“You look like a woman on a mission.” Natalie sat in one of the rocking chairs, watching Daisy play with a train set she’d brought with her and set up on the porch. “Where are you off to, Mom?”
“I’m just going to walk up to the beach for a few minutes.”
“Want some company, or . . . no, you don’t look as if you do,” Natalie observed.
“I think I’d rather fly solo, but thanks. I don’t expect to be long.”
“We’ll be here.”
The walk to the beach was a short one. Maggie took off her shoes and made her way through driftwood and tangled loops of seaweed that had washed ashore in the recent storm. She climbed the rocks but didn’t go all the way to the end of the jetty. She sat facing the harbor and the bay, with its islands beyond. She was happy and scared and wondering if somehow she might regret her upcoming meeting with Joe Miller. What would they talk about? They didn’t know each other and very well may not have a thing in common.
She tried to think of topics that might be nonthreatening. His job would be a good place to start. What kind of projects did he work on? Where did he go to school? What did he major in? He hadn’t mentioned a wife, but he could be married. If he was married, did he have children?
If he had children, she had grandchildren she’d never met. She covered her face with her hands. It was almost too much to grasp. After all this time, it was almost too much, too soon.
The sound of shells crunching beneath footsteps drew her attention. She looked back toward the road, and her heart caught in her chest.
“Hey,” Brett called to her across the beach. He was in uniform, except for the Red Sox cap, which she was pretty sure wasn’t department issued.
“That’s a good way to ruin those policeman shoes you’re wearing,” she called back, her heart beginning to thump. Keep it casual. “The sand’s pretty wet out here.”
Could she do casual where Brett was concerned? Now, when the son they’d made together was coming into their lives?
“I’ll dry them off and knock the sand out later.” He drew closer, and with his aviator glasses covering his eyes, he looked more like the boy she used to know than he had the last time she’d seen him. Of course, that time he’d been sitting behind his desk in the police department. This time he was more in his element. He’d always loved the beach and the water. “Natalie told me I’d find you here. I hope you don’t mind me stopping by. I won’t stay long if it bothers you.”
“It’s okay.” She sighed, then said something she hadn’t realized she’d needed to say. “I’m sorry, Brett.”
“You’re sorry? For what?” He scoffed. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”
“I flew into your office like a harpy. You’d been trying to tell me about Joe, and I kept blowing you off. I should have listened.”
“The important thing is now you know. But as soon as Jayne told me he’d contacted her, I should have tried harder to get in touch with you. You shouldn’t have had to find out the way you did.” He lowered himself to sit on a rock near her.
“Still, I said some things that . . . well, I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too. For everything. I know I can’t go back and change things, but I’ve been needing to apologize to you for years.”
“Brett, now’s not the time to—”
“There’s never been a time. So will you please listen, let me get this all off my chest? This isn’t what I came here to do—but things being the way they are right now, I don’t know if I’ll ever have this chance again.” Without waiting for her to reply, he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t pay more attention when you tried to tell me how much you hurt inside. It hurt me, too, but I wanted to be strong for you. So I tried to pretend it was all going to be okay. That we’d have other children and we’d go on to have a happy life together. I wanted that to be true. But it seemed no matter how hard I tried, you just got more and more sad as time went on. After a while, it was like there was you before the baby, and you after the baby. And being the jerk that I am, I tried to love the one and ignore the other. I want you to know how sorry I am for not trying harder to understand what you were going through. I’m sorry for not letting you know how much I was hurting, too.”
She sat still as a stone, listening to words she’d waited forty years to hear. When he stopped, she tried to process everything he’d said before nodding. “I get it. I do. Maybe you couldn’t deal with the fact I couldn’t get over it, couldn’t leave it in the past. I can understand that. What I can’t understand, what’s bothered me all these years, is that you wouldn’t see him. You wouldn’t look at him.” She fought a wave of tears. “He was so tiny and so beautiful, and you wouldn’t even walk down the hall to look at him.”
“But I did,” he said, his voice so low it was almost a whisper.
“What? When?”
“I went to the nursery the day you were leaving the hospital. I didn’t plan on it, but when I got off the elevator, the nursery was right there. I went up to the window, and I saw the little bed they had him in. I saw the name—Lloyd—on a white card trimmed in blue, and I remember thinking it should have said Crawford, because he was mine. The nurse was wrapping him up in a blanket, and she held him
