So what did she do?” Melinda asked.
He blinked, staring at her as if he’d already forgotten what they were talking about.
“To convince you to look for me,” Melinda prompted. She pulled out the bar stool from under the soapstone counter and sat down. She needed to find out everything she could about Jeremy if she had any hope of turning this around. Either that or camp outside his house until he relented and let her see Shiloh. With his business firmly rooted in Monterey, moving out of state to get away was out of the question.
Jeremy plucked an orange out of the fruit bowl, starting it at the stem end and removing the peeling in one continuous motion. He separated the whole fruit into halves and offered one to her. She shook her head knowing even bringing a small section close to her mouth would make her gag.
He put the orange aside. “It’s hard to describe how determined Shiloh can be when she’s made up her mind she wants something. A perfect example is the mess we’re in right now.”
“Meaning?” She knew he was talking about her and resented being referred to as a mess.
“If this meeting between the two of you is going to happen, it should happen at a less chaotic time.”
She wished she could tell him she would do anything, she would go through anything to see Shiloh, whatever the circumstances.
Melinda came forward and put her elbows on the counter. “How did she pull it off?”
“Shiloh was at the hospital for some tests when a new volunteer for Teri’s Best Friend stopped by to talk to her. She’d seen Shiloh’s name on a list of potential gift recipients and thought it would be a good time to start the process.”
“I’ve never heard of Teri’s Best Friend. What is it?”
“One of the charities that grants wishes for kids with chronic, life-threatening illnesses.”
Melinda’s eyes flared. “Life threatening? She really is dying?”
“She latched onto this dying idea when she started going through the hormone thing.”
“What hormone thing?”
He held up his hand to stop her. “We’ll get to that in a minute. First, the dying thing. What Shiloh learned during the interview is that she didn’t need to be dying for her wish to be granted. To be eligible, all she needed was a chronic, debilitating medical condition. From there it was a matter of talking to the right people at the charity. They knew her request might be tricky, but I’m convinced that’s what intrigued them. They were the new kids on the block, charity wise, and needed publicity to get operating capital.”
“No one realized they needed to let you in on what was going on?”
“There were two things working against them. It was a new charity run by good-hearted people who’d recently lost their daughter and had no real idea what they were doing—”
“And?”
“And Shiloh managed to convince them I would be thrilled to find her biological mother. As I understand it, she strongly hinted that finding her other family could make a difference should she ever need an organ transplant.”
“You must have been upset when you found out.”
“Not so much upset as disturbed. Her stunt made me realize how serious she was about finding you.” He crossed the room, opened the refrigerator, and looked inside as if it held something magical. After several seconds it started beeping, announcing the door was ajar. He grabbed a bottle of peach tea and held it up to Melinda.
She shook her head, wondering if his grazing was normal or an indication that he, too, was nervous.
“Of course having a couple of lawyers on the board of directors didn’t hurt. Instead of automatically dismissing the idea, they looked at it as a challenge. They were completely caught up in the process when someone on the board finally thought to ask how I felt about what they were doing.”
“And that’s when they found out you had no idea what was going on?”
“That’s when all hell broke loose.”
“I assume there were consequences?” Melinda sat back up and stretched.
“I’m looking at it.” He took a long swallow of the tea. “I figured she had to be desperate to do something that involved one lie after another. Shiloh is stubborn, she’s never been purposefully deceitful.”
“So you gave in.”
He glared at her. “What would you have done?”
“Exactly what you did. Only I wouldn’t have changed my mind at the last minute. What’s the point when Shiloh already knows who I am and how to find me?”
“Obviously this has all happened so fast I haven’t had the time to think it through.”
Melinda couldn’t help but smile at his admission. “You still haven’t told me why. What triggered Shiloh’s need to find me? And why now?”
“There’s a hell of a lot I don’t want to tell you, but it’s not because I’m hiding anything. Pure and simple, it’s none of your business. Maybe it would be different if I actually wanted you here, but I don’t. Shiloh and I are a family. There’s nothing you can add that either of us need.”
