Lilac Lane (Chesapeake Shores #14)(51)

At home after Luke dropped her off, she poured two glasses of wine, turned off the lights in her kitchen and walked over to Bryan’s deck to wait. She knew he’d breathe a sigh of relief at finding her house dark and that he’d assume she was inside, asleep.

It was one in the morning when he finally pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. She imagined he was feeling relieved and fairly pleased with himself as he came around back and was about to step onto his own deck.

“Nice try,” she said calmly, then held out the wine. “You might want to take a sip of this before you start commenting on me invading your privacy. It might put you in a mellower mood.”

“Or you could go home without interrogating me,” he suggested, even as he took the glass. “That would work, too.”

Kiera laughed. “And let you get away with opening up a particularly complicated subject, then trying to sweep it right back under the rug?”

“That would be the kind way to handle what was a probably a misguided moment of candor on my part. I should never have said anything, Kiera. It’s old news.”

“Not that old. It obviously continues to trouble you years later. All those calls that have left you depressed and moody are tied in to what you told me earlier, aren’t they?”

He sighed and took a seat beside her. “I’ve never stopped searching,” he confirmed. “But now it’s time. There has been nothing but dead ends for years now. A sensible man would have given up.”

“Do you remember what I told you after that first call that left you so distraught?”

“That someday just making the effort would be what mattered?”

She smiled. “So you do listen to me on occasion?”

“I listen to every word you utter,” he said. “I just pick and choose what to ignore.”

“What a ringing endorsement of my wisdom,” she teased. “May I give you an example to explain what I mean?”

“The wine seems to be taking effect, so why not?”

“When I married Sean Malone all those years ago, as you may have guessed, it was against my parents’ wishes. It caused a huge rift, and I vowed never to speak to them again. As you also might have noticed, I have a stubborn streak. I would have kept to that vow, no matter how much I might have wanted to change things.”

She glanced over and saw that he was listening intently. “But through all those years,” she continued, “even when I remained stubbornly silent, my father kept reaching out. I knew he and my mother would be there, if I bent even a little and turned to them. Of course, I waited far too long and bent only when my mother was ill and dying, but my father had made it easier to take that step even then simply because he had never given up on me.”

She held Bryan’s gaze. “It will be the same someday for you and your daughter. If you can show her that you never gave up the search, that your love remained steady and constant, it will mean more to her than you can possibly imagine right now when you’re feeling as if all is lost.”

Bryan was quiet for so long, Kiera thought perhaps she hadn’t reached him after all, but then she caught the sheen of tears on his cheeks in the moonlight and felt her own eyes sting with unshed tears of her own. When he reached for her hand, she took his in a firm grip and held tight. She wondered how long it must have been since he’d had someone beside him, someone willing to share this aching pain so that he didn’t have to face it alone.

Though she couldn’t know the answer to that, she realized that it had been years since she’d given herself so unselfishly to someone else to help ease the person’s burden. Perhaps she was doing for him what Peter had done for her, providing shelter from an emotional storm that seemed to be unending.





Chapter 12



“What was she like, your daughter?”

Kiera’s softly spoken question cut through the silence of the night. If it had been up to Bryan, he would have sat quietly on his deck, letting the mesmerizing sound of the waves and the occasional chirp of some nocturnal bird be the only interruptions to the peace that had stolen over him since Kiera had forced him to think about all the years he’d lost with his child. He’d taken some comfort from her words and from her tight, reassuring grip on his hand.

Now it seemed, though, that she wanted to stir this particular pot some more. No surprise there, he thought, resigned to ripping a little more of the scab from the old wound and exposing it to light.

“I don’t remember much. She was practically a baby when they left and too many years have passed,” he said with the futile hope that it would be enough to stave off her curiosity. The truth, of course, was that he recalled every detail vividly, and Kiera clearly saw that.

“But there’s an image that’s stayed in your head—a picture or a memory—that’s kept you from giving up the search,” she insisted. “Tell me about that.”

So he did, slowly at first, reluctantly. He recalled the way Deanna had smelled of strawberries after splashing in the bubble baths she loved, the enchanting giggles that had made him laugh, even when there was no rhyme or reason for it, the weight of her in his arms, the feel of her breath on his cheek as she slept against his chest, trusting in him to keep her safe. That was the thing, there was so much trust between a young child and their parent, and he’d failed her.