Lilac Lane (Chesapeake Shores #14)(76)

He drew in a calming breath and took the few remaining steps that brought him into her line of sight. “Dee?”

“Mr. Laramie?”

He winced at the formality, the icy tone. “I’m your father, yes. I’d recognize you anywhere. You look exactly as your mother did at your age.”

“You’re not my father, not in any way that counts,” she said, though her voice faltered a bit as if the words and tone had been rehearsed, but didn’t fit comfortably now that she was face-to-face with him. Steadying herself, she added more forcefully, “Ashton Lane is the only father I’ve ever known.”

In an instant, Bryan hated this Ashton Lane, the man who’d taken his place in his daughter’s life. Railing against him, though, trying to claim his rightful place in her life, wouldn’t get them anywhere right now. He prayed for the wisdom to choose his words carefully.

“If that’s so, what brought you here?” Bryan asked, trying to hide the pain her words caused him. None of this was her fault. She’d been little more than a baby when her mother had taken her and left.

She clung to her glass of water with a death grip, her gaze on everything in the room except him. “Ash said I should find you, that I’d never be able to move on with my life until I understood how you could abandon us. My mom and me, I mean.”

Bryan’s temper stirred, but he managed to keep his voice even. “Is that what your mother told you, that I’d abandoned the two of you?”

“It’s what happened,” she said flatly. “I don’t remember you at all. You never sent a single birthday card or Christmas gift. You never paid support.” The heat in her voice climbed. “What kind of man does that? What kind of man simply walks away from his wife and child?”

There were years of pent-up emotion behind the accusations, emotions she probably didn’t even want to acknowledge, but it told Bryan quite a lot. Whether she wanted to admit that she’d thought about him or not, he’d been on her mind, if only as an elusive concept. And, with either erroneous information from her mother or from her own imagination, every scenario she’d imagined had left him as the bad guy.

Bryan recognized that the angry denials he wanted to utter would only escalate the situation. He took a moment to let his temper cool. Now that she’d said her piece, Deanna seemed suddenly deflated. Perhaps she’d been expecting outrage, after all.

“That’s not how it was,” he said quietly, pulling out a chair and sitting down to face her. He waited until she met his gaze. “If that’s what you were told, I’m sorry to say, it was a lie.”

“My mother didn’t lie,” she said, but the anger had gone out of her voice, leaving a faint question mark in its place.

“Not typically, no,” he agreed, because that much was true. The Melody he knew had always been brutally honest. “But in this case, she did,” he said evenly, holding her gaze. “And if you like, if you’ll keep an open mind, I can prove it.”

“How? With a bunch of lies of your own? Why would I ever believe you?”

“I think you want to,” he said, understanding that most of all she needed reassurance. After years of believing she’d been abandoned, how could she be anything except angry and cautious? “I think that’s really why you came, to hear my side of things. Isn’t that true?”

“I guess,” she said, a little of the belligerence fading.

“The reality is that you don’t know me at all. And I totally get that. I don’t expect you to believe something just because I say it’s true,” he assured her. “But I assume you’re not the kind of person who would dispute facts that you can see in black and white. You can look at my proof, then ask your mother if I’m the one who’s lying.”

Tears welled in her eyes then. “My mother is dead.”

The cold, hard truth blurted out like that shook Bryan. It felt as if it was the second time in his life he’d lost the same woman. This time, though, it came with an undeniable finality. Right now he couldn’t even think about what that might mean for his own future. He had to deal with the undeniable pain that truth was causing his daughter.

“I’m sorry, Dee. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Why would you be sorry? You walked out on her a long time ago. You never loved her.”

Proving that he’d searched for his wife and their baby girl wasn’t the same as trying to prove that his feelings had run deep and true. He had police reports, bills from private detectives that stated clearly just how long he’d looked for his family. Feelings couldn’t be so easily confirmed.

“Dee, what is it you really need to hear from me? What did you come here to learn? Or did you only come to hurl accusations, say all the things you’ve wanted to say to me over the years?”

More tears spilled down her cheeks at that. “I don’t know,” she admitted, her voice cracking. “Everybody kept telling me I needed to do this. They had a whole long list of reasons, some practical like getting a medical history, some emotional like making peace with my past. I’ve been told I have abandonment issues, though I don’t see how that can be since I don’t even remember you. And I have a dad, so it can’t be that I needed another one.”

“I can only imagine how confusing it must be,” he said, hearing the confusion in her voice, the longing to make sense of things. “I’ve wanted to find you for years because a piece of my heart was missing, but now that you’re here I can barely find the right words to say. You said the man you consider to be your father convinced you to come.”