The Wedding Dress (10 page)

He rammed his shoulder against the front door, and the lock gave on the first attempt. There were still shreds of wedding dress on the living room floor, but there was no sign of her. After a quick check of the upstairs, he tried calling her, but it went straight to voice mail.

He quickly dialed the number for the courthouse. “I need to know the time of the Farleigh versus Turner mediation,” he said to the harassed-sounding man who answered. “It was supposed to be scheduled for three p.m. today.”

“I’m afraid I can’t divulge that information, sir.”

Fortunately, Gareth thought he recognized the man’s gravelly voice. “Jerry? It’s Gareth. How have you been? I haven’t seen you in quite a while.”

“Gareth, it’s good to hear from you! I was out in New York visiting my grandkids for a while.” There was a pause while the man on the other end of the line checked the schedule. “Actually, the schedule has changed. It’s just about to begin.”

After Gareth promised to come by to look at pictures of Jerry’s grandkids, he ran back out to his car. He sped toward the courthouse, praying he could get there in time, not caring even the slightest bit about rules and laws as he nearly ran two red lights and swerved between lanes.

The only thing that mattered was Anne.

Five minutes later—a record time, considering Anne lived ten minutes away—Gareth jumped out of his car and rushed inside the building.

Relief swept over him when he saw Richard Wells’s new investigator standing by the door of the conference room the previous mediation had been held in.

Terrence stepped out into Gareth’s path as he got close, holding up a hand. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Into the mediation.”

All those years of chasing the bad guys down had made him pretty darn quick on his feet, and it wasn’t hard for him to get past Terrence and into the room.

Richard was there with Jasmine, and the mediator from before, Ms. Williams, was there too, but Gareth barely spared them a second glance. He only had eyes for Anne.

She looked…well, frankly, she looked more than a little hungover. Worse than that, she looked so
serious
, wearing a plain dark suit.

Yet despite all that, she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Still his angel.

And also clearly shocked to see him.

“Gareth? What are you doing here?”

Richard butted in before he could reply. “You have zero business being in this room. I fired you, remember?”

Gareth ignored the lawyer and said, “Anne, I have something I need you to see. It’s urgent.”

“He can’t just come in here like this, can he?” Jasmine asked. “We were just getting to the results of the DNA test.”

Gareth ignored Jasmine too as he took the envelope out of his pocket. “Please, Anne.”

She looked at the envelope and then back at him before saying, “The way I remember it, the last time you came to me with an envelope, it wasn’t such good news.”

“This one…” Gareth paused. “I don’t know if it’s better, but I think it will help.”

“Help?” Richard Wells’s face reddened with anger. “Ms. Williams, this is going too far. He can’t just introduce new evidence like this. He shouldn’t even be in here. He has no legal right—”

Anne stood up and asked the mediator, “Could we please have a recess?”

“We’re just about to get to the important part,” Jasmine insisted. “She can’t just walk out because this isn’t going well for her. Richard, I demand that you stop them!”

But Ms. Williams had clearly had enough. “Everybody be quiet right now!” She glared at Gareth. “You’ve barged into the middle of my mediation session, you’re in some kind of complex relationship with the parties involved, and you seem to be determined to introduce some kind of new evidence into the proceedings. Can I ask why you’re doing all this, when you know it might lead to you being thrown out of here by security?”

There was only one answer to that. An answer that he would happily tell the world.

“Because I love Anne Farleigh.”

“Oh, very nice,” Richard sneered. “Very sweet. We’re in the middle of a serious legal process, and you come barging in to declare your undying love. Honestly, what kind of—”

“Mr. Wells,” Ms. Williams said, her expression much softer now, “I don’t think it would hurt to have a short break at this point. Not when I think we could all do with some time to calm down. I’ll see you all back here in fifteen minutes.”

“Thank you,” Gareth said as he reached for Anne’s hand and pulled her out of the room and into a quiet corner.

