infant. Both her parents were busy earning a living—much the way Dr. Sheffield and Dr. Patterson were,” she added. “Because we had such a close relationship, when her own two little ones came along, she asked me to take care of them.” She did her best to collect herself. “I was thrilled to be of use to her. I love those girls as if they were my own.”
Kennon didn’t doubt it. “I take it that by moving from San Francisco to Southern California, Dr. Sheffield felt that he needed a fresh start?”
Edna nodded her head. “He never said so in so many words, but that’s what I think, yes.”
Kennon was already processing what she’d been told. “Then what we’ll probably need is only the slightest touch of the past, with the main emphasis being on the future.” Having voiced her thoughts out loud, she looked at Edna to see if the older woman agreed with her.
The nanny took another deep breath, as if to push herself forward.
“I think that would be for the best. Miss Nancy would have wanted Dr. Sheffield to move on. She wouldn’t have wanted him to be this unhappy. She was always teasing him about being too serious,” she said fondly, remembering. And then she looked up at Kennon, as if appealing for her help. “This is way beyond that, and he needs to laugh again.”
Again. So the man was capable of actually laughing, Kennon thought. That was good to know. It meant that there was something for her to work with.
“Well, I don’t know if I can make him laugh, but we’ll really try to get him to smile again,” she promised Edna.
At that moment, Madelyn burst back into the room and headed straight toward them. Madelyn looked at Kennon pointedly. “Anything else?” the little girl asked.
Right on her sister’s heels, not to be outdone, Meghan echoed in a louder voice, “Yeah, anything else?”
For tonight, Kennon thought, she just wanted to immerse herself in the interactions of the family. Since the good doctor wasn’t down here with them, the girls—and memories of their mother—would just have to do.
Immersing meant blending in.
“Now I’m going to go and wash the dishes,” Kennon informed the girls as she got up off the arm of the sofa where she’d perched while talking to Edna.
“You wash dishes? By yourself?” Madelyn questioned, looking at up her uncertainly. “We’ve got a dishwasher that does that.”
“Don’t you have a dishwasher?” Meghan asked her, pity in her young voice.
Kennon laughed and put her arm around the younger girl’s shoulders, pulling her in for a quick hug. “Yes, I do, but I never like to have things pile up in the sink so I wash them before there’re too many. Besides, running the dishwasher for one person just seems sort of wasteful to me. Don’t you agree?” she asked Meghan.
Thrilled to be asked for her opinion, Meghan nodded her head vigorously. Kennon had a feeling that the little girl would have easily agreed to anything that she suggested.
“You really have a way with them,” Edna told her with genuine sincerity. She looked from one little girl to the other. There was approval in her voice as she said, “You seem to bring out the best in them. Do you have any children of your own?” the older woman asked, curious about this new person in their lives.
Kennon shook her head. “No.”
Not that she wouldn’t have wanted to have children. Several children. But before there were children, there had to be someone who could be a good husband, a good father. And if he could actually make her heart skip a beat or two, well, so much the better. If she was going to dream, she might as well go all the way.
“I never met the right man,” she told Edna. And with that, she closed the subject.
“Were you the oldest in your family, then?” Edna asked. “The one your mother depended on to look out for the others?”
There were no others. Her parents were divorced before she could get any siblings. She had always regretted that. A lot of her time as a child had been spent imagining what having a brother or sister would have been like. Even inventing an imaginary one when she was very young.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Edna,” she said with a smile, “but I’m an only child.”
“Then it’s a true gift you have,” Edna pronounced. “You’ve been blessed.”
She didn’t know about being “blessed”—it was just something that came rather naturally to her. Maybe it was even born out of that desire for a sibling. But before she could say anything to the contrary, Madelyn had caught her by one hand while, not to be left out, Meghan took hold of the other.
“Then we’ll help you do the dishes,” Madelyn declared.
Amused, Edna laughed. “Like I said, Miss Cassidy, you’ve got a gift. You’re not all that bad at healing, either.”
Kennon looked at her quizzically over her shoulder as she was about to be pulled away.
“I’m feeling much better, thanks to you and your chicken soup,” Edna told her.
“If that’s the case, that would be more due to the chicken than to me,” Kennon told her. She wasn’t one to take praise