DOWNSTAIRS, SOPHIE PUT a hand to her mouth at the sight of Grace patiently waiting on the living-room rug, arms outstretched, a smile lighting her face.
Sophie lifted her up, held her tightly and rocked side to side, breathing in the sweet child scent of her. Tears slid down Sophie’s cheeks even as she tried to stop them.
“Don’t cry, Mama,” Grace said. “I’m back.”
Sophie glanced at Caleb then. He stood at the edge of the kitchen, arms crossed at his chest, looking as if he wished he could disappear. “I’ll be going now,” he said.
A dozen different emotions assaulted her, none of which she had the presence of mind to separate and identify right now. She could only imagine what it must have cost him to bring Grace back today. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
Their gazes held for a moment before he nodded and left the kitchen, the front door closing quietly behind him.
WITH HIS DEPARTURE, the silence was stark. Sophie stood beside Grace, one hand on her small shoulder. Let him go. Wouldn’t it be crazy to do anything else? But he had brought her daughter back.
She pressed a kiss to the top of Grace’s head, ran to the foyer and swung the door open wide. “Caleb! Wait!”
He’d already begun backing out of the driveway. She ran down the brick walkway and stopped at his lowered window. “Stay for dinner,” she said.
From the backseat, Noah stuck his head out and licked Sophie’s hand.
“I should be going,” Caleb said.
“Please.”
He stared at her, then shook his head. “Look, Sophie. Don’t make me out to be something I’m not. I brought Grace back because she obviously needed you. There’s nothing selfless about that.”
She considered the response, and then said, “I’m not trying to put a label on anything, Caleb. It’s just dinner.”
Another stretch of moments passed and his gaze held hers. He turned the truck off. She stepped back. He opened the door and got out.
“Noah’s invited, too,” she said.
Caleb lifted the seat. The dog barked and jumped out, tail wagging.
The three of them walked back to the house, Noah leading the way. And all Sophie could think was how incredible it was that a single day could hold such surprises.
SHE PULLED INGREDIENTS from the refrigerator for a quick stir-fry. Zucchini, yellow squash, a couple of onions, sweet red pepper. The rice was already boiling, and she poured a little olive oil in a pan to sauté the vegetables.
She glanced out the window, her head pounding. Only this morning—could it have been that recent?—her world had gone pitch black, as if all the lights had been flipped out. Now Caleb and Grace were in the backyard throwing a Frisbee for Lily and Noah. Grace pointed at the swing set and said something while Caleb listened with quiet concentration.
He would have been a good father.
The thought tripped into her consciousness, bringing another realization along with it. Only a man with a good heart would have done what he had done today.
He had brought Grace home because he thought this was where she needed to be.
Sophie had no idea what it meant. She didn’t want to think any further ahead than right now. Her daughter was home. And the man who had taken her away had brought her back.
THEY ATE AT THE KITCHEN table, Grace in her booster chair, Caleb at one end, Sophie at the other.
Caleb ate like a man who enjoyed his food. Sophie liked to cook, enjoyed experimenting with new dishes. His quietly issued compliments felt sincere, and it was nice to prepare something for someone who seemed to appreciate it so much.
Grace kept her gaze on Sophie for most of the meal, as if afraid she might disappear. When she yawned for the fifth time, Sophie finally stood and picked her up. Grace put her head on Sophie’s shoulder, her small body heavy with sleepiness. “Bedtime, I think,” Sophie said to Caleb. “Let me just take her upstairs.”
“I’ll go on home,” he said. “You’re probably tired, too.”
“Wait,” she said.
Several beats of silence ticked by before he nodded. “All right.”
In Grace’s room, Sophie changed her into pajamas, tucked the covers up around her and kissed her cheek.
“Mama, I won’t have to go away again, will I?” she asked, snuggling into the pillow with Blanky clutched under one arm.
“Let’s not think about any of that right now. Just sleep, baby, okay?”