Shiloh and I? What about Tess? For an instant she wondered if Jeremy was trying to hurt her on purpose or if she was simply collateral damage in his battle with Shiloh. She was an obvious, even an understandable target for his frustration. But if she had any hope of bringing him around, somehow she had to hang on and control her temper until Jeremy understood she wasn’t the enemy.
The only way she could do that was to give him enough time to get to know her, to really know her. Trust was the coin of the realm they occupied and right now her purse was empty.
JEREMY TOOK ANOTHER long, slow swallow of tea, holding on to the bottle while he took the cap off and on, needing something to do to with his hands. He wasn’t accustomed to feeling off balance.
He had excelled in sports in high school, fearing nothing and no one on a field or a court. Seven colleges had approached him with athletic scholarships, three came through with academic offers. He’d wound up at the University of California, Davis, majoring in wildlife, fish, and conservation biology. During the summer he’d volunteered with Habitat for Humanity and fell in love with construction. Two tours of duty in Iraq followed graduation.
He had absolute confidence in his ability to handle whatever life brought his way. That belief lasted thirty-nine years, right up to the day he was laid low by a twelve-year-old with something Cheryl had described as wildly fluctuating hormones.
Until then, Shiloh rarely ever cried, for any reason. For the better part of her life she faced hospital stays and medical tests with stoic acceptance. Now all it took for her to turn into a sobbing bowl of mush was a video of an animal rescue on Facebook. Most days he was at a loss for what to do or what to say when Shiloh woke up sullen, then turned into someone whose laughter echoed throughout the house minutes before she burst into tears over the news that a blue whale had died and washed ashore at Pebble Beach. How was he supposed to make things better when the world they had occupied only months before had developed a fault line the size of the San Andreas? How did he respond when she sneaked out of the house in a tank top to watch a sunrise knowing she was taking her life in her hands?
The clock on the microwave nudged him to wrap up his conversation with Melinda and get on the road. He had a meeting with his lawyer that ranked even higher in importance than his meeting with Melinda.
Still, he couldn’t resist one more attempt to convince Melinda that coming to Santa Cruz had been a mistake, one that would do Shiloh more harm than good. If their meeting had accomplished nothing else, it had let him see Shiloh was important to Melinda.
With studied patience he expanded his explanation of what Shiloh was going through, emphasizing her emotional vulnerability. “Cheryl thinks Shiloh’s wild mood swings are connected to hormones,” he said without elaborating. “She said she went through something similar with both of her daughters.”
“Cheryl is the woman who lives in the cottage next door . . . ?”
“I got to know her and her husband when I was doing the first remodel of this place. They’re great people. You’ll like them.” What a stupid thing to say, especially considering he’d come there to ask her to leave. Still, he finished what he’d started. “Shiloh and their son, Bobby, met on a Monday and were best friends by the end of the week.”
“He must be one unflappable kid if he’s managed to make it through her hormone stage and they’re still friends.”
Her smile didn’t just come from her lips, but from her eyes. Another physical trait she shared with Shiloh. Jeremy stared too long for her not to notice, especially when he made a point of looking away. He was trying to reconcile the image he had of the mercenary sixteen-year-old who had sold her baby for twenty thousand dollars and the woman who would do anything to see her again. Did she come to apologize? If so, she was going to be disappointed at his reaction. He could handle everything Melinda had done leading up to the adoption, but he could never forgive the last-minute demand she’d made for more money.
“I remember what I was like,” she said. “Mainly because my father spent the rest of his life trying to understand how I could have gone to bed one night his sweet, accommodating daughter and woke up the next morning convinced he and my mother were old and out of touch and didn’t have a clue what it was like to be a teenager. The abrupt change nearly drove him crazy. My mother took the tears and tantrums in stride. She was the most easygoing person I’ve ever known. I wish I’d inherited just a little bit of that from her.” The smile faded, replaced by a yearning. “Is Shiloh easygoing?” she asked.
