“Indefinitely,” Oakley supplied, and Noah grinned.
“Well then.” His eyes lingered on Anne. “I’ll see you around.”
Reluctantly, he turned and went into the house.
“Dad?” Anne whispered as the screen door slammed shut behind him. “Since when does she call himDad?”
“That might have just been to get under your skin,” Oakley said. Anne and Zoe had a way of bringing out the worst in each other.
“Suddenly they’re best friends?” she hissed.
“If by suddenly you mean most of her life…” Oakley trailed off.
“He wasn’t a father to her!” Anne retreated around the corner, back into the shade of the house. “Dadraised Zoe.Ourdad.”
“Noah’s always been around. Especially since Dad got sick.”
“He wasn’t around!” Anne stomped her foot like a kid throwing a tantrum. “Not when she was little! He was off in the oil fields!”
“For a while,” Oakley conceded. “But by the time she was old enough to remember, he was back on island. He was around a lot.”
“I never saw him!”
“When you visited, he made himself scarce.”
Her pale gray eyes went wide. “Why?”
“You told him you never wanted to see him again. Screamed it, actually.”
Anne stared at her, slack-jawed. “I was seventeen!”
“Well, yeah. But you never said anything to the contrary.”
She pressed her hands over her eyes and leaned back until her head thunked against the side of the house. The silence stretched on, clawing at Oakley’s nerves.
“Anne?”
“No wonder she hates me.” Anne dropped her hands and looked at her with red-rimmed eyes.
“She doesn’t hate you,” Oakley said automatically.
It didn’t feel entirely true.
“She does,” Anne insisted, “and she has every right to. Leaving was one thing, but I could have come back. I could have been more involved.”
“Youdidcome back. Youwereinvolved.”
“I chose an out-of-state college over my own baby,” Anne said wretchedly. “I thought I could just leave her with Mom and Dad, then come and get her when I was ready to be a grown-up, and we’d pick back up where we’d left off. Except by the time I had a degree and a job, she wanted nothing to do with me.”
Tears streamed openly down Anne’s face, and Oakley’s heart broke for her.
“And the worst part is, it didn’t even get me anywhere. I’m broke and living at home, which is exactly what I thought I could avoid by focusing on college and career. I abandoned my daughter and I don’t even have anything to show for it.”
“You tried.” Oakley reached out and took her hand. “You flew home for every birthday, even if you had to fly back the same night. You were here every winter break.”
“Yeah. And that felt like a lot when I was twenty. But, well. You’re a mom. You can see now how that’s almost worse than nothing. And by the time I was old enough to realize that, by the time I was ready tobea mom… it was too late. She wanted to stay right where she was. And rightly so.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
