“No, no, Aunt Blanche. You did so much,” Chloe replied. “You took me away when I needed it most.”
“A dozen times? I should have taken you away for good, but no court would let me have you, and she was my sister.” Her voice cracked as she fought a sob. “Don’t let her shape who you are now, honey.”
“I’m working on that every day,” Chloe assured her. “And I’ve come a long way. But I don’t know if I’m cut out for…that.”
“That? You mean love and marriage? Everyone is cut out for it, especially with a fine man like Shane Kilcannon.”
“He is fine,” she agreed. “But what you’re talking about are big, massive life changes that take time and compromise.” They took normalcy, and Chloe would always live on the hairy edge of…not quite normal.
“You can compromise.”
“I’d need time, Aunt Blanche. A reason to stay here.” She gave a smile that felt as broken as her heart.
“Then maybe you should find a reason to stay.”
“I’ll keep looking.” Chloe sighed, picking up her cleaning supplies, tired of the conversation that hurt to have. “I still have to do one more street.”
After a moment, Blanche stood, checking her watch. “I have a transition meeting with the finance department. I don’t want to deal with any of it because I want…” She laughed softly. “To be planning a budget for Santa Paws next Christmas.”
Chloe let out a sad grunt. “It was such a good idea. The right amount of corny and cute.”
Aunt Blanche kissed her cheek. “I am so proud of you, Chloe. You came to Bitter Bark and gave it your all.”
She sure did. All her ideas. All her heart. All her…love.
Aunt Blanche rose and blew another kiss, leaving Chloe to sit for a few more minutes to let the ache of this disappointment hit hard. When her cell phone rang with a call, she snagged it fast, eager to talk to Shane.
But the phone number was as unknown as the man’s accented voice on the other end of the call.
“Is this Chloe Somerset?” he asked.
“Yes, it is,” she said, putting on her professional voice. “Can I help you?”
“I’m calling on behalf of the Roatán Tourism Council with the wonderful news that we’ve accepted your proposal.”
She closed her eyes.
“We have a beachfront condominium for you to live in and an office where you will work. Your fee has been approved, and our only question is how soon can you start?”
The longer she stayed here, the harder it would be to leave.
“Very soon,” she answered, absently reaching down to scratch Daisy’s curious face. “I have to…finish up a few things.”
Like the closest thing to love she’d ever known.
Chapter Twenty
Shane finished a long-ass day of training, his mood sour almost from the moment the day had started with an idiot trashing his hometown. He’d exchanged a few texts with Chloe, but hadn’t heard from her since around four and hoped that meant she was done with her one-woman cleaning operation—well, one woman and a dog—and was home relaxing now.
He needed to give Dad a finalized contract for the DOD deal he’d finished and get out of here, but the hoopla out in the training pen told him that Garrett must have called the staff and family together before he’d leave to deliver an adopted dog, because that came with some ritual that couldn’t be stopped.
As soon as Shane stepped outside, his mood lifted at the sight of people gathered around the lucky rescue who was being taken to its forever home. Of course, Garrett wore his “doggone hat,” reserved exclusively for the delivery of an adopted dog. But, God help them, Jessie had one to match now, although hers looked fresh and new.
And damned cute, Shane had to admit.
Today, the happy farewell was for Louie, a two-toned Staffy who looked an awful lot like Daisy. This one was just as sweet and hadn’t lasted long at Waterford when a warm, spirited woman named Mona started coming regularly to visit him and easily passed the home review and background check. She also passed Shane’s pit bull test, showing a natural love for the breed that he required before he agreed to let one be adopted.
Gramma Finnie came out from the house, making her way toward the pen with a beaming smile, adjusting her signature colorful cardigan, red today, despite the midsummer heat.
“It’s a happy day when a dog goes to a new home,” she said, joining Shane and slipping one of her tiny arms around his waist. “It was always your mother’s favorite day on the farm.”
“Unless she was losing one she wanted to keep,” he said, memories of Zeus still fresh after his recent confession to Chloe.
“That was Annie’s goal, you know. To keep all the people and dogs happy,” Gramma mused. “She used to say, ‘You’re only as happy as your least-happy kid.’ Remember?”
“Sure do.” He closed his eyes for a second, the move matching the mental sound of an emotional door shutting, as it always did when the subject of Mom came up.
“You happy, Shane?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Long day is all.”
With her free hand, Gramma placed a crepe-papery palm on his cheek. “I heard about the vandalism in town.”
“Good news travels fast.”
“It’s a darn shame she’s done all that work and they’ve gone and canceled the vote.”
“What?” He looked down at her. “They did?”
“There’s still a meeting, but the subject of tourism is off the agenda. Seems Blanche is stepping down, and Dave Ashford is taking her place.”
“Oh man. Chloe must be devastated.” He gave a quick glance to the circle around Garrett, looking for his father to give him the contract. He had to get out of here and back to Chloe. “Where’s Dad?”
“He’s been behind closed doors all day.”
That was weird. “Okay, I’m going to see him and leave. Bye, Gramma.” He stepped away from her, but she held tight to the fabric of his T-shirt.
