Falling for the Single Dad (13 page)

“What do you mean ‘this time'?”

“You and me, Caroline, we're more alike than we're different. We feel things, some would say too deeply. We can't easily let loose of what we should let go of.”

She fingered a woven bracelet. “I don't think you know what I—”

He stilled her hand. “I know about waking up to each day darker than the last. When everything is an effort. It's too hard to think. To make a decision. To leave the house. To get out of bed. To go on breathing.”

She sucked in a breath.

“I'm talking about the kind of black depression that feels like nothing will ever get better. That
you
will never get better. When all you want is for the pain to stop any way you can arrange it. You're not alone in feeling this way. You're not the only one who's ever wished for oblivion.”

She lifted her chin. “Maybe not, but I'm the only one of the Duers who ever tried to make it happen.”

He took hold of her arm and tugged her to her feet. “I want to show you something.” He guided Caroline toward one of the older headstones in the Duer family plot.

Kate Upshur Duer. Gone home. May there she finally rest at peace.

“Your mother, Dad?”

He nodded. “She is why I understand better than you could ever know.”

“Reverend Parks said something once about her. But I'm afraid I'm the one who doesn't understand.”

“I never wanted to burden you girls with the hard legacy I've lived with all these years. Fact is, maybe I should've told you, and then you wouldn't have felt so alone.”

His chest rose and fell. “My father was what was commonly referred to in those days as a ne'er-do-well. He died incarcerated in prison after he stabbed a man to death over a woman in Norfolk.”

“I didn't know that. But I still don't see how—”

“Because what he did influenced what happened later with me and with your grandma Kate.”

Caroline touched his sleeve. “I'm sorry about your father, Dad.”

“The Shore was more isolated in those days. I was scared to death one day the story would leak across the bay over to the Eastern Shore.”

“Everybody still knows everybody else's business here, Dad.”

Her father huffed in what for him passed for a laugh. “I was more afraid I'd grow up to be like him. A selffulfilling prophecy is a phrase I heard you use once about something else. Which is exactly why I never told a soul, except your mother, Sawyer and now you.”

“Dad, you're nothing like that man.”

He gazed at her. “Sometimes, my darlin', you and I are too smart for our own good. Too smart and yet so dense.”

“I don't understand.”

“Despite my being a naturally despondent, mixed-up young waterman, your mother loved me anyway. She told me because of God in me, I didn't have to become my father. Nor my mother, either.”

He blew out a breath. “Though I've been less successful until recently with my mother's legacy...”

She studied the inscribed dates on her grandmother Duer's headstone. “She died when you were a teenager.”

“Thing is, Caroline, my mother was a naturally despondent person, too. She lived in a state of fear and shame over the actions my father chose. She coped as best she knew how, running the family inn, raising her children, working in her garden. Pouring her heart into her quilts. She battled her pride and her hopelessness. But in the end...” He glanced away.

“In the end?”

“In the end, Caroline, after several unsuccessful attempts, she took her own life.”

His words set off a seismic reaction in Caroline. A quivering from the marrow of her bones to her knees. Aftershocks of trembling. Her heart quaked.

Caroline wrapped her arms around herself. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the wind off the harbor raised chill bumps on her arms.

She gulped past the boulder lodged in her throat. “You're telling me...” Tried again to speak and failed.

“We—you and I—share a genetic history of chronic depression.” His blue-green eyes bored into hers. “If I'd come to terms with this sooner, gotten the help I needed sooner, perhaps I could've recognized the signs in you.” He held her hands in his. “Perhaps prevented what you tried to do to yourself. I'm the one who's so sorry, Caroline.”

Oh God, she was so cold. Why couldn't she stop shaking? What was wrong...?

“I see...” She moistened her lips with her tongue. Her gaze fastened on the silvery ribbon of water far away in the harbor.

“Do you see? Truly?” Her father squeezed her hand. “Neither of us has to become her. Neither of us has to make the choice she made.”

Caroline's dad took hold of her shoulders, forcing her to look him square in the eye. “Her mistake, I've come to believe, was she isolated herself instead of allowing her family, her God and the community to help her. She didn't have to die, Caroline. Neither do you or I.”

Spots swam before her eyes. “If my doctor had known about my grandmother...”

If her doctor had known about her grandmother, she might yet be hospitalized. She might have lost her ability to practice veterinary medicine. And if she'd known about this genetic curse she carried in her mind?

She would never have come home. She would never have allowed herself to love Izzie and Weston. Caroline shut her eyes. She would never have allowed them to love her.

“I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me, Caroline.”

