A Father's Promise (3 page)

Zach frowned, trying to keep up with his daughter’s unexpected bubbling enthusiasm. “A book?”

“Of pictures. Of Mommy.”

Zach saw his little girl’s eyes sparkling with an anticipation he hadn’t seen in months. “Do you think you would enjoy making a scrapbook of pictures of Mommy?”

Tricia nodded. “I don’t like having my pictures of her just in a box. If we put them in a book, then I can look at them better.” She jumped off his lap, clapping her hands in anticipation. “That could be so fun. And you could help me. We could do it together.”

Zach glanced at his work, then back at his daughter, who was smiling eagerly.

Maybe making a scrapbook would help her move on.

Making a quick decision, he suddenly shut off his computer. His father had told him repeatedly to ease back into work a bit at a time. And he’d moved here to make Tricia his priority. This could be a way to do it.

And it wouldn’t hurt to see Renee again.

Zach was surprised at how thoughts of Renee kept entering his mind. Since Molly’s death, he’d never had a problem keeping himself aloof from the flirtatious looks he’d get from some of the single mothers at Tricia’s dance class or music lessons. There was something about Renee, however, that made her linger in his mind.

As they stepped outside, Zach glanced up at the mountains surrounding the town, cradling the valley created by Hartley Creek. He felt a sense of peace and well-being he’d never really felt in Toronto.

A young couple passed them while walking their dog. They smiled in greeting, and Tricia took a moment to pet the dog, asking a few questions about him.

This was a good place to raise a child, he thought, thankful that he had listened to his father.

Once they reached the store, Tricia ran ahead, pushing the door open, her enthusiasm easing away any second thoughts Zach had about doing this.

“Hello,” she called out. “I’m back.”

No one responded, and Tricia walked farther inside, but Zach stayed back, feeling out of place amongst the rows of papers and stickers and ribbons.

A movement near the back of the store caught Zach’s attention, then he saw Renee step out from behind a row of shelving, carrying a stack of paper.

She wore her hair tied up in a loose ponytail tucked to one side, enhancing her heart-shaped face. Her blue jeans and white shirt gave her a country-girl look that was curiously appealing.

Renee looked up at Zach, her mouth curving in a wistful smile that quickened his heart.

Then, as Tricia came toward her, Renee stumbled to a full stop. Her mouth formed an O of surprise immediately followed by a look of dismay.

And the papers she held slipped out of her arms.

“Here, let me help you with that,” Tricia said, crouching down to help gather them up.

“It’s okay. I got it.” Renee’s voice held a surprisingly sharp tone as she snatched up the fallen papers.

“I’m really sorry,” Tricia was saying, obviously noting the reprimand in Renee’s voice, as well.

Zach hurried over to help, his defenses coming to the fore. Why was she so upset? It wasn’t Tricia’s fault.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” he said quietly, his voice holding a faint warning note as he helped. “She didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No. I know she didn’t,” Renee said. “I was just...” She tapped the stack together with trembling hands and slowly rose to her feet. “Sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to snap at you. Things have been busy and stressful here... Anyway, I’m sorry.”

“No. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have scared you like that,” Tricia said, clearly eager to make amends.

“What can we help you with?” Renee asked, quickly turning her attention back to Zach.

“Tricia wants to make a scrapbook with pictures of her mother.” Zach rested a protective hand on Tricia’s shoulder. “I understand this is the place to do that.”

“Of course,” Renee said. “I’m sure we could help you buy what you need.”

“But my daddy doesn’t know anything about making scrapbooks,” Tricia said, appealing to Renee. “I want you to help me make it.”

“If you don’t mind, that is,” Zach hastily added. “I would gladly pay for your time.” Tricia hadn’t been this eager about anything in so long, he was more than willing to do whatever it took to make her happy.

“I could come after school with Blythe,” Tricia chimed in, her voice eager in the face of Renee’s obvious reluctance. “So you won’t be babysitting me.”

“If it’s too much trouble, I’m sure we can figure something else out,” Zach added, giving Renee an out. “Who knows, maybe I could learn to make scrapbooks,” he said, forcing a grin for his daughter’s sake.

