This time, he walked up to the front door and knocked.
A few beats later, Mercy answered. Gave him a quick once-over. He gave one right on back, which made her laugh out loud.
She leant in the doorway and said, “She’s not here.”
Rafe would have bet the farm on the fact she’d chosen those words deliberately. For they were the exact same words Mercy had used on him to let him know Sable had fled to the other side of the world.
“That so?” he said.
“Don’t panic, boy,” she said, even while he thought he’d hidden the brief flash of it rather well. “She went off into the bush with her old camera an hour ago. Like stepping back in time seeing her with that thing around her neck again.”
While Rafe breathed again. “What makes you think I’m not here to see you?”
A smile kicked at the corner of Mercy’s mouth. For they’d formed a grudging friendship over the years. The only two people in the world who understood what it meant to have a Sable-sized hole in their lives.
Mercy pushed the door wider and padded inside. And while he wasn’t sure he’d had enough uninterrupted sleep to take a Mercy conversation, he followed her inside.
“Water?” she called over her shoulder. “Tea? Tequila?”
It was eight in the morning. “Not for me. But you go right ahead.”
Mercy stopped in the kitchen, pulled up a stool, and said, “If you’re here to ask for my blessing to start something up with my daughter again you’re not getting it.”
He could have assured her that was far from the case, but found himself saying, “Don’t need your blessing, Mercy. Never did.”
“You sure about that? Didn’t take much encouragement for her to leave you the first time.”
Rafe’s fingers went to the bridge of his nose. “I’d be really careful, Mercy. She left to make you happy. Make sure she also knows you’re happy she’s back.”
Mercy’s expression twisted before she looked away. “Sooner she gets back out there, the better. She was living the dream, you know.”
“Not her dream.” For Rafe knew all about Sable’s dream. She’d spent the last few days drawing it out for him in painstaking detail.
Then Mercy surprised the heck out of him, her nostrils flaring before her face crumpled, her bottom lip quivering before she looked down at her hands. “I thought she was doing fine.”
There’s that word again.
Rafe leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’m sure she was. For a time. But from what I can gather, she’s been lost out there for some time. Did you not pick up on it? When you talked?”
“I wondered,” she said, then rallied in true Mercy fashion. “But life is a struggle.” Then she crumbled again. It was like an emotional roller coaster. “I never got the feeling that he—that man of hers—was bad to her. I figured he was merely ambivalent.”
“And that was okay with you?”
She looked up, her eyes intensely green, with none of her daughter’s softness, pinning him with a glare. “You were never ambivalent.”
Rafe stilled. Not sure if that was an accusation, or a compliment. “Thank you?”
“You want to know why she left you?”
If he’d seen it coming, he might have been able to steel himself. Janie called it his balaclava look. Instead, his entire body jolted.
“I saw you,” said Mercy. “In the jewellery store. You were looking at a diamond ring.”
Rafe held his breath as his memories whipped back through time. In the silence, wind set the tree branches outside scratching against the sunroom windows.
He could tell Mercy was waiting for him to play dumb. But doing what was expected had never been his way. “I’d saved for it for months. Years, really. I was going to give it to her on her eighteenth birthday.”
Mercy’s face worked. “My problem with you, Rafe Thorne, was never personal. My daughter was always too naïve. She needed grit. Resilience. She could never find that inside of her when she had you making things too easy for her.”
Sounded pretty personal to him.
“So I told her to go. Told her she’d never forgive herself if she didn’t. That I was prime example of what it felt like to live too small a life.”
Mercy’s background had always been a mystery. But he wasn’t going to bite now. This was about Sable. And about him. “Here’s the thing neither of you seemed to grasp—I’d never have held her back if I’d known about the prize. Even if it meant letting her go.”
Mercy’s mouth flickered.
“Not that it matters now,” said Rafe.
“Rubbish. Watching you together, last night, the look in her eyes, the look in yours—” She exhaled hard. “If you care for her at all, and I know that you do, let her go. Let her go for good.”
Rafe let Sable’s mother sling every charge she needed to sling. For he knew that Mercy’s hardness grew from a deep, instinctual love for her daughter. The kind he’d never had with his own parents. But even while he could have put her mind a little at ease with assurances, or a blood oath, the promise simply refused to come.
For she wasn’t entirely wrong. There was a significant connection between them. Whether it was chemical, or electrical, or some force he’d never understand, it was a connection that distance, time and heartache had not severed.
Deciding to act on it, or not, that was where free will came in. She’d chosen to leave. She’d chosen to return. While he was choosing to...bide his time till he’d cleared his head.
He rapped a knuckle on the edge of her bench and said, “I’m late. Have to go.” Then he turned and walked back down the hall.
“I won’t tell her you came by!” Mercy called.
Rafe waved in response. Fine with him. He wouldn’t know how to explain that conversation to Sable if he’d wanted to.
He’d go to Sydney, pick up the Pontiac, drive it to Melbourne. A good
