Despite it being a glorious, sun-drenched day, Melinda spent the entire time indoors. She moved from the sofa to the chair in front of the sliding glass door, her phone in her hip pocket, the kitten on her lap.
She stared unseeing at the activity in the cove, only peripherally noticing children constructing sand castles, seagulls begging for scraps from picnic baskets, and brightly colored beach towels and folding chairs with their occupants focused on magazines and paperback books and electronic devices. The kitten alternated positions from curled into a tight ball to stretched full length along Melinda’s leg.
The cell didn’t ring.
The overnight package Jeremy sent included information about the beach house and the rental car along with a stream-of-consciousness list of emergency contacts, stores, and when he would call to set up a meeting.
Her world revolved around computers so it was only natural that as soon as she knew Jeremy’s full name, she’d investigate. She found basic information, mostly from trade magazines that featured articles about his construction company and how it had grown from a one-man operation to a business noted for employing the finest craftsmen in Northern California. She also found a couple of archived pieces in the Santa Cruz Sentinel about his tenure on the board of directors for a local charity that worked to purchase and restore wildlife habitat. Oddly, nothing she’d read had included anything about his immediate family, no daughter and no wife.
She glanced at her phone, checking the time and making sure she hadn’t accidentally silenced it. She’d skipped breakfast and missed lunch and should have been hungry, but she was so sick to her stomach with apprehension that just the thought of trying to swallow even a bowl of cereal made her gag.
The kitten stretched, circled, and settled again, then thought better of it and took off down the hall toward the bathroom. The only cats Melinda had been exposed to growing up were barn cats. They were never fed or sheltered beyond opening a door to the root cellar or providing access to the barn. They earned their keep by controlling rodents. Their own numbers were controlled by foxes or coyotes or hunting dogs trained to go after them for sport.
Which made cats in Eastern Kentucky where she’d grown up wary of humans. The humans reciprocated with beliefs passed from one generation to the next that cats were harbingers of evil.
Especially black cats. They had an unsavory history that went back centuries and likely as not involved women and witchcraft.
Melinda looked up to see her supposedly evil kitten bounding toward her with what could only be described as a smile. She meowed in greeting and climbed up Melinda’s outstretched leg, making it to her lap in two surprisingly well-executed leaps. She circled and settled in, giving her still-tender paws a quick cleaning before dropping her head and falling asleep.
Five minutes later the doorbell rang. Her immediate reaction was a feeling of panic. Jeremy said he would call first. She’d counted on that time, however short, to mentally prepare for their meeting.
Moving the kitten to the flannel jacket she’d put on the sofa earlier, she quickly checked her hair to make sure it hadn’t done something weird when she switched from the sweater she’d put on in Juneau to the only warm-weather clothing she’d taken to Alaska—a camisole and crochet tank.
A hard swallow helped control the stomach spasms that accompanied every step. Why couldn’t she be like all the other females she knew and just cry when life made her the target in a game of emotional dodgeball?
She took a deep breath, forced a smile and opened the door. The smile disappeared as soon as she saw she’d been wrong about Jeremy calling first.
A tall, lean man Melinda had imprinted in her memory but only vaguely truly remembered blinked and took a step backward. Melinda couldn’t tell if he was surprised or disappointed. Either way, she was clearly not the woman he’d expected. He removed his frayed baseball cap and stuffed it in his back pocket, regaining his composure. “You’ve changed,” he said.
“That’s what happens when you grow up,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm. Don’t do that, she mentally warned herself. Jeremy held the power. She would gain nothing by alienating him.
“Of course. I guess I had trouble picturing what a difference nearly thirteen years would make.”
“Some days I think the changes are for the better,” she said in a gentler tone. “Others, I’m not so sure.” In person Jeremy looked the part of someone who spent his life outdoors—lanky but muscled with sun-streaked brown hair on the long side of easily groomed. His beard was a day or two beyond the popular bedroom look still favored by GQ models, and lightly sprinkled with either blond or gray, she couldn’t tell which in the bright sunlight. Dark brown eyes flashed a mixed message somewhere between weary and wary. She wouldn’t be surprised if it was both.