But Grace didn’t answer. Her eyes were already closed.
Downstairs, Caleb had cleared the table, rinsed the plates and put them in the dishwasher. “You didn’t have to do that,” Sophie said halfway across the kitchen.
He shrugged. “Least I could do for a dinner like that.”
“Thank you,” she said. “How about some coffee?”
“Sounds good. I’ll check on those two dogs.”
He went out the back door. Her hand shook a little as she prepared the coffee, and she told herself it had to be her body’s reaction to a day of such intense highs and lows.
He was back in a couple of minutes. “Still playing. They’ve just about worn each other out.”
Sophie smiled. “I’m sure Lily’s loving it.”
“Noah, too. I think he’ll sleep for a week.”
“Coffee’s ready,” Sophie said, a sudden spike of awkwardness forcing her to focus on pouring them each a cup. “Take anything in yours?”
“Straight up.”
“Me, too.” She handed him the steaming cup.
“Thanks,” he said, gripping the sides with both hands.
She tipped her head toward the screened porch. “Drink it out there?”
He nodded and followed. Most of the backyard was visible from the porch. Lily and Noah lay stretched out nose to nose in the cool grass, eyes closed.
Caleb smiled his rare smile. “He used to get like that as a puppy. Play until he was completely out of gas and just totally collapse. Laney said—” He stopped, then took a sip of his coffee.
“Go on,” Sophie prompted softly.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Do you do that deliberately?”
“What?”
“Not talk about her.”
“Probably.”
“That seems like an injustice to her,” Sophie said. “Especially when she must have been a special person.”
Caleb kept his gaze on the yard, as if he was considering her words. Minutes passed.
When he spoke, his voice had the soft rasp of memory to it. “She used to say that the world would be a much happier place if people could feel the kind of joy for simple things that dogs do. If people showed their pleasure for seeing one another at the end of the day the way dogs do.”
Sophie let the words settle, then said, “I think she was right. People make happiness way too complicated.”
He tipped his head to one side, and she wasn’t sure if he agreed or not.
“Tell me about her,” Sophie said.
He turned his back to her and shoved his hands into his pockets. After a few moments, he began to talk, and this time it was as if his response were being pulled from him by something beyond his control. “She liked to read. Sometimes, she’d ride her horse out just far enough from the house to be away from the phone. The horse would graze, and she’d lose herself in a book for a couple of hours.
“She loved to swim, too. She was on the team in college. Her mama and daddy said the first time they ever put her in water, it was like she’d been born there. She just knew what to do.”
Sophie blinked. “That’s how Grace is.”
Caleb looked at her.
The silence held for a while before he said, “She was a good person, not a saint by any means. But she thought about other people, cared if she said something unintentionally hurtful, couldn’t rest until she’d set it right again. We started going out in high school. Neither of us ever dated anyone else. I knew the first time I saw her that she was the one.”
He hesitated and then said, “It feels good to talk about her. Sometimes I wish I could erase it all. Even the good because remembering it makes not having her so painful.”
Sophie reached out to touch his shoulder, the impulse immediate, if not well thought out. “You shouldn’t blame yourself for what happened, Caleb.”
Something she could only identify as anguish flickered across his face.
“It would be natural,” she went on, “to look for a way to put reason into something that makes no sense at all. But sometimes there is no reason.”
He was silent still, and Sophie began to wonder if she’d overstepped her bounds. Around them, darkness had settled, sounds carrying from neighboring yards. Children being called in for the night. Doors clicking closed. A cat voicing protest over invaded territory.
“I often wish the police hadn’t shot him.”
Caleb’s voice startled her a little, and it took a second for the words to penetrate. She started to say something, anything, then stopped, sensing that what he needed was someone to listen.
“Sometimes, I wish he were in prison so I could go and see him locked up, ask him if he misses his life. I wish I could see him paying for what he did.”
