“You two became friends outside of the group?”
“More like, when the group got together, we’d gravitate toward each other. Rebecca wasn’t having the easiest time reacclimating.”
Caroline had asked for this, but she found it difficult to listen. Perhaps because he was starting to look genuinely wistful. “Sounds like a pattern,” she said coldly. “Like you always had a thing for the new girl.”
He blinked at her. “Nothing about Rebecca seemed lost, or wanting to fit in. She was the most self-possessed person I’ve ever met. On top of that, you had this sense that she was fleeting—that she was far too interesting to stay. I found it impossible not to be drawn in by her.” He shook his head. “I’m making it sound much more ordinary than it felt. But doesn’t all love?”
“It sounds selfish.”
Oddly, he smiled—as if ceding a point worth losing. “But doesn’t all love?” he repeated.
It was Caroline’s turn to merely blink. Where had this side of him been hiding? What else was in there? “So was the affair a onetime slip, or a long-term thing?”
“In between. We both knew it was wrong, but the idea of stopping was as unthinkable as what we’d already done. I’m ashamed to say it, but I was … reevaluating my choices. I’d barely been married a year.”
“So what changed your mind? Or made up your mind?”
“Hannah got pregnant.”
This was more than a recounting of his wake-up call. It was Caroline’s appearance in the story. Her mouth went dry. “I’m the only reason you stayed?”
He shook his head, adamant. “I never stopped loving Hannah the way I always had. Even at my most conflicted, I don’t think I’d have brought myself to leave her—she was so wrecked by her parents’ divorce that going through one herself, especially that fast, would have destroyed her. I’d have hated myself for it. I only wished, once I saw what love was capable of, that I could love her that way too. I promised myself to try, and that was the end of Rebecca.”
But Sela’s birthday was so close to hers. “Only Rebecca was pregnant too.”
“Evidently.” The pain in his eyes was real. “When I told her about Hannah and you, she removed herself, instantly—moved hundreds of miles away so fast it was hard to believe she hadn’t planned to all along. And maybe she had. She always talked about setting up in one of those little artisan towns.”
“Brevard.”
“Yes. And if she kept in touch with anyone here, I never heard about it.”
“When I was thinking about moving there with Keaton, what did you—I mean, did it come up again? With you? With Mom?”
“Rebecca has never come up again with me and Mom.”
“Their friendship just stopped? And you never asked why?”
“Asking why would have been what’s known as pressing my luck. Hannah was a newlywed and then a new mother. Rebecca was this free spirit letting her talent lead her somewhere totally different. At least, I thought it was totally different. I never pictured her changing diapers and warming bottles, the way we were.…” He cleared his throat. “It was conscionable that the friendship would grow apart, so that’s the story I told myself. When your move to Brevard was on the table, I do remember hoping Rebecca had moved on from there, and resisting the urge to look—but then it was off the table, so I put her out of my mind again, too.”
“What if you’d known about Sela? From the beginning, I mean?”
“You know how I feel about what-ifs.” A waste of time. His eyes clouded. “I was so sorry to read in that email that Rebecca died. I’d never allowed myself to so much as type her name into a search engine. But I did this week, at the hotel—and she’s left so much beauty behind. Paintings, murals, mixed-media collaborations. And a legacy of students—she’d been an adjunct at Brevard College. The world is a less colorful place without her, yet her color is still here. That brings me some peace.”
Brevard College. Not only the town Caroline had almost relocated to but the campus. The coincidence poked at her, but she shoved it aside.
“Her daughter is still here. Your daughter. How can you let Mom dictate whether you meet her?”
She didn’t know what had prompted Sela to reach out. Curiosity, duty? But the fact that she had seemed to indicate Sela would not as easily dismiss newfound knowledge of blood ties. What might those ties hold besides blood? Caroline was Sela’s half sibling. But their father? His title in respect to them both was whole.
“Sweetheart, I’m becoming an old man. I’m not a well man. My heart is a ticking clock, and I don’t know how much time is left on it. Your mom and I have spent this lifetime together, raised you, gone on to see your beautiful children born, and we’re proud of our legacy, if you could call it that. Up until that email, we were proud, damn it.” He pounded the table, his dreamy sadness turning to resistance, and Caroline jumped. “The last thing I do on this planet will not be disappointing my faithful wife. I’ve already broken her heart, and maybe Rebecca’s too, even Sela’s by default. If I can glue only one of those things back together, I choose Hannah.”
“If you’ve already decided, why aren’t you back home?”
“Among other things, I wanted to talk with you first. Anything you have left to ask, ask it now, because once I go back Hannah will not be open to us discussing this further.”
“Isn’t it cold to carry on like Sela isn’t out there?” She was disappointing him, not being a team player. But she barely even recognized this team anymore.
“Being your father is the best thing I’ve ever done. Certainly the only thing I haven’t screwed up.” She didn’t laugh. He leaned in. “It’s devastating to know I missed out on that with someone else. But letting her in now would hurt you too, if only because Mom would be…” He shook his head. “We all make hard choices to preserve the happiness of those we love.” He flipped open a noodle bowl and dropped in a spoon. “Rebecca too. If she’d wanted me to know, I’d have known. In that way, this course feels like respecting her wishes as well as Hannah’s.”
“But Sela reached out. Don’t you think she knows best what her mother wanted?”
He handed over her lukewarm bowl, and she dropped it back onto the table with a thud. “She didn’t reach out to me,” he said gently. “She reached out to you.”
“This is not exactly Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”
He lifted his hands in surrender. “I don’t mean to sound flippant. I know it puts you in a terrible position, and I’m sorry. I can’t change what’s happened. Even if I could…”
Had she ever before realized how much her father’s practical, even-keeled attitudes about relationships had influenced her own? Love at first sight nothing more than a fairy tale; what-ifs merely a waste of time; quiet compromise trumping open dialogue.
All based on lies.
He was unmistakably glad of the time he’d had with Rebecca. While Caroline agonized over the revelation, he’d spent the last few days nursing a decades-old thirst. One last time, he’d reopened that sealed-forever bottle and let himself drink in the things Rebecca had left behind. She was the reason he had not looked haggard on Caroline’s doorstep this morning. He was sorry, and yet he wasn’t.