Her eyes flew open.

“I love you, and I'm so glad you've come home to your family, who love you so much.”

She stared at her father. A man of few words from a generation who'd been trained to conceal more than they revealed of their truest selves. A heart-to-heart was not his style.

Only his deep love for her, she realized, had prompted him to verbalize something from his past so deeply personal and painful. And noting the strain on his face, she—so much like him as it turned out and in so many ways—understood what the last few moments had cost him.

With an effort, she pulled herself together. “Thank you, Daddy, for telling me the truth. But there's nothing to forgive.” Her hand touched his cheek. “I love you, too.”

Her father enfolded Caroline in his burly arms. Her nose pressed into his shirt, she inhaled the scents of her childhood—the briny tang of sea air and lingering aromas of coffee from the Sandpiper. Everything good, loving and safe in Caroline's life.

“I know you've talked with Reverend Parks. He's a good man.” Her father released her. “A man who rode the same dark waves we've struggled against. And an example of one who's overcome. He's been a good friend to me.”

She halfway expected the curtain of darkness to descend again at her father's revelations. Or at least, a shooting stab of pain from a stress-induced migraine. But instead something else came, maybe worse.

A seeping coldness. Shock, she guessed. Shutting down her mind. Hampering her limbs. Closing off her heart.

“Daughter?”

She jerked out of her reverie.

Her father frowned. “This doesn't have to change anything, Caroline. It can be a new beginning if we let it. A beginning to honesty and complete disclosure in our family. We'll call a family meeting. No more secrets. No more shame. Only light, and life, and healing.”

But Caroline knew better. As she'd known that long-ago day when she stood over her mother's grave. This legacy meant the beginning of the end. She wasn't cured. She wasn't ever going to be well. There'd be only short reprieves from the darkness.

Like a candle in the wind, the flame of her wellness flickered and died against the onslaught of the despair. The death knell to her dreams for a future with Weston and Izzie.

The end of hope.

Chapter Fourteen

“I
t's time.”

Standing a foot away from the flagging tape around the nest, Caroline wrinkled her nose at the telltale smell of eggs and wet sand.

Izzie's eyes widened. “Really?”

“See how the sand above the nest has caved a few inches?” Caroline pointed. “That's how we know it has begun.”

Izzie danced, her feet bare on the sand. “The babies are finally going to be born.”

“The hatchlings,” Caroline corrected. “And don't get too excited yet. This could be a two-day process.”

Izzie grabbed Weston around the waist and pulled him into her joy. “We're going to have babies.”

He laughed and extricated himself from the impromptu duet. “What do we need to do, Caroline?”

She gazed out over the churning waves. “We don't interfere, but we can watch if you want. Nature must take its own course, though it's liable to be a long vigil.”

Izzie tugged on his shirttail. “Can we, Daddy? Please?”

He shrugged. “Sure, why not? It's summer. No school.”

Izzie gyrated with glee. She froze. “I need to get my journal and my camera.” She spun on her heel and raced for the top of the dune.

He sighed. “Oh, for that kind of energy.”

“The hatchlings once free of their shells will wait until the sand cools in the early evening to emerge. No hurry.”

“You know Izzie. She'll be out here all day afraid she'll miss the party.” A crooked smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “No reason the humans can't party, too. Hot dogs on the grill for dinner? Six o'clock?”

Caroline smiled as she turned toward the wooden steps. “I'll be here.”

She didn't know how she was going to tell them about her plans. She couldn't stay here and allow Izzie to get more attached. Nor Weston, either, when she of all people knew there was no hope for a future together.

He followed her to her car. “We won't start the hatching without you.”

“There are things, despite our wishing, we cannot change, Weston.”

He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

She scanned the exterior of the cottage, memorizing each feature for the lonely days ahead. “Things we have to accept.” Her eyes swept skyward toward the lantern room at the top of the lighthouse. “Not everything is meant to be. No matter how hard we try.”

The egg hatching freed Caroline to leave without breaking her promise to Izzie. And yet the thought of driving away, out of their lives, opened a hollow place in Caroline's life. A gaping wound. But far better to rip the bandage off now than to infect their lives with her mental instability and scar Izzie and Weston forever.

She dragged her gaze from the lighthouse to his face.

A frown puckered his forehead. “I'll speak to Izzie. Make sure she understands not all of the hatchlings will survive. Prepare her.”

Sometimes the only way to make things better was to cut out the infection if healing were to occur. Someone else would become Izzie's mother. Weston—Caroline dug her fingernails into her palm—would find someone else to make him the perfect wife he deserved.