“But I want to do it
here,
” Tricia said, shooting her father a panicked glance. “In the store.”

“We would gladly help Tricia put a scrapbook together,” Renee’s mother said, rolling her wheelchair toward them. “No need to go somewhere else.”

“I’m not sure we’ll have the time,” Renee sputtered, her gaze flicking from Tricia to her mother. “You know we’re trying to sell the store.”

The sale was on hold until he released the lien, Zach knew. Selling the store wasn’t making them busy, so what was the real reason Renee seemed to be putting him and Tricia off?

“Of course we’ll have the time,” Brenda said, her voice holding a note of reprimand.

“But if it’s too much trouble...” Tricia began, obviously sensing the discord between Renee and her mother.

Renee put her hand to her lips. Then, just as Zach was regretting this spontaneous decision, she looked down at Tricia and gave her a tentative smile.

Then she crouched down to make eye contact with her.

“It’s
not
too much trouble. We can help you.” Her hand fluttered toward Tricia, but then withdrew, as if Renee couldn’t make up her mind what to do around his daughter. For a moment Zach caught a fleeting glimpse of pain and sorrow in her eyes that called to him. But as quickly as it appeared, it was gone, making him wonder if he had only imagined it. “Why don’t you come tomorrow, and we can start then. We were just closing up the store for the evening.”

Tricia looked up at her father as if for permission. “Can I come after school and can you come, too?”

For some reason, his daughter was fixated on the idea of having Renee help her, and Renee seemed as reluctant as her daughter was eager.

He would have to come with Tricia. Create a buffer between her and the reluctant Miss Albertson. Just as he frequently had to do with Molly.

“Sure, sweetie,” he said. “We can come tomorrow to start working on the scrapbook.”

“Can we come here on Saturday, too?” she asked. “Before we see the horses?”

Though he would have preferred to spend the entire day with Tricia, he just nodded. He sensed Tricia wasn’t going to let go of this until it was done.

“We have horses,” Tricia explained to Renee. “We keep them at Miss Arsenault’s place.”

“That’s pretty neat,” Renee said. “Do you ride?”

Tricia nodded enthusiastically. “My mommy took me all the time.” Tricia’s voice broke, and Zach saw Renee’s smile waver, as well.

“So I guess Tricia will see you tomorrow,” he said, filling in the awkward silence. “How long will it take to make the scrapbook?”

Renee shrugged. “It depends on how many pictures you want to include, and how fancy you want it to look.”

Zach thought of the large shoe box sitting in Tricia’s room and shrugged. “I’d like to keep it simple. I can only spend so much time on this project.”

Renee bit her lip, shuffling the papers she still held. “Speaking of time, I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything new on how long it will be before the lien is removed?”

Zach shook his head. “I can’t get hold of Freddy, and Benny still insists he paid Freddy in full.”

“And we can’t do anything about that?”

“Not until I contact Freddy or until the lien expires.”

“Which is?”

“Freddy has ninety days to prove his case.”

“Ninety days? That’s too long,” she said, panicking. “We have to be in Vancouver in six weeks, and I don’t know if Cathy will wait three months to purchase—” She pressed her fingertips to her forehead as if holding herself back from saying anything else. “Should I contact Freddy directly?” she asked. “Light a fire under him? I need this resolved soon.”

Zach felt pity for her predicament. His father had told him that Renee wanted to sell the store to pay for an experimental therapy that would, hopefully, help her mother to walk again. He couldn’t help but admire her sacrifice.

“No. Don’t worry about this. I’ll take care of it,” Zach said. “It will all work out.”

She nodded and gave him a careful smile that, in spite of all that had gone before, still created a flicker of attraction. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes.”

He held her gaze, suddenly unable to look away, and he saw a softening in her expression that quickened his heart.

You can’t get involved,
he reminded himself.
She’s leaving, and you’ve had enough difficult relationships in your life. You don’t need any more.

