Returning Home (17 page)

“Help me stop her.” Unable to keep the anguish from his voice, Jeff dragged his gaze back to his sister’s face. “If she would just stay a few more days, I could figure this out. Maybe if I confront her with this secret, whatever it is, I can make her understand that nothing is horrible enough to come between us.”

Charlene averted her gaze.

“Charlene,” he groaned, thoroughly exasperated and feeling more desperate every moment. “Help me. I’ve got to stop her from leaving. I ... I can’t live without her.”

Charlene gave a nervous laugh. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Help me. Please?”

“How?”

“This secret. Did she tell you what it is?” Charlene’s gasp was nearly imperceptible, but that tiny sound told him what he needed to know. “She’s told you, hasn’t she?”

“Told me what?” her voice trembled.

Jeff knew he must be relen
tl
ess. It was either that or lose Hope forever. “Come on, Charlene. Help me out. I won’t—can’t—let Hope go. You know the secret. Tell me what it is.”

She turned her back to him and he heard a muffled sob. With a shock, he realized Charlene was crying.

“Don’t ask me to do this,” she whispered. “I can’t I promised Hope.”

“Hope loves me.”

The answer came back, a single word, strangled by tears. “Yes.”

He should have felt triumphant, or even relief, but Jeff
felt nothing but a ruthless urgency. Any minute now Hope could emerge from the guest bedroom, load up her car, and drive away. He had to stop her. Whatever this secret was, it couldn’t be that bad. Nothing could be bad enough to come between them.

“Tell me,” he urged again, keeping his voice low. “For my sake, for Hope’s sake, for old time’s sake, tell me what she’s hiding, Charlene. Help me heal her.”

He waited.

Charlene sniffled. “You’ll hate her.”

“I won’t. Nothing could make me do that.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure.”

Surprised, Jeff paused. Charlene’s voice was heavy with grief and doubt. “Tell me, Charlene. If you don’t, she’s going to leave. None of us will ever see her again.”

Silence, while Charlene thought about it. When she spoke again, her voice shaky, weak, and clouded with tears, he knew he had won.

“I’m only telling you this because you really do have a right to know.” Charlene sounded unutterably sad. “Hope will hate me for the rest of my life for this.”

He didn’t have time to worry about that now. Cast
ing a quick glance down the hall, towards the closed door, he sighed and said, “I won’t tell her you told me.”

“She’ll know.”

“No. I won’t tell her.”

“I want your word on that”

“You have it.” Again he raked his hand through his hair, forcing himself to calm his racing heart. “Now tell me.”

When Charlene began speaking, Jeff felt his knees buckle. A child—his and Hope’s. And the child had died. God, not this; he hadn’t been prepared for this. Somehow he stumbled to the nearest chair and finished listening to Charlene. He managed to croak out a thank you when she was through. Shoulders shaking, she went out the back
door, leaving him alone in the house with Hope.

When Hope came out of her bedroom, staggering under the weight of her two suitcases, he didn’t even get up. He couldn’t He sat there, immobile as Hope walked past him, refusing to look at her lest she see the pain stark in his eyes.

He couldn’t believe it of her, not this.

Without making a single move to stop her, without even saying goodbye, Jeff sat in the chair, figh
ti
ng with his rage and anguish, and let Hope drive away, out
of
his life.

“Jeff?”

With a shock, Jeff realized Charlene stood in front of his chair, hands on hips, a look of accusation in her red-rimmed eyes.

“Aren’t you going to go after her?”

Still feeling oddly disconnected, he shook his head. “No.” He pushed himself up out of the chair. “I’m going back to the ranch.”

Charlene’s mouth opened and closed without a sound. She knew him well enough to realize when his tone told her not to argue with him.

One last time, he looked across the room, as if he expected to find Hope still there. Unable to resist he moved past his sister, down the hall. He ran by the room he’d slept in as a boy and paused at the room beside it—the old guest bedroom. This was the room where he and Hope had made love for the first time.

Pushing open the door, he stopped and inhaled the elusive fragrance of her, aching. The bed had been neatly made and it seemed as if she might never have slept there. The room looked much the same as it had before she’d come back to Dalhart, yet it seemed sub
tl
y different somehow.

Inside, he closed the door. Without thinking, he found himself searching the room for some hint of her. Despite
himself, despite the quiet, rational part of him that knew he was a fool, Jeff struggled against the urge to go after her and bring her back. He struggled not to tell her that a life without her would be untenable, unimaginable and bleak.

He struggled not to tell her that he—

He wasn’t sure how he felt about her now that he knew what she had done.

Biting back a savage curse, he pushed the thought away, forcing himself to think of the child he’d never known, his own flesh and blood. He’d had a daughter that he would have loved, had he been given a chance to know her.

Hope’s betrayal staggered him. He left her room, knowing he could not stand another moment near anything that reminded him of her.

Numb and cold, he managed to give Charlene a quick hug before heading out the door. He would go home, back to the ranch.

He cursed softly, all alone in the cab of his old truck. The ranch reminded him of her, their old dreams and broken promises. Sentimental fool that he was, he’d bought the place because it fit so per
fectly
with her description of where she wanted to live and raise their children.

Children. He could hardly believe it. He’d had a child. He’d had a daughter he’d never known. And never would. Now he could begin to understand the quiet sadness in Hope’s eyes.

How could she do this to him? He couldn’t recon
cile the Hope he knew and loved with such a bitter, vengeful act. She knew how much he’d wanted chil
dren; they’d talked of nothing else when they made their naive plans for the future. She’d known how he felt and still saw fit to keep his daughter’s existence hidden from him.

