“Not so tough,” she corrected with a sad look. “If I had been, maybe things would have been different.”
“What things?”
“You and me. Our relationship.”
He was totally lost. “What’s wrong with our relationship? I thought you and I always got along great.”
“We did. We do.” And with that she began to cry in earnest. Her hands covered her face and sobs shook her shoulders.
Kevin was out of his chair in a heartbeat, hunkering down in front of her and folding her hands into his. “Aunt Delia, don’t cry,” he pleaded, his heart aching for her misery. “Please, just tell me what’s wrong.”
“I should have told you years ago. I just pray when I tell you now that you’ll be able to forgive me.”
She was talking in circles and he was losing patience, but she was so obviously shattered by whatever she was trying to say, he couldn’t shout at her to get on with it. For once he held his impatience in check.
He grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the kitchen counter and handed them to her. “It’s okay. Take your time.”
“I’ve taken too many years as it is,” she said, as she blotted up her tears. “It all started years ago, before your mother was born.”
Kevin felt his heart slow. So, he thought with a sense of dread, the secrets were finally coming to light, for better or worse. He sat quietly, waiting.
Her eyes took on a faraway gleam, still glistening with tears. “I met someone, a nice man, or so I thought. From a good family. They were here for the summer. He was going back to finish college that fall and, then, well, I thought we’d be getting married.”
“He seduced you,” Kevin guessed.
“Not the way you mean,” she said fiercely. “Believe me, I was all too eager to be with him. I was in love. I had never been happier.”
She closed her eyes, but before she did, Kevin could see the anguish of old hurts.
“After he’d gone, I found out I was pregnant,” she confessed, her voice so low he had to strain to hear it.
“You had a child?” Kevin asked, shocked.
“I had a child,” she confirmed. “A beautiful baby girl. As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, the father didn’t want her or me. I never heard from him again after I told him about her. He simply vanished, dropped out of that fancy Ivy League school and went off to who-knows-where so I couldn’t pester him, I suppose.”
Kevin couldn’t begin to imagine what that had done to her, the dent it had put in that staunch pride of hers. Since she had never married, he could only assume the bastard had been the love of her life. He had ruined her, then left without a backward glance.
“What happened to the baby? Did you give her up for adoption?”
“Yes.” Fresh tears were tracking down her cheeks.
“I’m so sorry. You must have been devastated. Did you ever see her again? Or find out what happened to her?”
“I saw her often,” she admitted. “I didn’t have to go far.”
Kevin’s heart began to thud. “Who?”
“The baby was your mother.”
Kevin rocked back on his heels and concentrated very hard to make the room stop spinning. “My mother?” he repeated.
“That’s right.”
“That means you’re my…” He couldn’t even bring himself to say the word. He thought of the bitter old woman he’d always thought of his grandmother, the woman who’d made life hell for his mother, always resenting her for reasons he’d never understood. Now he knew. She had blamed his mother for her own failure to give birth to a child. His sweet, fragile mother had been a constant reminder of her inability to conceive.
He stared at Delia, thinking of all the times he’d run to her, counted on her, wished so very hard that she were the one, that she were his grandmother. And now, to discover that she had been all along…
“Kevin, say something. Please.”
“I don’t know what to say.” On the one hand, he loved Delia with all his heart, always had. On the other, to discover that she had robbed him and his mother of knowing exactly how she fit into their lives was too painful to cope with. He thought of the times he’d seen his mother’s anguished tears when his supposed grandmother had chastised her yet again for some imagined sin. Delia had stood by and watched that happen.
“Why didn’t you tell her?” he demanded roughly.
“I couldn’t. That was the deal I made with my sister, that she would be Mary Louise’s mother, that the truth would never be spoken. I went away to have the baby and she went with me. She came back with my daughter and I stayed on in Maine for another six months so no one here would be suspicious. I thought it was for the best, Kevin. I didn’t want my girl to live with the shame of me being an unwed mother.”
“So instead you left her with a woman who resented her from the day she took her in.”
“Not always,” Delia protested. “When Mary Louise was a baby, Hettie loved her. She did. It was only later, when Mary Louise instinctively seemed to form a bond with me, that the resentment started. I never broke faith with my sister, but there was no mistaking the bond that Mary Louise and I shared. You felt it, too. I know you did.”
Kevin couldn’t deny it. Nor could he deny that Delia had always been there for his mother, a safe haven, just as she had been for him. He sighed heavily.
“I have to think about this.”
“You don’t hate me, though. Please, Kevin, tell me you don’t hate me.”
He bent down and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “I could never hate you,” he said fiercely. “Never.”
She patted his hand. “Then we’ll be okay.”
He started to leave, then paused in the doorway. “Why now? Why tell me now?”
“Because of you and Gracie. Bessie says I’m being
