definitely. Content… I really couldn’t say. Maybe.”
Nana Lina nodded, tapping the magazine roll against her knee slowly. “Well, considering that until today we thought she might be buried out in that vineyard, along with her mother and her sister, I guess that’s saying a lot.”
Colby cut his gaze to the picture window, even though the drapes were shut and there was nothing to see.
Nana Lina didn’t know, of course, that twelve years ago, Colby had hired a private investigator to make sure all three Watson women were safe and well.
All he’d wanted, really, was to know that Hayley was alive. He shouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life wondering if there might be any truth to the local rumors that three ghostly beauties went weeping through the Foggy Valley Vineyard on nights with a full moon.
Finding them had cost a lot of money—at least, it had seemed like a lot to a twenty-three-year-old still in his last year of law school. Obviously the women had been desperate to keep their location a secret, in case Ben decided to follow them and make good on his threat that, if Evelyn Watson didn’t live with him, she wouldn’t live at all.
Something Colby’s investigator did must have tipped Evelyn off, because when Colby got the information and tried to contact her a few weeks later, all three of them—Evelyn, Hayley and Genevieve—were gone. No notice at their little apartment or their jobs. No forwarding address.
He hadn’t tried again. He knew Hayley didn’t want to see him—not if she’d remained away, without so much as an email, for years. And if she didn’t want to see him, he wasn’t going to push himself back into her life.
Especially since the investigator had told him there was no sign of a child. Colby had tried to forget it—forget her. She’d probably been mistaken about the baby, done some wishful thinking and turned a late period into an imaginary pregnancy. He’d been just a few months shy of going to college, and she had been desperate at the thought of being left behind. It wouldn’t, he told himself, be the first time a clingy female had tried to will a baby into being, just to trap a man.
It made Colby cringe to remember the bullshit he’d try to sell himself.
“Did she seem surprised to see you?”
He looked up, and he saw Nana Lina’s gaze on him, sharp and probing.
“She didn’t show it, but of course she must have been. She kept it short and…” Sweet wasn’t really the right word, was it? “We exchanged only a very few words, and they weren’t particularly personal.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Let’s just say she doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve anymore.”
“Good.” His grandmother nodded, and he wondered what that tone was in her voice. It didn’t sound judgmental. It sounded…sad. Was it possible that she, like Colby, had found herself regretting what they did all those years ago? If she regretted what they’d said, what they’d done, she’d never showed it.
“Was she alone?”
Alone? For a minute, he could see Hayley standing there, in the wooded cemetery, with a storm building around her, and her dead father’s casket hovering just above the big rectangular hole. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone who looked more alone.
“Her mother wasn’t with her,” he said, deciding he’d just stick to the facts. “Neither was Genevieve.”
“No husband? No boyfriend?”
He shook his head. “No. No husband. No wedding ring. No—” He took a deep breath. “No family at all. At least, no one who had come to the cemetery with her.”
And he left it at that. But he knew that, as they sat there in silence, they were both thinking the same tangled thoughts.
No husband, no boyfriend.
And no sixteen-year-old total stranger, no nameless child with black hair and blue eyes who might, just might, have been Nana Lina’s unacknowledged great-grandson.
“THAT’S BEAUTIFUL, ELENA,” Hayley said, picking up the crayon drawing Roland’s granddaughter had made for her as they played and colored after dinner. “Is that me?”
Elena nodded somberly, and Hayley was glad she had interpreted it correctly. At four, the child’s art skills were still fairly primitive, but it seemed to be an illustration of a girl sleeping on the fragile tip-top branches of a tree. The stick figure, which stretched out rigidly across the branch, had bright yellow hair, and the tree’s leaves were made of circles so vigorously drawn they had left little green crayon shavings behind on the paper.
The four of them—Hayley, Elena, Roland and his wife, Miranda—had gathered in the front room of the little square adobe foreman’s house—well, what used to be the foreman’s house, back before her father started selling off the acreage. Now it was just Roland’s house.
Hayley smiled over at the serene-faced man, who sat in his straight-backed chair near the fireplace, watching quietly. “You must have made this tree story seem very romantic.”
“He made it seem a great deal too romantic,” Miranda said, with the rote sound of someone who had gone over this subject many times already. She had been gathering toys, and briskly tossed a bunny into a wicker basket. “When in fact climbing tall trees is quite dangerous, and if anyone I know ever tries it, she’ll be punished!”
Hayley glanced at Elena, whose eyes had grown large. “Your meemaw is right,” she said. “I wasn’t being smart. If I had fallen, I would have been hurt very badly.”
But could anyone have stopped her? She’d been about six when she fell in love with climbing the vineyard’s encircling trees. Maybe it was because, up high, she felt entirely disconnected from the misery inside her house. She imagined herself a fairy, with an acorn cap for a hat, bluebells for shoes and wings made of rainbows and wind. She was small enough to hide in the leafy branches, and sometimes she wouldn’t come down, even when she knew her mother was calling.
One day, when she was seven, her parents had a bigger fight than ever before, and she’d climbed higher than ever before. Fifteen feet up in the black oak tree, she fell asleep. According to Roland, the household was utter chaos as they looked for her—her mother frantic, her father furious, bellowing her name.
Roland was the one who had found her, sound asleep, luckily wedged between the huge trunk and the thick branch, her legs and arms dangling like pale pink tinsel. Though he had been nearly fifty, arthritic and tired from a long day in the vineyard, he’d climbed up and brought her down to safety.
The fight, she’d learned later, had been ignited by the news that her mother was unexpectedly pregnant again. After Genevieve was born, Hayley never climbed another tree. She still longed to escape, but one glimpse of the baby, and she knew she had to keep her feet on the ground, in case Genny needed her help.
She looked at Elena now, wondering if this little girl would also feel the need to find a private place, to pretend her life was different. Miranda had whispered earlier, as Hayley helped her prepare dinner, that Elena’s mother had run off a year ago, and probably wasn’t coming back.
It was hard for Hayley to comprehend that. She knew, of course, that not everyone wanted to be a mother. But this beautiful, fragile little girl…
