Marin walked along the water’s edge, just close enough to the ocean so it licked her feet when the tide rolled in.
It was the hottest morning so far, but still she wrapped herself in a lightweight cardigan. She felt raw and vulnerable and would have hidden beneath a full-length ski coat if she could justify wearing one. The sweater had a hood and she pulled it over her head, though the breeze kept blowing it off. As she strolled, she hugged her midsection, newly aware that it wasn’t perhaps as flat as it had been two months ago. And no, she wasn’t imagining it; her jeans had gotten tighter.
As angry as she had been at her mother all this time, she had to admit her mother had taken the news well and had jumped into action. She made Marin an appointment to see an obstetrician in Hyannis on Tuesday.
She didn’t know how she would wait. The drugstore test told her she was pregnant, but it couldn’t tell her how many weeks pregnant. And the answer to that question was everything; timing was the only clue for Marin to guess who the father was.
She hated to admit it, but there had been a brief window when she was still sleeping with her fiancé and also hooking up with Julian. It had been such a confusing time, she had mentally edited it out of her own history. But now there was no denying it. The baby might have been fathered by either Greg Harper or Julian.
Tears welled in her eyes, and she brushed them away. She wasn’t going to feel sorry for herself. She didn’t deserve it.
“Hey—Marin!”
Rachel plodded toward her as quickly as the soft sand terrain would allow. Her long hair waved out behind her, and she held her ubiquitous flip-flops in one hand.
Marin wanted to tell her she needed time alone, but from Rachel’s determined pace and her less-than-pleasant facial expression, she doubted she’d get off that easily.
Rachel stopped in front of her, out of breath. Perspiration beaded at her hairline. It was hot already. Marin had barely noticed before now.
“You have some nerve,” Rachel said.
“I’m really not in the mood for this, so could you be a little more specific?”
“You tell me that I’m chasing Luke just so I back off and you can go after him!”
“Oh my God, that is ridiculous.”
“Really? Like you didn’t make a beeline for him the second we got to the pier last night? How long did it take for you to throw yourself in his arms?”
“Rachel, you have this all wrong. I have zero interest in Luke, and he has zero interest in me. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have much interest in you either. But that’s not my bad. So if you want to keep wasting your time and making yourself miserable, be my guest. But if you don’t mind, I have bigger things to worry about right now. And I came out here to be alone.”
Rachel crossed her arms, shaking her head slowly. Marin turned her back to her and walked off.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Blythe crouched over a shady patch of the backyard. After dampening it with water, she dug up a small sample with a kitchen spoon. She rubbed a bit between her thumb and index finger. Gritty. She tried molding a handful into a ball, and it fell apart. Amelia’s soil was too sandy, as she’d been warned. But the soil could be enriched, the problem fixed. She’d had the opposite issue in her backyard in Philadelphia—too much clay. And therein was the reason Blythe loved gardening; in gardening, unlike life, there was a solution to almost every problem.
She was going to be a grandmother! Oh, how she was dying to tell Kip. But Marin insisted that she not tell anyone.
“Not until I know more,” she’d said. Blythe would try to contain herself.
In the meantime, her thoughts kept turning to the day Marin was born. Kip drove her to Lankenau Hospital at four in the morning, and she remembered wondering if he would leave her in a few hours to go to the office. She asked him if he would, and he shook his head. “Is that what you think of me?”
Sadly, it was.
Her parents drove in from Michigan, and the Bishops of course were there. Kip was not in the delivery room with her, and in the clutches of labor pain, she preferred it that way. She couldn’t imagine him acting like a typical father-to-be did in movies, holding his wife’s hand and mopping her brow and saying, “Push! You can do it!” The very thought was worse than the contractions bending her insides.
After four hours of labor, Marin was born. Eight pounds, eight ounces, with a headful of dark hair and big gray-brown eyes. Blythe clutched her to her chest, and the tiny thing claimed her breast with an energy and confidence that flooded Blythe with a love she’d never felt before.
Kip rushed into the room. He had tears in his eyes. She was shocked, genuinely floored, by the raw emotion in his face. He kissed her, then gingerly kissed the baby.
“I love you,” he told Blythe.
Blythe cried, completely overwhelmed. Kip sat on the edge of the bed. He took her free hand, closing it in his own.
“We’re a family now,” he said. Blythe nodded through her tears.
Kip’s mother proclaimed she’d never seen a newborn with dark eyes. Blythe’s parents happily decided she looked just like the Welsh Madigans. Blythe, of course, knew otherwise. And in the first, and last, acknowledgment of the man who gave her baby life, she named her new daughter Marin, “of the sea.”
Blythe looked up; Amelia waved at her through the kitchen window. She was busy cooking away with Rachel, and Blythe was thankful they were too preoccupied to pay her much mind. She pulled out her phone and dialed.
Kip answered his cell on the second ring. Then she realized: it was a Saturday and he was not at the office.
“You back home?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “In fact, we’ve decided to stay the summer.”
Kip made a familiar, disapproving tsking sound. “This your idea, Blythe? I can’t see Marin making this decision.”
“And why not?”
“Because she is happiest when she is productive and working. She needs to get back to real life. Enough of this licking her wounds.”
She sighed. “You are so infuriating sometimes.” The truth was, even this aggravating conversation was of strange comfort to her. As irrational as it was, hearing his voice made her feel like everything would be all right. It always had. “If you’re so sure what’s best for her and disapprove of what’s going on, then come out here for a day. I need to talk to you, and, more important, your daughter needs you.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
She couldn’t hold back. Marin might not want her father to know, but he should know. And if that’s what it would take to get him out there, Blythe would tell him.
“Marin’s pregnant.”
A brief silence. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Rachel would not, as Marin had put it, waste her time and make herself miserable. No more hours spent pining after Luke Duncan. She’d come out there to get to know Amelia, and that was exactly what she was going to do.