He didn’t want to answer her. He didn’t want her to know intimate things about his daughter no matter how easy they were to tell. The stories and hopes and dreams were his. He hiked himself up to sit on the counter and stared at her. “She used to be.”
“If she used to be, she’ll be that way again,” she said with complete confidence.
Jeremy shook his head. Just like that, as if Melinda had been there for the entire transformation, she took what he and Shiloh had been going through and reduced it to its simplest form—the painfully awkward stage of a girl transitioning into a woman. He wanted to be gracious and accept her insight for what it was, but he was too irritated.
She may have put in the labor to bring Shiloh into the world, but he’d put in the time. Shiloh was his daughter and had been from the moment he’d held her in his arms.
She made a face, letting him know she knew she’d made a mistake. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m acting as if I know Shiloh already when I don’t. It’s just that from what you’ve told me—”
“I’ll be more careful from now on.”
“Jesus—I hope you’re not always this prickly,” she said. “I’ll have to rethink my impression and it won’t be good.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one,” he said. “You sound just like her.” Trying to pretend they had nothing in common was as foolish as trying to pass a hurricane off as a summer storm. He could see Shiloh in Melinda in a hundred ways, from their slate blue eyes to their wavy light brown hair, but most of all in the way they made the same fluttering movements with their hands when they were anxious or upset. Who did that? In thirty-nine years he couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone else make that particular expressive gesture.
“How long did the hormone thing last with you?”
“For me, not very long. There were too many other things going on with my parents for them to give me and my problems the attention I thought I deserved.”
“Like?” It was more than curiosity. He had always wondered what life experiences had pushed her to the point she would one day sell her baby to strangers.
“My father lost his pension when the only company he’d ever worked for went bankrupt. His lungs were in such bad shape no one would hire him, and it fell to my mother to find a job that would keep them from losing their house. It was demeaning work at low pay, but between her income and my father’s disability, we survived.” Melinda shrugged. “You can see there wasn’t a lot of time, and not much tolerance, for me to swim in the pool of self-indulgence.”
“Sounds a little harsh.” And compelling. Not something he wanted to feel where she was concerned.
She sighed. “Why are you doing this? If you want to know something, just come out with it.”
He leaned forward, planted his hands on either side of his legs and stared at her. “Why did you give Shiloh away? How could you?”
Melinda leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms to keep them still. “What difference does it make when you got exactly what you wanted?”
When he didn’t answer, even after she’d given him plenty of time, she added, “I’ve never understood that question any more than I understand people who think it’s okay to ask why someone committed suicide.”
Jeremy flinched. She was right, of course. Her reasons were her own, to share or not share as she saw fit. Melinda made another fluttering motion with her hand. It was a gesture that connected her to Shiloh as powerfully as a DNA test. Every hand motion, every tilt of her head, every lopsided smile provided irrefutable proof of a connection.
“Shiloh has gone through a lot of rejection,” Jeremy said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to set her up to go through more. Whether it’s the lupus or hormones, she’s been an emotional mess for months now.”
Melinda changed the direction they’d been heading. “Isn’t it really rare to develop lupus so young?”
He nodded, grateful to be talking about something less personal. “She was in pretty bad shape by the time one of her doctors figured out what was going on.”
“How could you possibly think you could tell me Shiloh was sick and I would just pack up and leave?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time that—”
Instant, fierce anger hit her with the force of a broken bat. “How can you say something like that? I’ve never—”
“—it’s happened to Shiloh,” he added with studied patience.
Her anger disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. “I understand why this would be a bad time for you. I know what it’s like to take care of someone so sick you’re afraid to leave them alone to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom. If you think telling me that Shiloh has an incurable disease is going to help you win this argument and get rid of me, think again.”
“This isn’t working,” he reluctantly admitted. “It’s been a shitty day for both of us. I shouldn’t have come, but I thought you deserved more than a phone call.”
“I guess I should thank you for that much at least. You could have sent a text.”
He ignored her sarcasm. “I owe Shiloh an explanation.”
She stared at him. “No.”
“No?”
“I’m not leaving Santa Cruz without seeing her.”