As if it were yesterday, she could feel the caress of her grandmother’s hand, smoothing over her head. “You have the most important job of all,” Gram used to say to her when she was tiny. “You make me remember why I bake.”
A lovely memory, yes. And Jenny admitted that she was blessed with an abundance of them. She reminded herself that she had a lot of blessings—including the entire town of Avalon. She loved this town and she loved the bakery, yet there was something, some unfulfilled yearning that haunted her. She had gone from school to the bakery to sole ownership and, all right, it wasn’t a bad life, but maybe, just maybe she should grab this chance to walk away, to live a different life.
Now? The question nagged at her. Since the fire, she was finally feeling a connection with Rourke. Maybe that was the biggest reason of all to turn tail and run. She took another sip of wine, hoping the others wouldn’t notice the emotion that seemed to emanate from her. And then she felt it—a familiar panic, chugging toward her like a locomotive gathering steam. God, not now, she thought. Please, not now.
Okay, she told herself. Okay. She could simply excuse herself, go to the restroom and take a pill. No problem. As she sat there, expressionless, struggling to hide her distress, a curious thought pushed up through the quagmire of anxiety. She had not suffered a panic attack while staying with Rourke.
Coincidence? Would this have happened anyway, or did it have something to do with the way she felt when she was with Rourke McKnight?
Greg, Olivia and Connor cleared the table and went to do the dishes, leaving Jenny with Philip and Laura.
“Talk to me about Mariska,” Philip said suddenly to Laura. “I want to understand.”
Jenny leaned forward, intrigued. He seemed to be making a point of asking with Jenny present. Laura seemed to take the blunt question in stride. “She spent a lot of time away,” she said, glancing from Philip to Jenny. “And then after she moved back here with Jenny, she still went out a lot. Her parents were more than happy to look after the baby.” Laura beamed at Jenny. “You were everybody’s angel.”
Jenny tried to read between the lines. Going out a lot meant partying, probably. She knew from things her grandparents had said that her mother didn’t always come home at night. A weekend trip was likely to stretch out to a week, sometimes two. That was why no one raised an alarm when she failed to come home one night. Of course, no one could know that first night was the start of forever.
“The Majeskys were wonderful,” Laura said. “They gave Jenny all the love in the world. A happy child is a powerful thing. It’s impossible to be sad when you have a laughing little girl in your lap.”
Jenny tried to hold a smile in place. Yes, she’d been a happy child, but she was also a girl who, by the age of four, was accustomed to the fact that her mother had a habit of taking off.
“When did people realize she wasn’t coming back?” Philip asked.
“I couldn’t say exactly. Might have been a month, six weeks. I remember Leo telling a sheriff’s deputy who stopped in for coffee and pastry every morning that she usually called but that the calls had stopped. Eventually, the concern became a formal report, which in turn grew into an investigation. However, we were told from the very start that when a grown woman with a history of lengthy, unexplained absences took off, chances were she wanted it that way.”
Clearly, Jenny’s mother hadn’t wanted to be found and brought back to the small town where she’d never been happy.
The anxiety thrummed in her chest, and she excused herself to go to the bathroom. She swallowed half a pill, dry. When she returned to the dining room, she paused in the hallway outside the door. Laura and Philip were leaning across the table, talking intently and unaware of her. She sensed an intensity in their voices that made her pause, loath to intrude.
“…didn’t know if I’d see you again after that summer,” Laura was saying. “You visited Camp Kioga with your new wife and, a few years after that, your little daughter.”
“But you knew, Laura.” He drained his wineglass. “My God, you knew.”
“There were things we didn’t talk about, ever. You were one of them.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“It wasn’t my place to say anything.”
“You were the only one who could have spoken up for Jenny, and you didn’t say a word.”
“I was protecting that child,” she snapped.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Think about it, Philip. She was a supremely happy little girl who was being raised in a world of love and security. I couldn’t imagine what might happen if some strange man suddenly came into her life and started calling himself daddy. For all I knew, you had enough Bellamy money and power to take her away from us.”
“From us?”
“Her grandparents,” Laura amended, and then she grew fierce. “And yes—me. I loved Jenny but I had no claim on her. I was terrified of losing her.”
“Did we seem like such monsters to you?”
“You seemed like a normal family. And I simply could not picture Jenny with you. Why would your wife accept her? Another woman’s child. And your daughter, Olivia—I had no idea if giving her a sister would be a good thing or not. Either way, I would be playing God with a little girl’s life, and I wasn’t willing to do that.”
That little girl didn’t exist anymore, Jenny thought as a decision firmed in her mind. She was a grown woman now, and she was through being ruled by secrets and fear.
* * *
After dinner, Jenny drove home and automatically turned down Maple Street before she realized her house was no longer there. She was supposed to go back
