An Invincible Summer (Wyndham Beach), Mariah Stewart [best classic novels TXT] 📗

me she hadn’t confided in them. They could tell something was bothering me, so when they asked, I said we’d just found out about Mom’s baby and I was upset about it.” Grace looked sorry for the first and only time that night. “And then they both said, ‘What baby?’”

“Grace, this is really bad. Mom’s going to kill you when she finds out, and I won’t blame her one bit. You shouldn’t have told them.”

Too late, Natalie saw Maggie in the doorway.

“She shouldn’t have told who what?”

Chapter Eighteen

MAGGIE

Maggie drifted into wakefulness the same way she’d drifted to sleep, minute by minute, the scent of salt air surrounding her. She glanced at the clock—only five thirty. A quick storm had rolled through at some point. The wet spray blowing in through the window had awakened her, and she’d gotten up to close the window, then fallen back into bed. Turning over, hoping for at least another hour of sleep, the drama of the previous evening replayed in her head, and she knew there’d be no more rest for her that morning.

She expected to have a rocky night, but she’d gotten herself ready for bed, climbed in, and pulled up the covers, her mind bouncing from one scene to another. Natalie’s revelation. Grace’s unexpected and unreasonable reaction. Natalie’s reversal from anger to kind understanding and apology. Grace spilling the beans to Liddy and Emma—and God only knew what the two of them were thinking. But the hardest punch to her gut had been Brett confessing his true feelings after all these years. She’d never suspected he’d suffered as she had.

The discovery that her son was reaching out.

My son is reaching out.

Of course she would meet him. Nothing could keep her from that longed-for reunion, regardless of how nervous she might feel, how afraid she might be of how he might judge her. What did he look like? Brett had said he looked like him, but what did that mean beyond he had blond hair and he was tall? Lots of tall men were blond.

“He has your eyes,” Brett had said.

She tossed the covers aside, stood, and stretched, then went into the bathroom, where she turned on the light and stared into the mirror.

Were his eyes the same shade of green, the same shape? Were his lashes long and thick like hers? Did they darken when he was angry, as hers did? Did the corners crinkle when he laughed?

Would she see anything else of her in his face or his mannerisms, the way she could see herself in Natalie and in Grace? Or would his gestures favor his adoptive parents, the people who raised and loved him? She thought about them, wondered who they were. She’d been given the option to meet them in the hospital, but she’d declined. Her eighteen-year-old self thought of them as the people who were taking her baby from her. Now, with so much time between the girl she’d been and the woman she’d become, she could honor them for who they were. They were the ones who tended to his scraped knees and kissed him good night, sat at his bedside when he was sick, read to him, and put up with his teenage antics. They gave him a life and made him the man who could reach out to a half sister he’d never met and wish her a beautiful, happy life, even if she chose not to be a part of his.

They’d given him their name when she could not give him hers.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Whoever you are, thank you.”

Twenty minutes later, Maggie sat at the kitchen table, her laptop in front of her, trying to compose an email to Joe Miller. She’d started it a dozen times but couldn’t find the words to make it sound exactly the way she wanted. This would be his first impression of her, and she couldn’t seem to strike the right balance between stiff and formal, and between familiar and chatty. It was so much harder than she thought it would be. There was no point in pretending she didn’t want to meet him, so she might as well set the ball in motion. Why waste more time?

Should she take Brett up on his offer to call Joe and set it up? Was that the coward’s way out? Did that make her seem weak, too tentative?

An email from her to him was definitely the way to go. She couldn’t hide behind Brett. If only she could say what she wanted and have it come out right.

She was still sitting there, staring at the blank screen, when she heard a knock at the front door. She glanced at the clock—7:25. Who knocked on your door at that hour of the morning?

Maggie peered through the glass panel in the door, sighed, and opened it. She should have known.

“Neither of us could sleep,” Liddy announced as she stepped inside.

“I called her at six thirty and told her we needed to address this head-on.” Emma followed Liddy.

“Come on in, then.” Maggie gestured in the direction of the kitchen.

“I don’t smell coffee.” Liddy sniffed the air. “Why don’t I smell coffee?”

“I didn’t get to it yet,” Maggie explained.

“Looks like you had time to start working on something.” Liddy pointed to the open laptop as she went right past Maggie and began filling the coffee maker.

Maggie slid Joe’s emails to Natalie under the laptop and closed it. She eyed both friends. “Go on. Spit it out. Say what you have to say.”

“Okay. You twisted my arm. I’ll go first. I—we—are hurt and offended you didn’t trust us enough to tell us what you were going through.” Emma needn’t have told Maggie she was hurt. Her eyes said it all.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you . . .”

“Oh, I call bull.” Liddy opened the refrigerator and took out the half-and-half. “If you’d trusted us, you’d have shared this with us. It had to have been terrible, but did you