Chapter Twenty-Three

Doubt squirmed inside Isobel, nasty and gnarled. Unable to settle down to sleep, she padded barefoot into the kitchen before the first slivers of sunlight peeked over the horizon.

She left the overhead light switched off and used the nightlight on the microwave to navigate her way around as she started a pot of coffee brewing. In pantry, she rummaged about for the bottle of Irish Cream to add to her coffee. Liquor in hand, she turned back just as the dark silhouette of a figure moved across the living room.

“Sidney?”

The girl started and spun.

Isobel flipped off the closet light and crossed the kitchen. “Are you okay?”

Sidney’s gaze slid longingly to the front door and she gripped the backpack strap slung around her shoulder. “I was, um, leaving.”

“Where are you going?” Isobel lowered the glass bottle onto the island countertop.

Sidney stared down at her sneakers. “The first ferry starts boarding in a couple of hours.”

Isobel folded her arms over her stomach. “You’re leaving the island?”

“I’m, um, going to my aunt’s house. In Texas.”

“Does she know you’re coming?”

Sidney’s light brown hair shimmered when she nodded. “She bought my plane ticket.”

In a gentle voice, Isobel asked, “Does the baby’s father know you’re leaving?”

Sidney’s face flushed with her mortification. “It isn’t Finn’s.”

“I know. He told me.” Isobel worried her bottom lip. “But if Finn’s not the dad, who is?”

“Nobody.”

Isobel’s eyebrows shot up.

“I’m not pregnant.” The words erupted from Sidney. “I just told my dad that so he’d… do what he did.”

She dropped her arms heavily to her sides. “You wanted your dad to throw you out to get of the house?”

“Yes.”

“But… why?”

Huge eyes clamped onto Isobel’s face, pain-filled and darkened with more misery than Isobel had ever witnessed up close. Her stomach lurched.

With a curt nod, she gave Sidney’s thin arm a soft squeeze. “Okay. It’s okay. You’re not going back there. Your safe now.”

The coffeemaker beeped and both women jumped.

Isobel returned her gaze to Sidney. “Can I talk to your aunt before you go?”

“It’s, like, four in the morning where she is.”

Slipping past Sidney, Isobel snagged her purse off the hook by the door. “You can leave me her number.”

With one hand, she rummaged through the bag for her cell phone, then made Sidney recite the digits to her. “Do you have any money?”

“Some.”

“How much?”

“Three hundred and forty dollars.”

“Not bad,” Isobel muttered, pulling her checkbook from an interior pocket. “More than I had.”

“Um… what?”

“Nothing.” Isobel flipped to a blank check and started writing.

When she’d finished, the amount matched the funds remaining from Shea’s loan, which meant she would have to put her business plans temporarily on hold. She wasn’t even a little sad about that fact when she ripped the slip of paper from checkbook and held it out to Sidney.

“When you get to Texas, I want you to open a bank account and put this in it.”

Sidney recoiled, as though Isobel held out an invitation to drink poison. “I don’t want your money.”

“I insist.”

“Th-that’s not why I came here.”

Isobel tilted her head to one side. “Why did you come here?”

“I didn’t know where else to go. I’ve been planning to leave for a while, but then I-I had to get out a little sooner than I expected and I-I knew Finn would help me.” Sidney’s voice and eyes softened when she said Finn’s name. “He’s always been so nice to me.”

Isobel’s heart swelled pride, constricting her chest. She jiggled the check. “Just take it.”

“I don’t want it.”

Dropping her chin, Isobel leveled Sidney with the look all three of her kids immediately responded to. “It’s my fee for coming here tonight.”

Sidney twisted around and careened toward the door. “I’ll go.”

Isobel slid into her path. “You don’t even have to spend it. Think of it as insurance. It’s there if you need it. If you don’t spend it, you can send it back to me. Maybe include a note to let me know you’re okay.” A sudden surge of emotion piled in her throat. “Take it, please. For my sake, if not yours.”

“Why are you being so nice to me?” Sidney’s voice cracked with a hitch of desperation.

Isobel peered into the girl’s youthful face and a pang struck her beneath the breastbone to realize how young she was. “I’ve been where you are. I know how scared you must be.”

Sidney ducked her chin. “I’m not scared.”

“Then you’re a lot braver than me. I didn’t have the courage to leave. I waited until my dad tossed me out like garbage.

Sidney swallowed, the sound an audible gulp. Then a silent sob shook her shoulders, and Isobel wrapped her arms around Sidney’s small body. More sobs escaped, and Isobel wanted to weep right along with her. She was only a child. The same age as Isobel when her own father had kicked her out of the house.

All these years, she’d carried the shame of what had happened. But the shame wasn’t hers. It belonged to her dad. If he could be so cruel to his own daughter, a frightened child, then he was the one lacking. Not her. She hadn’t done anything wrong, except love too hard, too soon.

“It will get better,” Isobel promised. “Soon it won’t hurt so much.”

When that storm kicked up off the lake and blew across the island, the fear and the shame broke her. Exhausted, hungry, the terror had overcome her and she’d laid her head down on the ground. She didn’t care if the storm killed her or if she got sick. At least death would take her away from the nightmare.

“Eventually the storm passes,” she murmured into the smooth mass of Sidney’s long hair.

In her case, the storm had ceased the moment his sneakers appeared in her line of sight. After that, she knew only warmth and love and the soothing comfort of his raspy voice as he talked to her, jabbering away for hours while she slept and cried in the passenger’s seat of his car.

Sidney lifted her head and wiped her eyes with a shaking hand. “Please tell Finn how sorry I am, and how much I appreciate what he’s done for me.”