His physical appearance invited speculation, a little like a fill-in-the-questionnaire-on-how-to-create-the-perfect-father-for-your-daughter. Physically, she wouldn’t change much, other than make him a little less tired-looking. For the rest, the most important attributes, she would have checked off a sense of humor, a sprinkling of mischief, and an innate tenderness. She’d thought a lot about the man she wanted her daughter to call Dad and those were the traits that always came out on top.
“I’m going to assume you’re Jeremy Richmond?” she said when he didn’t supply the information himself.
“I figured you’d already guessed that.” He gave her a knowing smile. “But then the photograph of me at the Builders’ Award Dinner isn’t the best and we didn’t spend a lot of time together at the hospital.”
“No, we didn’t. And,” she added, “you’re right about the photograph. It wasn’t helpful at all.” Of course he would figure out that the first thing she would do after learning his name was look for him online. Fighting an inclination to say something flippant, Melinda reminded herself she had nothing to gain and everything to lose. Her mother used to tell her that devils danced on the tip of her tongue, especially when she was scared or angry. At the moment she was a long way from being angry, and scared didn’t begin to describe the terror gripping her stomach.
Jeremy rocked backward, looked down at his boots and then up again at Melinda. “Would it be all right if I came in?”
“Sorry, of course.” She opened the door wider, moving to give him room to enter without making physical contact. She took a minute to look outside, focusing on his truck. No one was inside, not his wife . . . not anyone. Disappointment settled over her shoulders like a coarse wool blanket.
She closed the door and turned to face him. What now?
“As I recall the day we met, you looked like hell,” he said, taking them back to their only meeting. “As if you’d been crying for a long time. And you looked young. Way too young to have a baby.”
“I’ve never cried well. People don’t feel sorry for me, they look for ways to escape.” Again, she tried to smile. “As fast as they can.”
“I remember everything about that day. To me it was more like you were dealing with a broken heart,” he said with breath-stealing kindness. “How fast I left had nothing to do with how you looked. From the minute I saw my little girl, even though I knew it wasn’t possible legally, I was terrified you might change your mind.”
With those few words, she was back at the rural hospital where she’d given birth, sharing a room with a woman nearing the last stages of dementia who comforted herself by reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets. “Whether or not to give my baby up for adoption wasn’t a choice, it was a necessity.”
“No matter the reason, for me, all logic vanished the minute I saw you coming down the hallway to put your baby in my arms. I didn’t know that it was possible to fall in love that fast.”
They had this in common. What he could not know was that she could still feel the weight of her daughter in her arms and how lost she’d been when that weight disappeared.
“You’ve changed, too,” she said, taking the conversation back to sheltered ground. Should she extend her hand? Was there a protocol for formally meeting the adoptive father of your daughter? She waited for him to give her a clue.
Jeremy ran his hand over his stubble, stopping to scratch his chin. “A little more gray I suppose, and a few new wrinkles.”
He shifted from one booted foot to the other. They were work boots, the kind with steel toes and shanks that had creases across the top from years of sitting on his haunches to work on something low. His jeans had holes, but they were the earned kind, denim worn through where his tool belt rode against his hips.
She made a fluttering hand movement, a gesture she’d inherited from her mother that belied her effort to appear in control. She was losing the confidence battle. “Just curious—is this your house?” She’d seen nothing to indicate anyone actually lived there except for a kitchen full of food. “I know you did the remodel, but wondered how you arranged for me to stay here.”
“I wish it was mine,” he said. “I’ve tried to talk the owner into selling it to me, but she’s not ready to let go. Too many memories.”
Melinda understood about houses and memories. Even after all this time, selling her parents’ home still seemed like a betrayal.
“Would you like something to drink?” What? All of a sudden she’d transitioned into the role of hostess? “As you undoubtedly know, there’s juice and soda in the refrigerator, but I’m not sure what’s in the cupboards. Coffee maybe? Or tea?” She made that stupid fluttering gesture again. “I’m assuming I have you to thank for the supplies?”
“Not me—a friend of mine. She lives in the cottage next door. When I got tied up . . .” He visibly struggled with how to finish. “With something I wasn’t expecting, she pitched in.” Jeremy glanced around the room, his gaze stopping on the unpacked suitcases.