Chapter Three

T
he chirping of his cell phone broke into Zach’s contemplation of the will he had been working on. He glanced at the picture that showed up on the home screen of the phone. Tricia.

“Hey, Daddy, where are you?” Tricia asked in a singsong voice that he hadn’t heard for months. “You’re supposed to come to the store, remember?”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to meet you until four o’clock?”

“School closed early. So, can you come?”

“I suppose I can come now,” he said, shooting a glance at his desk and the files piled on it. Maybe he could go for a few moments then come back.

“Don’t forget the pictures.”

“I won’t.” He disconnected the call, then grabbed the box sitting on Tricia’s table. She had brought them there this morning before Blythe picked her up to take her to school. Then he stepped out of the office to tell Debbie where he was going just as his father came out of his own office carrying a mug.

“Where’s Debbie?” Zach asked.

“Went to the post office. You heading out to see a client?” his father asked, walking over to the coffee machine that Debbie kept going for his father and clients.

“Actually, I’m going to Renee Albertson’s scrapbook store,” Zach said, suddenly feeling like a kid caught sneaking out of class early. “I said I’d help Tricia with the scrapbook she’s doing.”

His father nodded, his eyes bright with pleasure. “That’s an excellent idea. Tricia needs something to keep her mind off her sorrow. This is the perfect solution.”

Zach was surprised at his father’s enthusiasm. “I’ll take work home tonight to get it done. I know it seems silly to take time off to work on some scrapbook...” He let the sentence hang, trying not to feel as if he was letting his father down.

Arlan waved off his objections. “I’ve told you several times that your main focus should be getting Tricia settled in. Helping her with this book at Renee’s store is a great idea.”

Zach felt a weight slip off his shoulders at his father’s understanding words. Back in Toronto, his work had taken precedence over everything: family life, personal life, faith life. There was no way any boss of his would have allowed him to leave work early. Especially to do something as frivolous as work on a scrapbook.

“You better go,” his dad said, pushing himself away from the table. “Don’t want to keep Re—I mean, Tricia, waiting.”

Zach shot his father a grin, then headed out the door and down the stairs.

When he stepped into Scrap Happy, he took a moment to get his bearings. An older woman with white, tightly curled hair, wearing a bright pink velour jogging suit, was contemplating a wall filled with shiny plastic packages. A young mother was pushing a buggy with a sleeping baby back and forth, putting sheets of patterned paper into a basket balanced on the hood of the baby’s buggy.

Then he heard Renee Albertson’s melodic voice, and he followed it to a room in the back.

Tricia sat at a table, her tongue clamped between her lips as she cut something out of a piece of pink paper. She glanced up as Zach came in, dropped her scissors and ran to his side.

“Daddy, you finally came,” she exclaimed, the unadulterated joy in her voice making him smile.

Then Renee looked up from the table, and as their eyes met, attraction arced between them.

“Look, Renee, my daddy brought the pictures.”

When Renee broke the connection and turned toward his daughter, Zach mentally shook his head to get his mind back to the present.

“That’s great. Now we can figure out what to do.” Renee gave Tricia a warm smile, and the concerns he’d felt about Tricia working with Renee eased.

“So, how do we start?” Zach asked, pulling up a chair to the table.

Tricia was fairly humming with excitement as she pulled open the box.

“The first thing to do is figure out what size album, but Tricia already picked one out while we were waiting.” Renee sat down across from Tricia and showed Zach a small book in Tricia’s favorite color, purple. “She also told me she wanted to put the pictures in chronological order, and we picked out some of the papers she wants to use.”

“You decided all that already?” Zach asked, surprised that Renee seemed so willing to talk to his daughter when she’d been so reticent around her yesterday. “You and Tricia?”

Renee nodded, her head bent as if she understood exactly what he was implying.

“I know we didn’t get off to the best start,” Renee said quietly, sorting through the brightly patterned papers in front of Tricia. “But I think things will work out well.”

She looked directly at him, and he held her candid gaze, then nodded. He immediately felt bad for his brusque question. Renee was trying, and he was being an overprotective father.