It was all because of his one stupid mistake. It was all
because of one drunken, foolish act of betrayal.

This then, had been her revenge. She’d never let him explain, never let him apologize, never gave him a chance to tell her that it had meant nothing, that all he’d ever wanted was her. Losing Hope had felt like part of his heart had been cut out. Finding out she’d done this turned what was left to stone.

She’d kept his daughter from him. He didn’t even know the child’s name or whether she’d been dark or fair, lively or quiet He knew nothing about the child conceived in love and
born
in betrayal, nothing except the fact that she’d died.

He felt a stab of anguish. Leukemia, Charlene had said. Why hadn’t Hope contacted him when Alisha first got sick? Why had she denied him even that?

He supposed he would never know.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

The only thing he knew with certainty was that he’d better exorcise Hope Glidewell from his heart forever. Even he couldn’t love a woman who had wreaked such vengeance on an innocent child.

Two days went by. Two miserable, isolated days. Glad she didn’t have to work, Hope stayed in her apartment, going outside only to check the mail. She missed Jeff with an intensity that cut to her soul.

She hungered for the feel of his strong arms around her, the
gentle
way he touched her right before low
ering his mouth to hers. She missed the laughter that sparkled in his emerald eyes and the deep throaty sound of his voice.

As the following days crept by, Hope realized she had no choice. Trembling, she realized she would have to tell him the truth about Alisha and what she’d done. She needed to open the door to the barrier that stood between them and see if their love was strong enough to knock it down.

On the eighth day, she took pen and paper and began to write. As she set down the truth, everything that she had felt and done since she’d found out about Jeff and Heather, she felt a sense of relief.

Weeping softly, she told him about his daughter’s birth, about walking the floors night after night, try
ing to soothe her colic. She wrote about her first birthday and how Alisha had smashed her tiny fist into the cake, then smeared it all over her grinning face. She told of the shiny red tricycle Santa had brought for her second Christmas and what a happy, joyful child Alisha had been.

Then she wrote about the illness and how she’d noticed bruises on her daughter’s perfect, pale skin. She cried as she described the weight loss and the pain of the awful diagnosis. She told of how she’d wept in the dark, hunched under the blankets, afraid to let Alisha know how the dangerous illness—leuke
mia—terrified her. Finally, she wrote of the hope when Alisha responded well to the treatments and the overwhelming despair when the
little
girl relapsed.

Hope wrote about how often she’d been tempted to contact him and how many times she could have used his shoulder to cry on. She told of how each time she started to call, she couldn’t, knowing it was too late—far too late.

She had written him three letters—letters that she’d sealed but never sent. She still had them and enclosed them, unopened, for him to read and make his own judgment

Together, she and Alisha had learned to make every minute, every second, count.

Then, inevitably, the end had come. Far too quickly, far too slowly, Hope was forced to watch her beloved child waste away.

Alisha had one day closed her eyes and died.

Writing those words, seeing them stark against the cool white of the paper, Hope shuddered. She’d wanted to
die, too. Much of the time after Alisha’s death would be forever blank to her, a time of despair and grief so all-encompassing she’d needed to be sedated.

She’d gone to the coast to stay with her parents, taking a leave of absence from her teaching job.

For a long time, she’d taken no joy in life. Nothing her concerned parents did helped. She’d lost weight; the very act of eating had become a chore. She forgot to style her hair, forgot makeup, and spent long hours lying on the beach soaking up the sun. Sometimes she thought she was hoping to fall asleep there in the sand and never wake up.

There’d been a dream—she remembered it clearly, as if she’d actually lived it Alisha had come to her, wearing the wings of an angel with a shining gold halo as bright as her smile. It was Alisha as she’d been before the leukemia had robbed her of her strength. It was Alisha as she surely was now, in heaven.

And Alisha had looked at her mother and had not liked what she saw.

Waking, Hope had stumbled out of bed and found herself in front of a mirror. The hollow eyes of the gaunt cheeked woman she’d become seemed scarcely recognizable. Sometime in the darkest part of her grief, she’d chopped off her hair. She had taken the scissors to it herself and hacked relen
tl
essly until she had nothing left.

She’d looked, she thought, like a starving refugee just rescued from a life of deprivation.

And the tiny spark that remained of the Hope she’d been rebelled. Alisha wouldn’t have wanted this. Her cheerful
little
girl wouldn’t have liked seeing her mother this way.

Then, nearly eight months after her daughter’s death, Hope began to climb out of the abyss she had made.

Finally, she had begun to heal. There would always be sorrow, always an empty place and an ache for the
child she’d loved so much.

Chewing on the end of her pen, Hope sniffled and wiped at her face with a tissue. She was sorry, she wrote. So sorry. It was not enough, she knew, it could never be enough, but there it was.

Wishing she’d had enough nerve to tell Jeff to his face, Hope dropped a snapshot of Alisha inside and sealed up the envelope. She grabbed her purse and headed out the door to the post office. Best to get it in the mail before she lost her nerve.

No one knew his heart was breaking. No one knew because he kept it hidden, keeping busy so that he didn’t have time to think, time to ache, time to cry— time to miss Hope.

Despite what he knew she’d done, he missed her. The thought of never seeing her again, never touch
ing her silky skin or hearing her sweet laugh, ripped his heart out. Sometimes he wished he could lose his memory again, at least the part of it that remembered to love Hope.

He’d made a life here, a life without her. He’d thought he’d succeeded pretty well, until Hope had come back and helped him remember more than he ever wanted.