“I…” Anne shook her head. “I want to believe what you just said in front of everyone, Gareth. I want to believe you so much, but people lie. They cheat. Things go so wrong.”

“They go right, too,” Gareth assured her. He gently cupped her chin with his hands so he could look directly into her eyes. “Can you honestly tell me that you don’t feel the same way?”

Anne shook her head. “I do love you. So much. But I’m just not sure love is enough anymore.” She paused and looked at the envelope in Gareth’s hand. “What’s so important that you had to burst into the middle of the mediation to give it to me?”

“It’s a letter,” Gareth said. “From Jasmine’s mother.”

Anne took a slight step back. “From…from
her
? I don’t understand. Why would you bring me something like that?”

“I wanted to try to find something that would win this case for you. Something that would make all this go away. I even broke into Richard Wells’s office to look for evidence.”

“You did that for me?” Anne said. “But that’s breaking the rules.”

“I know it is. And I didn’t find anything, because there was nothing to find. I want to keep you safe, Anne. I want to make you happy. But I finally realized I can’t just patch things up for you and pretend what’s true isn’t.” He held out the letter to her. “Jasmine is your half-sister, and nothing I can do will change that. But hopefully this will help make things a little better. Last night, I went to see Deirdre Turner. We had a long talk about Jasmine. About your father. About you and your mother. And she wrote this for you.”

Anne finally took the letter out of his hands, staring at the envelope with as much fear as he’d ever seen from her. Gareth thought back to the eager way she’d opened that first envelope he’d given to her at the start of all this; to the excitement she’d had at the thought of a stranger giving her something.

He wished that he could give her back that joy, but maybe that was the price of seeing the world the way it was.

Because he knew how differently she’d helped him to see it.

“Do you know what it says?” Anne asked.

“No,” Gareth replied. “But I do know what Deirdre told me. Read it, Anne. Trust me, I wouldn’t have brought this to you if I thought it would hurt you more.”

With a sharp motion, Anne ripped open the envelope, took out the letter folded inside, and started to read.

Chapter Eighteen

Dear Anne,
she read,
I know that I must be the last person you want to read a letter from. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for you, finding out about all this.

That was almost enough to make Anne stop reading. She didn’t want sympathy from Jasmine’s mother, of all people. Yet with Gareth looking at her expectantly, she kept going.

None of us can change what happened, and since I have a daughter I love as a result, I wouldn’t even if I could. But I can try to explain.

That was enough to catch Anne’s interest. She shut her eyes for a moment. There had been so many times in the last few days when nothing had seemed to make sense, and everything had seemed to be falling apart. Maybe an explanation would help.

You’re probably very angry with your father for having an affair. I’m not sure there’s anything I can say to make that right, but I am sorry for the pain it has brought you. Please remember that we were both a lot younger then, and your father was so terribly lonely when he was apart from your mother.

Anne had never seen that loneliness in her father, but she could remember it in her mother all too easily. She could remember the way her mother had tried to keep them both so busy while her father was gone, trying to fill up the days so there wouldn’t be the time to think about him. Yet it had never worked. Thinking back now, Anne could remember the pauses and the silences, the wistful looks when her mother had thought she wasn’t watching.

We only shared one night, and I know both of us regretted what we’d done soon after, but then I couldn’t regret it anymore, because he gave me Jasmine. Edward was a good man, and if he had a fault, it was that he tried to love too much. He loved your mother, he loved you, and he loved Jasmine too, even though she doesn’t see that right now.

Anne’s eyes stung with fresh tears, but she forced herself to keep going.

When we love people, we want to protect them, even when that turns out to be the wrong thing to do. Edward wanted to protect you and your mother from the pain of finding out about the mistake he’d made with me. Your mother may have wanted to do the same, because I suspect she knew, toward the end. I know that I wanted to protect my daughter when I kept her father’s identity from her.

As she read it, Anne knew that was true. Her mother
had
tried to protect her. Wouldn’t her father have tried to do the same and more?