“You don’t want to tell him yourself?”

Sidney shook her head.

“Give me a minute to grab my shoes and keys?” Isobel moved toward the hallway. “I’ll drop you off at the ferry.”

Protests fell from Sidney’s lips. “You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s another one of my fees,” Isobel called over her shoulder as she darted for the hallway.

She slipped into the bathroom and shut the door, then quickly pulled up the number for Sidney’s aunt. The woman’s groggy voice grew instantly alert when Isobel explained who she was and why she was calling. Though they talked briefly, Isobel learned Sidney’s aunt, Becca, was eager for her niece’s arrival and had indeed booked her airfare. By the time Isobel disconnected the call, she felt a little better about letting Sidney go.

Thirty minutes later, Isobel waited while Sidney boarded the ferry and soon after, the boat cast off. A bright orange sun peeped over the horizon when she returned home.

She let herself in through the back and slammed into a thick wall of tension that halted her steps. At the kitchen island, Shea perched on a barstool, a cup of coffee in one hand.

Slowly, he set down his cup. “Where’ve you been?”

She opened her mouth to tell him all that had transpired while he slept, but the thundering of footsteps cut off her reply.

Finn burst into the kitchen, his chest heaving from his dash to reach them. “Sidney’s gone.”

Isobel laid a hand on his arm. “She left, mijo.”

Finn jerked away from her touch. “What?”

“I just dropped her off at the ferry,” she said, setting her purse and car keys on the island counter.

“You let her go?” Fiery anger contorted Finn’s attractive features. “Why didn’t you stop her?”

Isobel gaped stupidly at him. Not only had she never witnessed so much animation in her son, but in that moment he so strongly resembled Shea that a thunderbolt of shock jolted her.

“She didn’t want to stay.” Isobel licked her parched lips. “Finn, she lied about the baby. She’s not pregnant.”

With a confused shake of his head, he snarled a hand through his hair. “Where did she go?”

“To her aunt’s in Texas.” Isobel tugged open her purse and tunneled through the oversized handbag. “I have the phone number.”

Hands on his hips, Finn stared at the floorboards while she fumbled for her phone. Pulling up the call log, she scribbled the number on a piece of scrap paper and thrust it at him.

His gaze flickered to the note, but he didn’t reach for it. He stared so long and so hard at that tiny slip of paper in her hand, she felt it warm from the heat of his gaze.

“Keep it,” he said finally. “She obviously didn’t want me to find her.”

Then he crossed to the refrigerator and disappeared behind the open door.

Isobel glanced at Shea, who studied the refrigerator door with a concentrated scowl.

Finn banged around inside the fridge. He cursed.

She tucked Sidney’s number inside her purse. “You okay?”

More noises tumbled across the kitchen, but there was no reply.

“Finn?”

At Shea’s stern tone, the door slammed shut. “No, I’m not okay. I’m pissed off. She should’ve talked to me before she left.”

“So call her,” Shea said.

A snarl curled Finn’s upper lip, but a wounded light glittered in his eyes.

Her heart squeezed. “I know it hurts right now, but you’re a little relieved, too, right?”

“Relieved?”

It could’ve been Shea, the man she married eighteen years ago, ensnaring her in his defiant glare.

“Sidney is s-safe.” Her nerves stretched taut, she stammered. “She isn’t pregnant, and you aren’t marrying a girl you hardly know. You couldn’t have wanted that for yourself.”

Finn’s expression turned scornful. “Mom, you know me. Do you honestly believe I’d ask a woman to marry me if I didn’t want to marry her?”

Shock stole her voice.

“The answer is no, Mom.” Then, his shoulders slumped, he retreated down the hall.

Her gaze swung to her husband. Belatedly, words dropped from her lips. “I—I—what was that?”

Shea sipped his coffee. “I tried to tell you.”

“You tried to tell me what?”

Brilliant blue eyes pierced her. “Not every man who asks a woman to marry him is doing so because he thinks he has no other choice.”

“That’s what you still think, isn’t it? That I married you out of some outdated sense of duty or obligation?”

His words plucked a chord of truth in her heart and she ducked her chin to hide the fact that’s exactly what she believed. Though it was perfectly understandable, given the circumstances of their marriage, that she might’ve wondered, but icy fear tightened her throat, strangling the admission.

If she confessed the truth, he’d be mad, and they’d fight. Again. She was so tired of fighting, but more terrifying than that, what if this fight was the last fight? What if, like all the other fights, it fixed nothing, and they had to face the fact that their marriage couldn’t be saved? What if the last fight, the last heartbreak, was the last light to be turned out on them?

Slowly, he pushed to his feet and at the sink, set his coffee mug in the basin.

When he turned back around, his expression had changed. “I’ve got to go talk to my brothers.”

Her hand flitted over her hair, touching the sagging ponytail and uncombed tendrils. “Let me go change—”

“No.”

She froze, and her hand fell uselessly to her side.

His gaze touched hers briefly, then dropped away. “You look exhausted. You should get some sleep before we meet with the photographer later.”

Inwardly, she groaned. In the chaos of the night, the photoshoot had fled her mind. She hadn’t finished the last dress, but truthfully it didn’t seem all that important to her now. Certainly not as important as being with Shea when he told his brothers about Aiden.

She opened her mouth to tell him exactly that, but he moved close and dropped a quick kiss on her forehead. “Get some sleep. I’ll meet you later at the loft.”

Then he slipped quietly through the back door without her.

She wanted to scream at him to stop. To wait for her. She wanted to demand he tell her why he no longer wanted her to go with him.

But that question had been answered by the devastation in his eyes. Devastation that she had somehow triggered.