wife, someone’s mother. Having a home and a family. But deep down, I never cared for Burke the way I should have, and I guess he knew it.”
She’d never loved Burke because she’d never stopped loving Tyler, and she was the kind of woman who mated for life.
“You must have had feelings for Burke,” her dad reasoned gently. “After all, you married him. You had Tess with him.”
“I guess in the beginning, I thought I’d fall in love with him in time. But it didn’t happen.” A tear slid down Lily’s cheek, and she didn’t bother to brush it away. “I shouldn’t have gone through with the wedding. He might be alive today if I hadn’t.”
“There’s no way of knowing that,” Hal told her. “Let yourself off the hook, Lily, if only because there’s no way you can change the past, and because Tess needs a happy mother, one who’s looking ahead, not backward.”
“I am happy,” she insisted, for the second time that evening.
Hal’s sigh was heavy with bittersweet amusement, and a certain degree of resignation. “No, you’re not,” he argued. “Your mother was all for the marriage, but I remember looking down into your face, just before I walked you up that church aisle and gave you away, and seeing something in your eyes that made me want to put a stop to the whole shindig, then and there. Tell all those Kenyons and their fancy friends and relations to eat, drink and be merry, but there wouldn’t be a ceremony.”
Hal Ryder had given his daughter away long before her wedding day, but that was beside the point. Still another old, dusty skeleton that shouldn’t be exhumed.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Lily asked softly. “To me, at least?”
Hal sighed again. “Because I didn’t have the right. You were a grown woman, with a college education and a good job. And because I’d already interfered in your life once before that.” Just when Lily would have asked what he’d meant by that last part, he stood, stretched, yawned. “I’m worn-out, Lily,” he confessed. “I need some rest.”
“I’ll get your pills,” Lily said, rising, too.
“Oh, yes,” Hal replied, with grim humor. “My pills. Let’s not forget those.”
In the kitchen, she opened the pharmacy bag, studied the labels on the little brown bottles and carefully counted out the appropriate doses while her father set the coffeepot for morning and locked the back door.
Lily raised an eyebrow at that. “People are locking their doors in Stillwater Springs these days?” she asked.
“I normally don’t,” Hal admitted. “But I’ve got you and Tess to think about now. And some things have been happening around here lately—”
He’d just made a speech, in the living room, about what a good place Stillwater Springs was to raise a child—specifically Tess. Knowing he was tired, Lily didn’t call him on the contradiction between his words and his actions.
I’ve got you and Tess to think about now.
Had he convinced himself they would be staying on in Stillwater Springs permanently, after he’d recovered enough to live on his own?
She set the handful of pills on a paper towel, and handed them to him, along with a glass of water. Watched as he forced down his medication.
“Good night, sweetheart,” he said, when he’d finished, and set his empty glass in the sink.
When was the last time he’d called her sweetheart?
The night Tyler handed her her heart in fragments, that was when. Had it really been that long?
Lily closed her eyes and waited until Hal had left the room. Until she heard his bedroom door close, just down the hall from the kitchen.
And then she cried, for little girls without fathers.
And for big ones, too.
CHAPTER FOUR
T HE FIFTEEN-YEAR GAP between their ages showed in Doreen’s haggard face in ways it hadn’t way back when. She looked thin in her casino-waitress uniform, and lines in her forehead were etched deep. She was developing jowls, and her mouth was hard, the lipstick too red and slightly off-center.
Still, her weary eyes softened a little when she recognized Tyler, standing in one of the casino’s several restaurants. Davie sat in a booth nearby, nursing a soda and pretending to read one of those glorified comic books that pass as a novel.
He doesn’t look much like me, Tyler thought, with distracted regret. But, then, he hadn’t looked much like Jake Creed, either. Secretly, he’d fantasized that his mother had been fooling around, conceived him with some lover, but he doubted his own fantasy. Poor Angie didn’t seem to have the strength to defy Jake that way. Or maybe she’d just loved her husband too much to cheat.
In the end, that love had destroyed her.
“Tyler,” Doreen said, almost breathing the name.
“Doreen,” Tyler replied, with a nod. Now that he was face-to-face with the woman who might have borne his child without bothering to let him know, all the things he’d planned to say, all the things he’d rehearsed on the way into town with Kit Carson riding shotgun, deserted him.
“I could take a break in half an hour,” she said.
Tyler merely nodded again. He’d left Kit Carson at Cassie’s to spare the dog a long wait in the Blazer, so he had time. He could cool his heels awhile.
Doreen hesitated for a few moments, looking from Tyler to Davie and back again. Then she sighed and turned to walk away, take another order for another plate of nachos, another mug of beer.
Everything about her, the way she moved, the way she spoke, said she was miserable. Hated her life, but didn’t know how to escape it.
Unlike Angela Creed. She’d found a way out, and devil take the grief she’d left behind.
Tyler approached Davie’s table.
“Mind if I join you?”
Davie didn’t look up. Just shrugged.
The cover of the graphic novel showed a woman being devoured by some hideous beast, and Davie seemed absorbed.
Tyler sat down across from Davie, signaled another waitress, ordered coffee. He liked a beer once in a while, but with Jake Creed for a father and a wild youth not that far behind him, a man tended to moderate his alcohol intake. He wondered briefly if Logan and Dylan took the same care not to overdo the booze.
“Good book?” he asked.
“What do you care?” Davie shot back.
“Do all those hooks and rings hurt?” Tyler persisted, frowning at the eyebrow piercings. The silver ring through Davie’s lower lip made him a little queasy, and after some of the bar brawls he’d been in, that was no small matter.
“Hurt when they
