The Cliff House. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ arched an eyebrow. “You do remember I was a medical student with plans to become an OB-GYN when you walked away. I’ve been in practice for more than a decade now. I think I have a pretty firm grasp on the basics of what’s required for a successful pregnancy.”

      He had been twenty-three when they met, already finishing his second year of med school, earnest and compassionate and eager to make a difference in the world.

      While she could never claim to have any gift for telling the future, she had known without a doubt that he would be a brilliant doctor someday.

      How many times over the years had she wondered about him? She could admit to herself it had taken all her self-restraint not to google him or find him on social media.

      Somehow she had known that making contact with him would be a mistake, would stir up all the emotions she had struggled bitterly to overcome.

      “This is obviously not a good time.” He scratched his neck, looking rueful. “I think it would be better if I came back later.”

      Yes, she wanted to tell him. Go away.

      Stella needed at least a few moments for the joy to sink in, to savor the idea of being pregnant. She wanted to imagine burying her face in her baby’s neck to inhale the intoxicating scent, to think about how wonderful it finally would be to cradle that sweet, warm weight against her after all these months of dreaming.

      She had no desire to traipse down memory lane with a man she had done her best to forget.

      She should invite him in but she didn’t want to. She wanted him to walk back out the way he had come, to go on and live his life without her, as she had forced him to do.

      Good manners wouldn’t let her go quite that far. “You’re here. You obviously have a reason for that. You might as well come in.”

      She held the door open, and after an awkward moment, he moved past her. She had a wild urge to pinch him to make sure he was truly there and not some strange pregnancy-induced apparition. Somehow she was able to refrain.

      “I take it from what you said that you’re not married. Does that mean you’re planning to raise the baby by yourself?”

      She refused to let herself panic about how very daunting that task suddenly seemed.

      “Yes. I’m certainly not the only woman in the world who has ever done that.”

      “True enough. And you raised the girls yourself, so you had plenty of practice, right?”

      With preteens and teenagers. Not with an infant. That panic flared again and she stuffed it down. She was forty years old, far more experienced than she’d been when she took custody of the girls. She could do it.

      “What are you doing here, Ed?” If she asked enough times, he would have to answer her, right?

      He again looked uncomfortable, his gaze shifting away from her. “It’s a long story. The short answer is that I wanted to give you fair warning that I’m moving to Cape Sanctuary with my daughter.”

      Moving. Here. Of all the places in this vast and beautiful country, he was moving here? She had spent twenty years trying to forget him. How on earth was she supposed to do that if he was living in Cape Sanctuary, a town of only ten thousand people?

      She couldn’t wrap her head around that. Instead, she focused on what was probably the least earthshaking part of his sentence. “You have a daughter.”

      The somewhat harsh planes of his face softened with a tenderness that made her throat feel tight and achy.

      “Yes. Rowan. She’s almost twelve. Smart, funny, curious. Amazing.”

      As a middle school teacher, she couldn’t help being touched by his words. She knew too many parents who came to parent-teacher conferences armed with only criticism and frustration toward their child for not measuring up to expectations.

      “How lovely. And her mother?”

      His smile slipped. “She...died two years ago,” he said curtly.

      Oh. Poor Ed and poor Rowan. Compassion nudged its way past the shock. She knew what it was to lose her own mother at a young age and how hard it had been on Bea and Daisy, too.

      She had so hoped that by leaving him after she took custody of the girls, by allowing him the freedom to pursue his dreams unencumbered by all her baggage, she was providing him the chance to find the happy-ever-after she had been incapable of providing him.

      After his own rough youth, largely putting his own life on hold from the age of twelve to help his single mother raise his own brother and sisters after his father walked out, she couldn’t ask Ed to do the same thing all over again with two orphaned, needy girls.

      It hurt more than she might have expected to know her hopes for him to have a beautiful, happy life hadn’t been realized. He had walked his own tough road. He had loved again, lost again and was now a widower.

      “I’m so sorry.”

      “Thank you. That’s why I’m here, actually. Not here in your living room but here in Cape Sanctuary. My daughter and I were in need of a fresh start and a good friend from medical school told me her partner was retiring and asked if I wanted to go into practice with her. You might know her. Joanne Chen.”

      Her stomach suddenly twisted with the vague nausea of the past few weeks that had been hinting at the truth she had been afraid to verify.

      “I do know her,” she said. “Quite well, actually. She’s my doctor.”

      He made a face. “When I saw you standing there with the pregnancy test, I feared as much. That’s one of the reasons I looked you up and decided to stop by, so that neither one of us had any sudden shocks when we run into each other at the clinic or on the street somewhere.”

      “You mean like the kind of shock I might have had when I opened my front door to find you on the other side, after all these years?”

      He gave her a rueful look. “Yeah. Exactly like that one. I’m sorry. I should have thought things through a little more and phoned you first. In retrospect, I probably should have reached out to discuss it with you when Rowan and I were first considering the idea of moving here.”

      “You can move wherever you want, Ed. I’m not queen and supreme ruler of Cape Sanctuary. Though I have to ask, of all the places you could have gone, why here?”

      “My previous practice was in Pasadena and I wanted more of a small-town atmosphere. And Rowan wanted somewhere with a beach. She is learning to surf and wants to be a marine biologist. I bumped into Jo at a conference several months ago and she mentioned what a lovely town it was. It seemed the perfect place for us. Not tiny but small enough to feel like we’re part of the community.”

      “You remembered that I lived here?”

      “I remembered that this is where you took the girls when you left. I remember you talking about how much you loved it here, how your time in foster care in Cape Sanctuary was the happiest of your life, when you felt the most safe.”

      Had she said that? Probably. After their СКАЧАТЬ