Caroline would never allow anyone to hurt them again. Least of all, her. But why did her life always have to be about leaving behind the people she loved?

“Tonight.” The blue in his eyes sparked. “You'd better prepare for s'mores. It may get messy.”

She swallowed and climbed behind the wheel. As far as her heart was concerned, too late. It already was.

* * *

“Watch how they go motionless to get their bearings,” Caroline whispered.

On his belly flat in the sand, Weston regretted the third s'more he'd downed after dinner. Not to mention the two hot dogs before that. He groaned.

“Shh...” Izzie hissed, lying prone on the other side of Caroline.

“How do they find the sea?” he whispered.

Just outside the stakes, they lay in wait for the momentous event. The sun had set in a fiery orange ball over the shimmery edge of the world. In the indigo gloaming of early evening, a sea breeze set the flagging tape aflutter. Like his heart every time he got close to the gorgeous turtle lady.

“A scientific mystery for years.” Caroline shifted. “We now understand they see the light above the ocean is brighter, lighter on the horizon.”

His breath ruffled the mahogany tendrils of hair curling around her ear. “So you're saying they're drawn toward the light.”

Caroline angled her head a fraction. “When you put it like that, yes.” She wasn't smiling, though, and she edged farther away, out of reach.

His eyebrows arched, but his focus changed to the hatchlings as they surged forward once more. Their visual GPS fixed on the ocean within seconds.

“Daddy!” Izzie breathed. “They're moving.”

Caroline's mouth pulled downward. “As a group.”

He wasn't sure what had happened between Caroline and her dad yesterday afternoon. But since then, she'd become remote, unreadable and too quiet.

Weston threw her what he hoped was an irresistible smile. “Coasties learn early it's about teamwork. True of life, too.”

But she kept her eyes trained on the hardy band of survivors trudging toward the open water.

He bumped her shoulder with his. “Just like us, they make it with a little help from their friends.”

She bit her lip but didn't respond to his attempt at playful banter.

His throat constricted. Had a fateful confrontation with her father severed any hope of reconciliation? His gaze was drawn to the sand as the hatchlings climbed over sticks and skirted clumps of seaweed on their march to the sea.

Izzie wriggled with excitement. “Amaaazing...”

For a moment, Caroline's face softened and lost some of its bleakness. She kissed the top of Izzie's head. Caroline pushed herself to a kneeling position.

A knot formed in his gut. Something was wrong. He rose more slowly.

Izzie scrambled to her feet. “How do they make it out alive?”

Caroline brushed the sand from her jeans. “One hatchling wiggles free of the shell and this triggers movement in his neighbors until more and more break free.”

Izzie shook the sand from her clothes like a dog shedding water. “How do they know which way is up?”

He and Caroline shielded their eyes from the flying globules of sand. He laughed. “Instinct.”

Caroline nodded. “Somehow they know. There's a digging frenzy. They flick, scrape and scratch at the walls of the nest. The sand ceiling above them collapses.”

She led the way toward the surf on the narrow path they'd staked to funnel the hatchlings to the sea. “The hatchlings rise like they're in an underground elevator to excavate the next layer of sand standing between them and freedom. Which is why it takes several days with plenty of stop-and-go.”

His eyes riveted on the baby sea turtles as a wave dragged the band of hatchlings backward and left them stranded on the sand. But a bigger wave followed and lifted them as one. With their flippers no longer touching sand, the survivors were caught by the undertow. The hatchlings were swept ten yards out to sea.

“They made it.” Caroline's stiff posture relaxed. “After a few days, the hatchlings will be far from shore and beyond the reach of beach predators.”

Izzie squared her shoulders. “We should launch the kayak, Daddy, and follow them to make sure they find Turtle Mama.”

Caroline cut her eyes around to him. “Uh, Izz. We explained that the other day.”

Izzie planted her hands on her hips. “Their mother wouldn't leave them behind on purpose. She's out there, waiting for them.” She padded into the surf as if she meant to follow.

“Not too far,” he called.

A silvery path of moonlight bathed the water from the shore to the horizon. Caroline closed her eyes as if basking in its glow. Or praying?

Silence roared between them. Awkward. Painful. Emptiness consumed him as realization struck.

The knot tightened in his stomach with a certainty of dread. “You're leaving again, aren't you?”

She winced and opened her eyes. “The pilot program ends—”

“You're leaving us?” His heart pounded. It couldn't be true.

“We never talked about—”

“I want you to stay.” Something tore inside his chest. “I love you, Caroline.”

She refused to meet his gaze. “It's not enough to want—”

“You mean I'm not enough for you to stay.” His voice roughened.