“One more thing, lad.”
He stifled a sigh of frustration, waiting for some more bad news from town.
“You know what the Irish say about love?”
“Six hundred things that you have committed to memory or stitched on a pillow on your bed?”
“Cross-stitch? For this Internet sensation?” She gave a scoffing laugh. “Hashtag old school.” She yanked him a little closer. “The only thing perfect about love is how imperfect it is.”
He frowned. “I never heard that.”
“Oh, I just made it up for my blog today. I wanted to test it out on you. Do you like it?”
“Kind of, yeah. Keep working on it, though.” He reached down to give her a kiss, and she patted his cheek again.
“You keep working on it, too.”
He wanted to, but if there was no vote and no tourism push in Bitter Bark…why would Chloe stay?
An unfamiliar weight in his chest slowed him a little, but he hustled into the house, looking for Dad, surprised to find his office empty since Gramma had said he’d been behind closed doors. Didn’t that mean working? Where would he be?
Checking out the downstairs, he took the steps two at a time to round the large center hallway to make his way back to his parents’ room. Well, his dad’s room now.
Sure enough, the door was closed. Shane tapped. “You in there, Dad?”
He heard some movement, a throat clear, some papers shuffle. “Something wrong, Shane?”
Yeah, Dad’s voice sounded…weird. “I want to give you this DOD contract.”
“Under the door.”
What? He put his hand on the doorknob and turned it slowly, inching it open. “You okay?” he asked.
He heard his dad sigh. And sniff. Good God, was he crying?
He pushed the door all the way and got his answer, and the jolt of it nearly knocked him backward. Dad hadn’t cried since the funeral, not since the day he’d come down from this very room and planted the idea that all the Kilcannon siblings le
ave their current jobs and move back to Bitter Bark to start a world-class canine facility.
All but Aidan, who was in the military, jumped at the opportunity. Building this business had been the thing that saved them all from grief, transferring their pain into creating something that Mom had always dreamed of.
“Dad.” He took a few steps into the room. “Hey, man, are you all right?”
He was seated at the little blue settee that Shane always thought was more for form than function, placed in front of a fireplace about six or eight feet from the bed. On a coffee table, he spied a slew of pictures.
Oh boy. Someone was stumbling down memory lane.
“Fine, fine, Son.” He wiped his reddened face. “Just got a little lost today.”
Shane closed the door behind him, feeling that familiar kick of fury, but now wasn’t the time to close off and walk out and be pissed off that life screwed him. ’Cause life screwed Daniel Kilcannon even more.
“What brought this on?” he asked, propping himself on a low wooden chest at the foot of the bed. There was another chair in that little sitting area, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to get that close to what looked like about a hundred pictures that covered about thirty-six spectacular years.
“Stupid little anniversary.”
Today? It wasn’t their wedding anniversary, or the anniversary of the day she died. But Shane knew his parents well, and one of their “things” had been remembering dates. The first time they took a vacation together, the day they got engaged, the day they bought their first car.
“You two and your anniversaries,” Shane said, memories drifting through his head. “Half the time nobody in the family knew what you were celebrating.”
“That’s why it was fun,” he said, picking up a picture and putting it down. “Your mom and I had inside jokes. Not easy with six rug rats, but important. Kept us…” He swiped his eye again. “You know. Together.”
“So what was today’s anniversary, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Dad looked up, his eyes the same blue as Gramma’s, but much sharper, despite the fact they’d obviously been well-watered today. “I do mind you asking, and I don’t think you want to know. It’s, you know, private.”
Private? Like…oh. He knew his parents met when they were both freshmen at Vestal Valley College and, yes, they got married young. But Liam’s birthday was six months after their anniversary, so everyone knew why they’d gotten married at twenty and how it happened. But some things a son didn’t want to think too hard about.
“But this anniversary took you to a dark place.”
“Dark?” Dad laughed softly. “Nothing dark about reliving the best three and a half decades a man ever had. I’ve spent the day in the bedroom with her.” His lips curled in a wry smile. “Just like we did thirty-eight years ago today.”
Yeah. TMI. But something wended around his heart and squeezed so hard, Shane couldn’t breathe for a moment.
Dad toyed with another picture, studying it for a long time. “She was pregnant with you here.” He held it out to Shane, who stayed paralyzed like he had lead in his belly. “We still didn’t have a real home, since we were here and Gramma and Grandpa hadn’t yet handed over the Waterford reins. I’d opened my practice in town when we found out you were on the way. Take a look.”
Shane relented and stood to reach for the picture, barely glancing at the image of a dazzling young twentysomething with a toddler holding one of her hands and the other resting on a sizable baby bump. He dropped it back on the table and returned to his seat.
“We were so happy,” Dad said, picking up another photo. “It’s the only thing that really matters, you know.”
“To be happy?”
Dad snorted. “No, to be loved. To love. It’s the only thing that lasts.”
Lasts? Was he out of his mind? Shane knocked his knuckles together. “Except, you know, when it doesn’t.”
He didn’t get an answer to that, but Dad cast his eyes down at the sea of photos. “You’re so angry, Shane.”
