“That doesn’t matter right now,” she told Dillon. “What matters is that she’s your daughter and she’s here and you both love each other. You can work out the rest of that later,” Hailey told both father and daughter. “Right now all you really need to do is get acquainted.”
“No,” Dillon answered, “We can do that on the plane when we take Julie back. Right now,” he told his daughter, “I need to call your mother and keep her from having a nervous breakdown.”
Julie looked completely unmoved when he mentioned her mother. She waved her hand dismissively. “She doesn’t care.”
“Oh, yes, she does,” Dillon insisted. “Whatever is going down between your mother and me, make no mistake about that. She loves you very much and she deserves to know that nothing happened to you,” he told his daughter. He began to dial Maura’s number. “How did you wind up here, anyway?” he wanted to know. She had obviously flown here from Florida and airplane tickets weren’t exactly going for a song.
“I paid for it,” she proudly informed him as he heard the cell phone begin to ring.
“How?” he pressed, still dubious about what she was telling him.
“I’ve been saving my allowance for something important for a long time now,” Julie announced.
This being-a-dad thing was going to take some getting used to, he thought.
Meanwhile, Hailey was smiling at him. “Looks like she takes after you,” she said, nodding at Julie. Then, as he looked at her quizzically, she explained, “Patient.”
Just then, Dillon held his hand up as the call was being answered.
“Maura?” he asked.
The first words out of the other woman’s mouth were, “Did you find her?”
“Yes, Julie’s here.” He put his arm around Julie’s slender shoulders and hugged her to him as he continued to talk to Maura. “She turned up on—my doorstep,” he said, changing what he was about to say at the last minute. There was no point adding fuel to the fire and saying that the girl had appeared on Hailey’s doorstep, he thought.
“Is she all right?” Maura asked, her voice catching.
He could tell Julie’s mother was crying. He didn’t ever remember hearing Maura cry. “She’s fine, Maura,” he assured the woman kindly. “None the worse for her experience.”
“Well, I am,” Maura snapped, her voice practically choking because of the tears in her throat she was trying to suppress.
Dillon really didn’t know what to say to that. Deciding that there was nothing he could say, he just moved on and told her, “We’ll be taking the next available flight back to Fort Lauderdale to bring her home.”
“We?” Maura questioned.
He knew what she could be like and he wasn’t about to get into this with Maura right now.
“I’ve got to go now, Maura,” he told her, promising, “I’ll text you the details when I have them.”
And with that, Dillon terminated the call before Julie’s mother had a chance to tell him what she thought about this whole thing.
Chapter Eighteen
The second that Dillon ended the call to her mother, Julie immediately spoke up. “She’s a real pain, isn’t she?”
“Don’t talk about your mother that way,” Dillon told his daughter. A part of him shared some of Julie’s frustration, but he wanted to bring about a reconciliation—not escalate the feud that was in progress.
She looked surprised and somewhat betrayed by his admonishment. “Why not?” she cried. “It’s true! She won’t listen to anyone, not even her husband and he’s kind of a nice guy.”
“Be that as it may,” Dillon told her, “she is still your mother and deserves your respect.”
He was really struggling to take the high moral ground, and it was hard. Because all of his arguments with Maura had only managed to get him excluded from Julie’s life. It was hardly fair. And yet, he was her father—and he knew this was the right thing to do. For both mother and daughter.
Julie fisted her hands at her waist belligerently. “Why?” she wanted to know. “My mother certainly doesn’t give me any respect—or you for that matter,” the girl pointed out angrily. She was obviously trying her best to get him to side with her against her mother.
This wasn’t going well, Hailey thought. Feeling Dillon could use some help, she decided to step in. Not all that long ago, she could remember feeling exactly the same way that Julie was feeling right now, so she could easily commiserate with the preteen.
“That’s one of those things that makes absolutely no sense now, but eventually, it will. I promise,” she told Julie. “Trust me on that,” Hailey added kindly.
Julie scowled at the two adults who were looking at her. “Well, I think you’re wrong,” she told them, obviously angry that things weren’t turning out the way she had hoped.
“And you are entitled to think that way,” Hailey told her, surprising both Julie and Dillon with her answer. “But not long ago I was exactly where you are right now. I was positive that everyone was against me—but they really weren’t. As a matter of fact, one of those people gave me some very good advice. They said that sometimes a little bit of diplomacy goes a long way.”
Hailey slipped her arm around the girl’s shoulders. Julie stiffened, but Hailey left her arm where it was and after a moment, the girl began to relent.
“What you have before you is the long-term plan, not just something for the short haul. You need to try to get along with your mother and then maybe, eventually, she’ll come around to your way of thinking. But she definitely won’t come around if you insist on defying her and behaving like you can’t stand her.” She looked into the girl’s eyes, searching for a glimmer to indicate that she had gotten through to Julie. “Do you understand what I’m