“Thanks for that,” he said. “I had a few concerns.”

“I understand. I would have, too, given...given my reaction.”

He felt the tension in his neck ease at her oblique confession. She was trying, and though he didn’t understand what it was about Tricia that made her feel so uptight, he had to accept her apology.

He smiled and was pleased to see her smile in return.

She really was pretty, he thought, suddenly unable to look away.

“This was me as a baby,” Tricia said suddenly, holding out a picture of Molly cuddling her. “I was kind of funny-looking.” She dropped that picture on the table and grabbed another one. “Here’s my first day of school.” She tossed that one aside, too, and grabbed another one as the picture fell to the floor. “This was when I went to dance class and Mommy got sick. Oh, and here’s one of my daddy when—”

Zach was about to tell Tricia to be careful, when Renee gently laid her hand on Tricia’s. “Why don’t we start at the beginning and sort the pictures out first. You can tell me about them as we go.”

Tricia frowned at Renee’s hand, but when she looked up at Renee, she nodded.

“We want to be careful with the pictures, don’t we?” Renee said. “So why don’t you pick up the picture you dropped.”

Tricia seemed unsure what to do. Then, just as Zach was about to reprimand her, Renee put her hand on Tricia’s shoulder. “It’s just right here,” she said, turning her to look at the pictures that had fallen.

Zach’s protective instincts rose up at the hurt look he saw on Tricia’s face from Renee’s reprimand. “She just wanted to show you the pictures,” he said quietly.

Renee cut him a quick glance, then held up a hand. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to take over your job.”

As soon as she spoke, Zach realized how he had sounded. “No. I’m sorry,” he said, slanting her a quick smile. “Just being a father.”

“That’s not a bad thing to be,” she returned, adding her own smile.

Their gazes held for a heartbeat longer than they should have, then Renee broke the connection first as she bent down to pick up one of the pictures Tricia had tossed on the floor.

She laid the picture down on a piece of white paper. “This would be a good one for the first page. You and your mom and dad leaving the hospital. Do you also have one of you and your mommy or daddy inside the hospital? After you were born? We could put that one with this picture.”

Tricia leaned over the photo, shaking her head. “I was adopted, so we don’t have lots of hospital pictures.”

Renee picked up the photo, her fingers trembling, her face suddenly pale. “Where was this one taken?” she choked out as she held up the photo of Molly, Zach and Tricia standing in front of the hospital.

Zach smiled at the picture as he took it from her. Sunshine had poured down from the sky that day, and Molly had been happier than she’d been in years. It’d been the most life-changing day of his life.

“It was taken here,” he said, gently tracing the bundled figure in Molly’s arms. “In Hartley Creek.”

He looked up at Renee, who had her hand on her chest, her face as white as the paper she had been holding seconds before.

“Where were you living at the time?” Her question came out in the faintest of whispers, her face twisted in an expression of near terror.

“I was working as a lawyer. In Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory.”

Renee glanced from the picture to Zach, to Tricia, then turned and suddenly ran from the room.

* * *

Renee stood in the back alley behind her store, her heart drumming in her chest as what Zach had just told her whirled through her mind.

The picture of Zach and his wife holding a newborn baby was taken in front of Hartley Creek Hospital.

The baby was Tricia.

And Tricia was eight.

Reality hit her like a truck.

Eight years ago Renee had been pregnant. Eight years ago she’d given birth to a baby girl in Hartley Creek Hospital.

When her boyfriend, Dwight, had found out she was pregnant, he’d broken up with her, leaving her alone to face her mother’s disappointment.

The only people who’d stood by Renee were her friends Evangeline and Mia.

Afraid and alone, though her mother had told her repeatedly that she would support her, Renee hadn’t seen her way clear to being a single mother.

So she’d visited Mr. Truscott, Zach’s father, and told him that she wanted him to facilitate a closed adoption. She didn’t want to go through Social Services. Didn’t want her mother to find out from any of the people she knew who worked there.

Renee thought she had covered her tracks. Thought she had done everything necessary to put her past behind her.

