An Invincible Summer (Wyndham Beach #1)(90)

“The important thing is now you know. But as soon as Jayne told me he’d contacted her, I should have tried harder to get in touch with you. You shouldn’t have had to find out the way you did.” He lowered himself to sit on a rock near her.

“Still, I said some things that . . . well, I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too. For everything. I know I can’t go back and change things, but I’ve been needing to apologize to you for years.”

“Brett, now’s not the time to—”

“There’s never been a time. So will you please listen, let me get this all off my chest? This isn’t what I came here to do—but things being the way they are right now, I don’t know if I’ll ever have this chance again.” Without waiting for her to reply, he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t pay more attention when you tried to tell me how much you hurt inside. It hurt me, too, but I wanted to be strong for you. So I tried to pretend it was all going to be okay. That we’d have other children and we’d go on to have a happy life together. I wanted that to be true. But it seemed no matter how hard I tried, you just got more and more sad as time went on. After a while, it was like there was you before the baby, and you after the baby. And being the jerk that I am, I tried to love the one and ignore the other. I want you to know how sorry I am for not trying harder to understand what you were going through. I’m sorry for not letting you know how much I was hurting, too.”

She sat still as a stone, listening to words she’d waited forty years to hear. When he stopped, she tried to process everything he’d said before nodding. “I get it. I do. Maybe you couldn’t deal with the fact I couldn’t get over it, couldn’t leave it in the past. I can understand that. What I can’t understand, what’s bothered me all these years, is that you wouldn’t see him. You wouldn’t look at him.” She fought a wave of tears. “He was so tiny and so beautiful, and you wouldn’t even walk down the hall to look at him.”

“But I did,” he said, his voice so low it was almost a whisper.

“What? When?”

“I went to the nursery the day you were leaving the hospital. I didn’t plan on it, but when I got off the elevator, the nursery was right there. I went up to the window, and I saw the little bed they had him in. I saw the name—Lloyd—on a white card trimmed in blue, and I remember thinking it should have said Crawford, because he was mine. The nurse was wrapping him up in a blanket, and she held him up. ‘Yours?’ she asked. I started to say yes, but then I noticed a couple standing close to the glass. Before I could answer, they both said, ‘Yes.’ They were so excited they were beaming.” Brett’s voice cracked. “It was the only time I let myself wonder if we were doing the right thing.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What difference would it have made? We were going to walk out of the hospital and leave him behind, and that’s what we did.”

“All this time, a part of me has hated you because I thought you were ignoring the fact he was born.”

“How the hell could I have ignored he was born? He was mine as much as he was yours.” He took off his ball cap and ran a restless hand through his hair, his cowlick sticking up stubbornly before disappearing again under the cap. “He was ours, and we were giving him away. I hadn’t wanted to see him because I knew some other guy was going to walk out of there with my son. Only then it would be his son. I thought if I didn’t see him it wouldn’t have been as hard to leave him. But that day, I knew it was my only chance, probably forever. So I stopped at the nursery window. I watched the nurse wrap him in that blanket, and I knew they were getting him ready to go home. But not with us.”

“All this time, I thought you didn’t care.”

“Of course I cared. How could I have not cared?”

“I wish you’d have communicated that a little better.”

“Maggie, for a long time, neither of us could talk about it. Then when we did, all you did was cry. I knew giving him away had broken your heart, and I knew it was my fault. I talked you into doing something you didn’t want to do.” He looked at her across the space separating them. “And I couldn’t undo it. I could never make it up to you. When you left me in Seattle, I knew it was what I deserved. I hadn’t fought for you when you needed me to, and I can never make that right.”

“It wasn’t just you. My parents . . . your father . . .”

“It shouldn’t have mattered. I should have stood up to them. Should have backed you. I never would have lost you if I’d been less of a coward and more of the man you needed me to be. After you left me, I didn’t run after you and beg you to come back, because I knew I didn’t deserve you.”

“Oh, Brett.”

“When I didn’t hear from you, I figured you just wanted to put it all behind you. And I thought I should give you that much. But something inside me never stopped hoping you’d come back. When I heard you’d gotten married, I thought, Okay, she’s found someone else to love. She’s moved on. I should, too.” He tried to smile. “Took me a little longer, and I have to say, I wasn’t as good as you were about getting it right.”

She raised her eyebrows, as if questioning him. Before she could respond, his phone rang. He took it from his belt, where it sat next to his holstered service pistol.