The Cliff House. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ Stella spent five difficult years being bounced from foster home to foster home throughout Northern California. At thirteen, she finally landed in Cape Sanctuary with a wonderful, loving couple that showed her by example how a family should function. With mutual respect, with kindness, with compassion.

      Cape Sanctuary had become home. Naturally, this was also where she had been compelled to bring Daisy and Beatriz when she obtained custody of them after Jewel’s lifestyle caught up with her.

      “I guess, maybe I was looking for some kind of peace for me and for Rowan. She’s struggling a great deal over losing her mom. Holly’s death was...difficult. The idea of finding a sanctuary somewhere held a great deal of appeal. To be honest, I figured you probably weren’t here anymore. I just assumed you would have married and moved away and had the half-dozen children you always talked about wanting.”

      She hadn’t. Just the girls and this tiny life growing inside her, though she wanted to think she had been a mother figure to all the foster children who had found temporary refuge here at Three Oaks.

      “I’m still here,” she said, stating the obvious. “Thank you for warning me. Now I guess I’ll have no excuse to freak out if I see you in the street.”

      He was quiet, those handsome features she had loved so much looking tense and uncomfortable. “I want this move to work for my daughter, but not at the expense of you and your comfort here in town.”

      “It’s fine. It doesn’t bother me at all,” she lied. “You can move wherever you want, Ed. I hope that after all this time, we can be friends.”

      “I would like that,” he said softly. “I’ve learned that true friends in this life are as rare as they are precious.”

      He gave her a careful look. “Now that we’ve cleared the air and gotten the initial shock of seeing each other again out of the way, tell me about this pregnancy. How far along do you think you might be?”

      She knew exactly how far along she was, five weeks to the day since her last rendezvous with the doctor’s turkey baster. She wasn’t about to tell him that, though.

      “About a month,” she said.

      “Jo is an excellent doctor. You’re in good hands.”

      “Yes. She’s been my OB-GYN for years.”

      “Then you know her skills well.” He cleared his throat. “Thank you for being understanding. It’s really great to see you, Stella. And congratulations again.”

      “Thank you.”

      “I guess I’ll see you around.”

      Not if I see you first, she wanted to say, but that would probably sound juvenile coming from a forty-year-old schoolteacher who was about to become a mother.

      “Right.”

      To her astonished dismay, he leaned in and kissed her cheek, then turned around and walked through her door, leaving behind a little swirl of his distinctive scent that took her right back to those intense college days when she had been young and completely in love.

      Those heady months they had been together had seemed full of amazing possibilities. She had been close to graduating, in the middle of her last semester of coursework before doing her student teaching.

      It had been an important time for her scholastically but she had barely been able to keep her mind on her schoolwork that final semester because she’d been in love for the first and only time.

      Stella sank into her favorite chair, the one she had saved and saved to buy, with its whimsical forest scene created by her favorite artist, the anonymously infamous Marguerite.

      The chair usually centered her. It was the one she meditated in, read in, sat in to write in her diary. This time she couldn’t seem to find anything resembling peace as the memories crowded in.

      She had been so in love with the gorgeous medical student she’d met at the UCLA student health clinic when she had sprained her ankle playing beach volleyball with friends over the holiday break.

      Sparks had flared between them instantly and she had slipped him her phone number, something she had never done before or since. He called her the next day, ostensibly to check up on her ankle, and the two of them ended up talking for hours. Ed had dropped by the next night with a pizza and a bouquet of flowers and she had fallen hard. From that instant on, they spent every available moment together. They studied together, met up for meals on campus, spent all their free time hiking, riding bikes, or just taking a drive and talking.

      He had proposed after two months. It was entirely too early in their relationship and they were both too young. Plus, he had years of med school, residency and internship ahead of him.

      Both of them knew getting married had been a crazy idea but things seemed so right and real and perfect. Ed had been old-fashioned, hadn’t wanted to move in together without marrying her, and by that point neither of them could imagine being apart.

      She had known she wanted to build a life with him, so she had said yes. He was warm and loving, honorable and kind and amazing.

      She wasn’t sure what he saw in her, a former foster child with an alcoholic mother and a deadbeat father who had disappeared long ago, but she didn’t care. She had been lost in the wonder and magic of knowing he would be hers and they would build the family she had always wanted.

      And then she had found out purely by accident that her sister, Jewel, had died months earlier of a drug overdose, and Jewel’s daughters, her nieces, had been put in separate foster homes.

      And that was that. In that single moment her entire future had changed and she had known exactly what she had to do.

      The girls needed her.

      She had broken things off with Ed. What choice did she have? She could never ask him to help her raise two troubled girls, not when he needed all his energy and focus to become the brilliant doctor she saw inside him.

      He would have done it. He would have put all his dreams on hold to help her obtain custody of the girls and would probably have quit med school to help support them all.

      She couldn’t let him. So she had just...walked away. Eventually, she had told him she wasn’t in love with him, that she was too young to be married. That part was probably truth. She told him she had an offer to do her student teaching in Cape Sanctuary, at the other end of the state and a world away, and she was taking it.

      She had cried herself to sleep the first three months she was away from him and had tortured herself by keeping a picture of them on the beach in the drawer of her bedside table until she had finally forced herself to put it away.

      And now he was here.

      What kind of weird wind had carried him back into her life now? And what was she going to do?

      She wiped at the tears she hadn’t realized she still had inside her for Ed Clayton and a love that seemed as real and strong now as it had then.

      It didn’t matter. She touched her abdomen, to the tiny life growing there. She couldn’t let it matter. She had more important things to worry about now, like how in the world she was going to raise this child by herself.

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