She was not wrong.
He ended things.
She, on the other hand, decided to make it so he wouldn’t.
According to the townspeople, who were happy to talk about this juicy tidbit in particular, after four years without even a hint the couple didn’t know how to protect themselves from an unplanned conception, the fact she turned up two months pregnant a month after he broke it off with her was widely considered her attempt at entrapment.
Sheriff Yeager didn’t feel like being trapped.
Due to the risks involved, he waited to demand a DNA test until after the child was born.
What he did not do was reconcile with his ex in order to do “right” by the child, something that surprised many, for that was something folks commonly considered Sheriff Yeager would do (another reason many thought her getting pregnant was entrapment).
The DNA test was performed after the birth.
She was his.
They named her Jane but called her Janie.
I knew why.
I’ll never saddle a kid with a crazy name. Somethin’ he’s gotta spell or repeat or correct someone who’s sayin’ it wrong. My kids are gonna be named names like John, Nick, Max, Mary, Jane, Beth. Solid names. Good names.
This, Tony had told me while we were in bed after we’d made love.
At the time, I thought this was an odd thing for him to say, especially the determination behind it. His name was Tony. His last name was Wilson. Neither were hard to say or spell.
I would understand why when I’d learned he was actually Coert, pronounced “Cort” and spelled in a way I’d never seen before.
Thus it was not surprising his daughter was called Janie.
The private investigator reported that after her birth, Coert stayed with his ex, sleeping on the couch in her apartment for three months in order to help her ease into having a child, be a part of their daughter’s first months on this earth, but also in waiting for when Janie was able, and it was appropriate, that she be away from her mother in order to be only with her dad.
From that point on, he had her every other week and even dragged his ex into court when she threatened leaving Magdalene and taking their daughter with her.
He’d won.
Suffice it to say something the PI didn’t have to report (but he still did), this ex not achieving her aim of trapping Sheriff Yeager but instead buying her ex-boyfriend sleeping on her couch for months and sharing a child with the man she loved enough (albeit clearly unhealthily) to do something that horrible to was not something she relished.
It didn’t help matters that Coert also found time to date.
He was not a serial dater or a player. He asked out women he was interested in and not once, not even once since he’d left Denver, did he ever ask out a woman that he didn’t see at least five times before he ended it.
Their relationship now was apparently a lot easier (if also clearly not everything it could be considering all she’d done) as she’d realized she had every other week free, so she was also dating.
Regardless that Janie’s parents were getting along enough to co-parent, this situation could have been frustrating, upsetting or even infuriating.
If there wasn’t a little girl with dark hair and beautiful hazel eyes that looked utterly adorable in a kitty cat hat.
I had no little girl or little boy, and in the years since I met Tony at that backyard party I’d had very limited opportunities to make one.
Patrick and I didn’t sleep together. Not once. That wasn’t who we were. Not at the start. Not ever. We even had separate bedrooms from the very beginning.
He was not my lover.
He was my savior.
He’d been sixty-five when we’d married.
I’d been twenty-four.
I did not marry him because of his fifteen-thousand-square-foot mansion. I did not marry him because he was the man behind Moreland Heating and Air, a company that had vans moving in sixteen states in the western part of the U.S.
I married him because he loved me, he wanted to protect me, he wanted to keep me safe and he wanted to give me a family.
Not of my own.
His.
It wasn’t a road lined with roses we skipped down happily. It was rocky. Especially in the beginning when Patrick’s children thought I was what everyone, including Coert Yeager, thought I was.
But he was Patrick Moreland. If he put his mind to something, he did it.
And he did it.
I took a very large sip of wine and shoved aside the stack of papers to get to the first of many eight by ten photographs at the back.
Janie, on her feet in a little pink corduroy pinafore dress with a little girl’s long-sleeved thermal under it, which had big, bright pink, purple and aqua daisies on it and bright aqua tights under it, with little girl pink boots (that looked like Ugg) on her feet. She was arched back, smiling, her hand lifted and covering the smiling huge, beautiful lips of a beautiful, dark-haired man who was bent more than double to put his face in hers.
That was taken last October.
It was my favorite.
And it destroyed me.
I flipped the folder closed, hastily shoving all the papers back into it and doing the same with my brother’s.
Coert and Caylen lived one hundred miles apart.
In what Patrick refused to believe was a coincidence (or say, a cruel twist of fate) my estranged brother and the only man I ever loved (that way) both had moved from Denver and now lived in coastal Maine, one hundred miles apart.
Patrick said it was a sign.
Patrick said it was time.
Patrick said he knew with everything that was him that I was meant to be here in Maine. That those two men were going to give me my happily ever after.
Patrick was absolutely sure of it.
He was also most likely very wrong.
But I owed him everything.
So I owed him this.
And from it, I’d have my lighthouse. I’d have my views of the sea. I’d have a fabulous place where the family could come, vacation and spend time with me.
And Caylen was one hundred miles away. After he delivered his last cut, I’d never see him again.
Now Coert . . .
Well, if he could handle living in the same town and co-parenting with a woman who tried to trap him by getting pregnant with his child without his knowledge . . .
He could put up with every once in a while (and less, if I could manage it), seeing me.
It was after I signed the papers.
After I’d made it impossible to turn back, but in an uncommon moment of indecision, I’d realized I’d made a horrible mistake.
After I’d decided to move forward with the renovations (because the old girl needed them), but I wouldn’t go whole hog because I’d be creating three different spaces to rent out to tourists and not living there at all.
After I decided my best bet was to give up on Patrick’s dream and go home to Denver.
It was after all that, I saw it.
I was returning to the lighthouse because first, it was mine and second, I had an appointment with one of the contractors to go over the site.
I’d been there three times since making an offer, and I’d seen them growing, the strong shoots of their shamrock-green stems and leaves startling against the greening (but not yet fully back from winter) spring grass all around them.
But it had been days since I’d been there.
And the last time I was there, they hadn’t opened.
Now . . .
They were open.
You could see them from afar, but as I drove up the slope to the cliff where my lighthouse was, the spectacular beauty of them increased significantly.
I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed.
There were three cars and even more bicycles all along the rickety fence surrounding the old girl with people out on foot, phones or cameras up, pointed at the spectacle.
And the spectacle was a bed of profuse magenta tulips that bled into lips of pure white coming from a sea of shamrock stalks and leaves. There were places where they were more sparse, places that they only trailed through the grass, but all around the lighthouse, the walkways, the outbuildings and much of the open area close to the buildings was a bed of deep pink and startling green.
With so much on my mind, I had not thought about Googling it to see the pictures.
Viewing it in all its glory for the first time in person, I was glad I had not.
I parked my rental by a medium-size SUV that had South Carolina plates and slowly got out of my car, wandering to the fence, staring at what lay before me.