“Angry? Yeah, I guess I’m still mad about it. I want to punch walls if I think too hard about never seeing her again. Don’t you?”
Dad shook his head. “If being mad at her or at what happened is some stage of grief, then I got through it quickly. God took her, Son, on the day and time He wanted her.”
“A mother of six? Happily married? Fifty-five years old and healthy as an ox? What kind of God does that?”
“The one I’m going to face one day and account for how I handled it.”
Shane fought the urge to flick that off, knowing better than to mock God in front of his Irish Catholic Dad. Hell, his parents had frowned at him when he’d even considered practicing family law, like it was his fault those crappy marriages ended up in divorce court.
“You’ll never be able to find love of your own until you let go of that anger, Shane.”
This time he did choke at the comment. “Not like you and Mom had, since that’s pretty much the stuff of fairy tales. And didn’t end that well after all.”
Dad gave him a fiery, furious look, harsh enough to make Shane inch back.
“Don’t you dare say that!” he exclaimed. “It ended, yes, but it lasted and will last forever.”
Shane swallowed, a little damn sick of the platitudes and proverbs being strewn around this family. “Dad, come on. Love can’t be reduced to a quote hanging on Gramma Finnie’s wall. Nothing lasts forever. Even a relationship as nice and steady as you had with Mom, because look at you. Crying in your room all day. What the hell?”
His father stood, suddenly looming over him and throwing Shane back a few decades to childhood when he’d crossed a line in Dad’s invisible sand. Criticizing the family in any way? A big, red line.
“I’ll tell you what the hell, young man. I didn’t have a ‘relationship’ with Annie. I had a life with her. And all the crap that entailed, from sick kids to low bank accounts to arguments that lasted deep into the night and the next morning.”
“You never argued,” Shane said quietly.
“Like hell we didn’t. And I’ll tell you something else. There was nothing nice and steady about it. It was work. It took compromise. It got messy. It didn’t always feel good and certainly wasn’t always happy.”
Shane blinked. “Sure looked that way to us kids.”
“Because it was real, Shane Kilcannon. Our love for each other was real, down to the molecular level. Your mother and I loved each other the way we breathed, without thinking about whether or not there would be another breath. We just knew there would be.”
Until there wasn’t. Didn’t he see that? “But then she died,” he said softly, reaching out to calm his dad.
“Not here.” Dad slapped his chest. “She’s as alive in here as she was when she was in that bed behind you. I still hear her laugh. I still feel her touch.” His voice cracked. “I still love her and always will.”
Oh God. Poor, broken, delusional widowed Dad.
Shane nodded, standing slowly. He had far too much respect for his father to try to make him see the error of his thinking. “I got it, Dad.” He put his hand on the older man’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’ve found a way to come to terms with losing her.”
“I wish you would—”
“I have,” he assured him, cutting off the lecture before it started. “I’m never going to be happy about it, but I’m a big boy, and I get that this is the card life dealt our family.”
“I wish you would listen to your mother,” he finished.
Oh man. “She’s dead. And I can barely hear the sound of her voice in my head.”
Dad closed his eyes as if that comment had gone too far. But Shane didn’t apologize for it, because he loved and respected his father, but he wasn’t going to lie to him.
“If you could hear that voice,” he finally said, “you’d know what she’d say about your situation.”
“What situation?” As if he didn’t know.
&nb
sp; “This thing with Chloe.”
“Oh, man, give it a break. There’s no thing or, yeah, there’s a thing. Just a thing. Just a meaningless, temporary, physical thing. Not everyone can take that and turn it into…” He gestured toward the table full of memories. “That.”
“Not with that attitude.”
Shane rolled his eyes. “Okay, Dad. It’s my attitude. It’s always my attitude, not, you know, life. Death. God. Fate. Bad luck. Whatever.”
“Yes, Shane, it is your attitude. You’re cocky because you’re uncertain. You’re angry because you’re in mourning. And you’re lonely because you don’t want to lose, so you won’t take a chance.”
Really? He blew out a noisy breath. “Okay, then. There’s the contract and…don’t stay up here too long. Garrett’s taking Louie for adoption, and they’re probably still down there.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Dad said, turning back to the pictures. “I’m staying with Annie today.”
That. That was exactly what Shane didn’t want to be, exactly the ultimate loss a man who loved to win could not endure. How could you win at this love thing? If you have a great marriage—no matter how tough Dad said it was, theirs was great—it can end in a bad heartbeat. And the majority of people never even had anything that good, since Mom and Dad had beaten ridiculous odds and still lost.
Shane gave him one more pat on the shoulder and headed out, already prepared to say his goodbyes to Chloe now…not later, when it would hurt even more.
As he trotted down the stairs, his phone buzzed with a text, no doubt from her. He pulled it out and glanced at the screen, then read the message, which wasn’t from her at all.
Oh, poor Chloe. She was about to learn the same lesson Dad had just had driven home to him.
Love didn’t last.
Test that on your pithy blog posts, Gramma.
Love didn’t last.
Carve that in your memory box, Dad.
Love didn’t last.
Sorry you weren’t around for whatever anniversary this was, Mom.