Melinda cringed at the message the suitcases communicated—she wasn’t planning to be there long enough to make an effort to unpack. “So your friend knows who I am and why I’m here?”
“There’s not much Cheryl doesn’t know. She’s been a godsend the past couple of years.” He looked up, staring at the crown molding above the fireplace, his eyes narrowed in concentration. “I count on her a lot more than I should, especially with her and her husband, Andrew, planning to move to Botswana next year.”
“Why Botswana?” she asked, not because she cared, but because she couldn’t come up with anything else to say.
“Their youngest daughter is on assignment with National Geographic.”
“That’s impressive.” Their conversation had turned surreal. They were acting like two people killing time at a bus stop with no more in common than the need to get from one side of town to the other.
Jeremy hesitated before answering a question Melinda hadn’t asked. “She’s on a decade-long study photographing the loss of elephants through poaching and trophy hunting by assholes like that dentist who killed Cecil the Lion a couple of years ago.”
Melinda had lived her entire life in an environment where hunting was part of the culture. She knew men who could not have fed their families after the mines closed without the deer and elk they brought down each fall and winter. But she also knew men and women who killed for nothing more than bragging rights, and they turned her stomach.
“When are they leaving?” Melinda felt an unreasonable flash of jealousy that she wasn’t the woman her daughter turned to when she needed a friend. She made a dismissive gesture to stop him answering. “Never mind. It’s not important.”
He answered anyway. “They’re hoping to have the details worked out by the end of the year. Telling them good-bye is going to be even harder on Shiloh than me.”
“Shiloh?” Melinda repeated, confused at the introduction of someone new.
“My daughter?”
Melinda caught her breath in surprise both at the name and that she hadn’t thought to ask until now. In her mind her daughter had always been Danielle, named for her father, a gift he’d never received because he’d died before he knew she existed. “You named her after a Civil War battlefield?”
“It’s a family name, one that’s been passed down for more generations than anyone can remember.”
She wasn’t sure how she felt about the name but it wasn’t as if she had any real choice. “You haven’t said anything about Tess. How does she feel about Shiloh looking for me?”
Jeremy made a face. “It doesn’t matter how she feels.”
Melinda waited for him to finish, to at least offer some kind of explanation. As she waited, the perfect family portrait she carried in her mind the way a man carried a wallet in his pocket faded to a barely discernible image, as if it had been left in the sun too long. “Why?”
“It’s not something I want to talk about any more than it’s something you need to know.” The verbal door slammed with a resounding bang.
Jeremy strode over to the sliding glass door and stared outside. “You found everything okay?”
She wasn’t sure what he meant by “everything,” but answered, “Yes. Thank you.”
He turned to look at her. “There’s a couple of bikes and beach umbrellas in the garage. Help yourself to anything you find while you’re here.”
He had to be kidding.
“Sorry,” he said. “That was a stupid thing to say.”
“That’s okay. I’ve been known to say stupid things, too.” What in the hell was going on? Why didn’t he simply tell her when and where she would meet Shiloh?
“What do you do with your time off when you’re in Minneapolis?”
Another inane question. “Why do you ask? Is it important?”
What possible difference did it make whether she had hobbies or lovers or a passion for old movies?
“Not important. Just something Shiloh might want to know.”
His questioning didn’t make sense when Shiloh could ask whatever she wanted to know as soon as they were together. Melinda stiffened. Unless that wasn’t his intention. A bubble of heat burst in her chest sending tendrils into her neck and along her arms. She either confronted him or went along with the hope she’d read too much into his odd behavior. “When I’m in Minneapolis I do volunteer work at one of the local hospitals.”
“What do you do there?”
She sighed, resigned to answering whether she wanted to or not. “I cuddle babies. At the hospital where I volunteer, a lot of the babies are born drug addicted and don’t have family support. There isn’t enough hospital staff to give them the human contact they need.” She shrugged. “That’s where the volunteers come in.”
Jeremy ran his hands across his face as if it were possible to erase his obvious fatigue. “This isn’t working. We need to talk.”