I’m not asking for your forgiveness. I’m asking you to understand. As parents, as people, we try to do our best. We try to be perfect for the people we love, because we know better than anyone just how much they deserve that perfection. Yet we aren’t perfect. We make mistakes, and then we make more mistakes trying to protect the people we love from them. None of that changes how much we love the people we care about.

I won’t claim to have known Edward Farleigh the way your mother knew him, but I knew him enough to know that he did his best for the people he loved. And he loved you and your mother very, very much.

Deirdre Turner

Anne folded the letter up carefully.

Her father had done so much that was wrong. He’d betrayed her mother. He’d betrayed her. He’d had a whole other facet to his life that Anne had known nothing about.

Yet even as Anne let herself be angry, even as she finally faced the pain of accepting the truth about what her father had done, she also found another emotion pushing in alongside it.

Understanding.

Yes, she hated that her father had cheated on her mother. Of course, she hated that he’d had a daughter he’d never told them about. But for the first time in her life, Anne could see her mother and father for who they really were.

Not wrapped up in a fantasy she’d created about
true love.
Not tied to her image of them holding on to each other in the car crash, or how perfect they’d looked on their wedding day.

Just the two of them as wonderful people she loved, but who were, like anyone else, full of flaws and problems and mistakes.

It was so hard for her to see them like that. To think that her mother had known about her father’s affair…and that the two of them had simply tried to do their best to make things work going forward.

But was that what love truly was, Anne wondered, rather than the easy perfection she’d always dreamed about? And was it only when things went wrong or were difficult that two people
had
to love one another to keep going?

Only, she already knew the answer.

Because he was standing right in front of her.

She reached for Gareth and wrapped her arms around him. “Thank you for doing this for me.”

“I’d do anything for you.”

Ms. Williams poked her head around the meeting room door. “It’s time to come back inside.”

Anne went back in with Gareth beside her. Jasmine and Richard Wells were sitting together on the other side of the table with matching stern expressions. Yet when Anne looked at the other woman now, all she could see was the pain Jasmine must have felt growing up, thinking that her own father didn’t care enough about her to want anything to do with her.

On impulse, Anne pushed the letter across the table.

“What’s this?” Jasmine demanded, looking at Anne with suspicion.

“Something I think you should read.”

Richard Wells quickly interjected, “My client isn’t going to read anything until I have looked it over.”

But Anne wasn’t the least bit intimidated by the lawyer. “If Jasmine wants you to read it, you can, but she should read it first. Her mother wrote it.”

“My mother?”

Jasmine opened up the paper and started to read. Anne watched the swirl of conflicting emotions move across her pretty face as she read it.

Anne knew exactly how she felt. When she was done, Jasmine looked up.

“I need some time to think.” She spoke to Ms. Williams. “I need to talk to my mother. Could we postpone this?”

“Jasmine,” Richard said, “we have her right where we want her. What are you doing?”

“Thinking. And I’d like to postpone.”

“If that’s what everyone wants,” Ms. Williams said with a look toward Anne, who nodded.

“Let me see that,” Richard said, grabbing the letter and quickly reading through it. “This is nothing, Jasmine. Nothing.” He snarled at Gareth, “Where did you even get this? Approaching the client’s family like this is a flagrant breach of your nondisclosure agreement.”

“How, exactly?” Anne asked, before Gareth could.

“Well, he obviously used the address in the file—”

“As opposed to just looking it up?” Anne smiled across at him. “Deirdre’s address is easy to find, Mr. Wells.”

Richard Wells stood up, pointing a finger at Gareth. “I’ll find a way to make it stick, and if that doesn’t, there’s still the question of you breaking into my office. Did you think I wouldn’t find out about that?”

Anne put a hand on Gareth’s arm to let him know she had this. She had his back the way he’d always had hers.

“Gareth went to your office to meet with you. You weren’t there, so he left.”