Bitterness colored the words, and Sophie thought what an awful burden that would be to carry the distance of a lifetime.
“What happened to him?” she asked quietly.
“He abducted another woman in South Carolina. Someone saw him shove her in the car and called the police. He held her hostage for most of a day before they took him out.”
The picture was an ugly one, and Sophie shied from sketching in too many details. It didn’t seem possible to connect this man with her daughter.
“When I look at Grace…she’s such a perfect child,” Caleb said, echoing her thoughts.
“I like to think that she got all of your wife’s goodness. That it was her gift to Grace.”
Caleb looked at her then, and even in the night shadows, she could see appreciation in his eyes. “I see so much of Laney in her.”
“I’m glad,” Sophie said. And she really was.
“Tell me about your family, Sophie.” The request was quiet and direct with what sounded like sincere interest.
“There really isn’t much to tell.”
“Your aunt and uncle are your closest relatives?”
She nodded, old hurts rising up to mingle with far more recent ones. “And not that close, as you saw in court,” she said, irony in her voice.
“Were they good to you when you were growing up?”
“I had a roof over my head,” she said, hearing the flatness in the words. “I suppose they felt obligated to take care of me when my parents and my sister died.”
“What happened to them?”
Caleb’s gaze was intent on her, so much so that she angled a shoulder away from him, afraid he would see too much. “Our house burned down one night. I was the only one who got out.”
He drew in an audible breath. “I’m sorry.”
“My aunt and uncle weren’t able to have children of their own. I wasn’t exactly what she wanted. Kind of like a consolation prize.”
Caleb put a hand on her shoulder. She jumped at the touch. He turned her to face him, looking into her eyes with an intensity that made her glance away. “They should have been grateful to have you, Sophie.”
“They took care of me,” she defended automatically as she always had. “I could have ended up in foster care or worse.”
She had never told any of her friends what she had just told Caleb for fear that it would make her a lesser person in their eyes. She had never even told her ex-husband everything, rather a glossed-over version of her childhood that didn’t encourage too many questions.
They stood there for a while, neither of them saying anything, or feeling compelled to do so. She remembered suddenly the attraction she’d felt to him the first time she’d seen him, before the truth had come to light. She wanted to touch him. Wished he’d reach for her, put his mouth to hers.
She stepped away then, too quickly, and bumped her coffee cup from the end table where she had set it earlier.
It toppled onto the stone floor of the porch and broke.
“Oh, no,” she said, dropping down to pick up the largest pieces.
“It didn’t cut you, did it?” Caleb asked.
“No,” she said.
He knelt beside her to help gather the rest of the shattered cup. “I think that’s all of it.”
The words clearly marked the moment for them to stand, move apart, dilute the sudden thickness of the air around them. But they stayed where they were, watching one another.
Most shocking was the look on Caleb’s face, a reflection of the same longing that Sophie felt.
“Sophie,” he said, his voice not sounding like his at all.
She couldn’t speak, could find no words to answer the questions she heard in her name.
“I should go home,” he said.
“It’s late,” she agreed, her gaze on her hands.
They both moved for the sliding door at the same time, creating an awkward two-step where they avoided eyes and said simultaneous excuse-mes.
In the kitchen, she put the broken cup in the trash, made a pretense of washing her hands at the sink just so she could keep her back to him.
His boots sounded on the floor behind her. He touched her shoulder. “Sophie?”
She turned to look at him, not trusting herself to speak.
“You would regret it,” he said.
“I would? Or you would?”
“Both of us, I suspect.” He pulled his hand back as if her skin had suddenly become burning hot. He went to the back door and called Noah. The dog bolted up the steps, Lily trotting in behind him and coming over to sit at Sophie’s feet.
“Thanks again for the dinner,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“Good night, Sophie.”
“Good night.”
For a long time after the front door clicked quietly closed, she stood at the kitchen sink, rubbing Lily’s soft head and trying to decide exactly what had just happened.