He looked up quickly for fear Izzie had overheard. But she played just out of earshot at the edge of the tide.

“If I stay I'll only hurt you both.”

His gut seized. “If you leave you're hurting us both.” Fear exploded in his heart. “We don't have to rush things. We agreed to take it slow. With your new job—”

“I'm turning down the job at the new marine center. Izzie wants a mother. You need someone reliable and steady to be your wife. I am neither of those things.”

He jutted his jaw. “Why do you always sell yourself short?”

“I'm a black hole that would suck the life out of you and Izzie, Weston.” She fixed her gaze on Izzie. “I can't handle that kind of responsibility for another human being when I can barely take care of myself. I won't do that to you or Izzie. I can't be what either of you needs.”

Anger flayed his nerve endings. “I love you. Izzie loves you. I've seen firsthand how much you love my daughter.” He took hold of her arm. “Are you standing here telling me after everything we've shared that you don't love me? 'Cause I don't believe it, Caroline. I don't believe it.”

She jerked free. “What I think I feel or don't feel doesn't matter. I'm telling you that you can't base a life on a future with me.”

“You say you don't want to hurt Izzie and me. You're already hurting Izzie and me. What I think you really want to do is to protect yourself from hurting.”

The wind blew strands of her hair across her mouth. And angry as he was, Weston wanted to smooth the tendrils out of her face. Hold her in his arms and never let her go.

“I'm not safe, Weston,” she whispered as if she read his thoughts. “I'll never be that wonderful woman you deserve.”

“Don't you get it, Caroline? There never has been or ever will be anything safe about love.”

He straightened to his full height and towered over her. “Are you telling me then you won't give us a chance? That you don't love me?”

She lifted her chin. “I don't love you, Weston.”

Her words pierced his heart. His mind drifted to the night on the Ferris wheel. Another starry evening at the lighthouse gallery. And even now her eyes said what her lips would not.

Weston shook his head. “I don't believe you.”

“Please...” She bit off a sob.

“Stop lying. To yourself and to me.”

His nostrils flared. “You think you can live your life safe if you don't love anyone or anything. That's a life I sure don't want to live. And if you were honest with yourself, you don't, either. But by the time you figure that out, I suspect it'll be too late. Too late for Izzie and me.”

“I'm so sorry, Wes.”

He crossed his arms across his chest. “You've gotten really good at saying that, Caroline. That and walking away.”

“I wish things were different.” Sadness flickered in her eyes. “I wish I was different.”

He worked to prevent his voice from cracking. “With or without you, I mean to make a life for her and me with the help of God.”

Raw fury seared his flesh. Fury at himself for trusting her. Fury at his own stupidity. For daring to dream.

“With you would be sweeter than I dare to imagine. But one way or the other—with or without you—I'm going to find my happily-ever-after.”

Caroline's lips trembled. “Which is as it should be.”

Anger was almost a relief. Keeping the pain at bay. “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow,” she whispered to the wind.

He blew air from between his lips. “Can't wait to get away from us, can you?”

“It's not you, Weston.” Her eyes pleaded for his understanding. “This is about me.”

But she didn't want his understanding. She wanted his absolution for wrecking their lives. He hardened his heart. “Unfortunately, everything about you has become all about me and Izzie, too, Caroline. My mistake.”

She swayed in the brisk breeze blowing off the ocean. “I told you from the beginning I couldn't offer anything more than friendship.”

He pursed his lips. “More fool, me.”

She flinched as if he'd struck her. “I'll call Izzie and say goodbye when I get to my apartment in Virginia Beach. I will always be her dear friend. I won't cut her out of my life—”

“That's no good for either of us. If you're not going to be a real, vital part of Izzie's life, it's better you don't contact her at all, ever again.”

Caroline inhaled sharply.

“She needs to move on with her life without you.”

And he somehow had to find a way to move on with his life without Caroline.

She reached for him. “But—”

He slid out of her reach. Her hand hung midair for a moment before she dropped it to her side. The look on her face...

Weston tightened his jaw. If he didn't get away from her this instant, he was going to lose control of his emotions. Give in to the grief of losing her.

He might not be enough for Caroline Duer, but he had enough pride left that he didn't want her to see how she'd broken his heart so completely.

“I think we've said about all we need to say to each other, Caroline. I think you should leave now. I'll explain to Izzie. Goodbye.”

He wheeled and strode toward Izzie.

Placing his hand on the back of Izzie's neck, he drew Izzie's attention to the outline of a ship on the ocean's horizon.