I could feel Carter’s eyes on me and then on Jack. When he dropped my hand, I felt my heart race again. When Carter started walking toward the other end of the boardwalk, I knew he knew. I wasn’t sure what to do. Run after him? Give him time?
It was the one thing that Carter made me promise, that he would never know who Sloane and Caroline’s fathers were. I couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that he could live his life never knowing. As I suspected, it began to weigh on him. Yet he didn’t want to know who the man was. Even before we married, we never talked about past relationships, where we’d come from, who had shaped that path. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that we had found each other, that our future was the two of us.
And so we compromised. I told Carter that the father was someone from my past, someone I had once loved, someone who never wanted children of his own but had agreed to give me, give us, the one thing that we wanted so badly. Carter was angry at first, said that I had been irresponsible, that I had risked our family by letting the other man know he had children. I didn’t argue. He could never understand.
But now he understood. In an instant, Carter understood that Jack was the father of his other two daughters. He knew who their brown eyes and dimples belonged to.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I’m so sorry. But you should have told me. How did you think I would react?”
“I didn’t think I’d see you,” I responded, anger in my voice. But it wasn’t Jack’s fault. I knew it even then. This was a situation I had created.
“I know you don’t really owe me an explanation, but—”
“Of course I owe you an explanation, Jack,” I said. “After all these years, Carter and I are having our own baby.”
There was a thinly veiled sadness in Jack’s eyes, and I could feel him thinking about what might have been. I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about it, too. But I was old enough to know that what might have been was never as good as what was. It just wasn’t. I had moved on. I didn’t fantasize anymore about what would happen if Jack had decided he did want children, that we did want the same things in life. Because I knew that Carter was the man I was supposed to marry, raise a family with, be with forever.
But I loved Jack, of course. Always. And I don’t know what it was about that moment, when I should have been running after my husband, that made me say, “You have given me everything I ever dreamed of. I will love you until the day I die.”
“I will love you even longer than that, Ansley.”
I nodded and headed down the dock, into that cotton-candy-colored sky. I knew that Carter and I would carry on. We would get through this. It had been naive of either of us to think we could make it through an entire lifetime and never run into the true father of our children. It had been ludicrous to think it was a secret we could keep, even from ourselves.
Dockmaster Dan didn’t speak to me that morning, simply tipped his hat, his eyes viewing me like he knew I needed to be alone with a secret, a secret that, I had to consider, maybe wasn’t as secret as I believed it to be.
But Peachtree Bluff was a town of hidden truths, of stolen moments, a town that had borne the clandestine, the furtive, the surreptitious tales of the sea since well before the Revolution.
I knew, as the wind caught my hair just so, making me feel like that little girl who had come here when her heart was so innocent and her future so wide, that this town, with all its gossip and chatter and crazy characters, might thrive on a little good-natured fun. But when it mattered, when it was important, this place, this corner of the world that time seemed to have forgotten, would bear the big secrets, the earth-shattering ones, until the tide washed it over and, like time itself, it existed no more.
* * *
WHEN I LOOK BACK on my life, I know that I will remember my summers in Peachtree Bluff with the most fondness. Bringing my girls when they were tiny to visit my grandmother. Driving Boston Whalers over to Starlite Island, collecting shells, admiring the wild horses from the widow’s walk, playing tag in the front yard, having water-balloon wars. And my childhood summers here, when the world was so pure, nothing was scary, and I was so full of innocence, were the closest, I think, that one could ever get to heaven on earth.
Those were the good times, the times that would always fill my heart with the most gladness. In some ways, this year, even with all of its troubles, would be one of those times. No matter how difficult it had been, whether Adam was lost or found, we were a family again. We were together. We had always loved one another; we had always held one another in our hearts. But something deeper had happened over these past few months. We had become family in the way we were when Carter was still alive, in the way we were always meant to be. And I knew that all of us would treasure this time for the rest of our lives.
My heart felt so heavy that chilly night, as I sat wrapped in a blanket on the outdoor sofa, looking out over the water, at the way the moon reflected and danced and spun, the way the stars glowed here in a way I couldn’t remember seeing anywhere else in the world. A part of me knew that this was wrong, that I should be watching these stars with Jack. A part of me knew that I was protecting myself from something I didn’t need to be protected from. And that I was protecting my daughters from a threat that wasn’t a threat at all. But opening your heart after it has been closed for so many years is hard. It’s unthinkable at moments, actually. Right now, my plate was full. So if my heart was a little less full than it could be, that was something I was going to have to be OK with. It seemed that night that Jack had closed the door on a possible future for us. That hurt. But I knew it was nothing compared with the hurt I had caused him in our life together—or lack thereof.
Taylor and Adam burst through the front door, an ecstatic Biscuit running behind them. None of Mr. Solomon’s family wanted his little dog, and when I heard that she had been taken to the shelter, I couldn’t stand the thought. She had spent her entire life on this street. I would make sure she spent the rest of it here, too. It was my final mea culpa to Mr. Solomon, and I hoped that he would rest easily knowing that his best companion was royally taken care of.
Biscuit had been a terrific distraction for the boys, who didn’t understand, thank goodness, what was happening.
“Is Mommy still sick?” Adam asked, crawling up beside me. Taylor followed suit and scampered onto my lap, resting his head on my chest, that thumb popping right into his mouth.
I kissed the top of his head. “Mommy is still sick,” I said, trying to hold back tears.
“Will she still be sick tomorrow?” Adam asked.
I nodded. “Mommy might be sick for a while. But she’s going to get better,” I said. Then I whispered, “I know she will,” more for my benefit than for his.