Now the baby she thought had been adopted by a couple living thousands of miles away in the Yukon, the baby she never thought she would ever see again, was sitting in her store. She was real. Sweet. Adorable.

Renee couldn’t breathe. Her lungs couldn’t pull in enough air.

She pressed her hand against her chest, trying to slow her heart down, wishing time would stop.

Dear Lord, how could this have happened?
How could her past have invaded her present so dramatically? Her daughter was supposed to remain safely in the past.

Not here in her present. Not so vividly alive and...here.

She closed her eyes, trying to pull in another breath. Trying to figure out how she was going to process this information.

Her throat closed as the ever-present sorrow raised its dark head. How was she supposed to keep working with Tricia now, knowing who she was?

“Renee? What’s wrong?” Zach stood in the doorway, concern etched on his features. “Are you okay?”

Reality washed over Renee.

Zach was her little girl’s father.

She looked at him as her thoughts tumbled around in her head. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I just... The pictures...”

She took another breath, the puzzlement on Zach’s face showing her how confused she sounded. But how to explain?

She struggled to gather her thoughts, pull herself back together. He had to know.

She was about to speak, when Tricia appeared behind him, peeking around her father, a frown pulling her delicate eyebrows together.

Renee couldn’t stop her mind flashing back to the memory of the first time she saw Tricia.

A tiny baby, red face, eyes scrunched closed, hair dark as ink. Too easily Renee remembered how she’d traced her daughter’s features and marveled at her delicate eyebrows. Let her miniature fingers curl around hers, the hours and hours of unrelenting labor pain washed away in that precious moment.

She wasn’t going to do it, Renee remembered thinking. She was going to keep the baby in spite of her mother lying in a coma in a hospital two hours away. In spite of how impossible it would be for her to raise this baby and take care of her mother on her own.

Then the nurse came, holding her arms out for the baby, and Renee, too drained to protest, relinquished her. Later, she had promised herself as she sank into an exhausted sleep. But there was no later. When she woke up, her baby was gone.

Regret and sorrow shivered like icy fingers down her back.

You couldn’t take care of her,
Renee reminded herself.
Mom was in another hospital. She needed you, too. She’d promised to help you take care of her, but that promise had been made before she became paralyzed.

She dragged her gaze away from Tricia, looking straight ahead at the range of mountains she saw rising over the tops of the buildings across the alley from hers.

They’d always been here. Solid. Protecting. She’d grown up with them surrounding her, played in their shadow, used the movement of the sun down their sides to determine when it was time to head home.

“I lift up mine eyes to the mountains.”

The words of the psalm slipped into her mind, soothing her. The Lord would help her deal with this new problem.

She pushed herself away from the brick wall, forced her stiff lips into a smile, then turned to face Zach and Tricia.

“I’m okay,” she said, her voice a reedy sound. “I was just feeling faint.”

Zach’s frown told her he didn’t believe her. “You were saying something about a picture?”

She ignored his question and walked past him and Tricia, heading to the back room of the scrapbook store, Tricia trotting along behind her. “Are we going to finish sorting the pictures?” Tricia asked.

How could she do this? How could she look at pictures of her baby in the arms of another woman?

Then her own mother appeared by the table, looking from her to Tricia, concern on her features, her hands resting on the arms of her wheelchair. Renee was reminded of the reason she had given up her baby in the first place. “Is everything okay? I saw you running outside.”

Renee kept her smile pasted on her face. “Everything is fine. I was just short of air.”

Her mother’s frown deepened. “Are you
sure
you’re okay?”

Renee wished everyone would stop peppering her with questions. All she wanted was to get through the next half hour without falling apart.

“I’m okay,” she said more sharply than she’d intended.

Thankfully, her mother turned her chair around to tend to another customer.

Renee swallowed, her heart still fluttering in her chest. She grabbed the edge of the table, concentrating on the pictures.

They’re just pictures,
she reminded herself.
Pictures of other people. Don’t think of them as pictures of your baby. Tricia belongs to Zach. She’s not a part of your life.