My back straightened and I turned toward her in my chair. “Kath, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this and it’s not a surprise he’s this angry.”
Her brows shot high. “How is that not a surprise? How, in all that happened, does he have even the ittiest bit of right to be angry, much less that angry? Still?”
“I promised him I’d stick with him,” I explained something I’d told her before. “No matter what. I didn’t stick with him, Kath.” I lifted a shoulder. “Sure, when I thought he was a drug dealer or the lackey of a drug dealer or whatever I thought he was, which by the way I never asked, I was completely okay with it and our life and how I fell into having one with him. When I found out he was an undercover cop, though . . .” I let that hang because she knew the end of that sentence too.
“He lied to you.”
“It was his job.”
“He lied to you and he slept with you and he listened to you making plans for your future together all while he was lying to you. You didn’t even know his real name.”
“It was his job, Kathy,” I repeated.
“When he knew who you were, how you were, he couldn’t tell you that?”
“Our connection came strong and fast, and it was there but it wouldn’t be very wise of him to share with some girl he didn’t really know that he was working undercover in the dangerous pursuit of bringing down drug dealers, possibly increasing that danger enormously if he did.”
“He thought it was wise enough to sleep with you in order to use you to make others think he was what he was not,” she parried.
“He slept with me for more than that,” I whispered.
“Cady,” she whispered back.
I shook that hurt off because I knew she didn’t mean to deliver it and stated, “I knew who he was. I knew how he was. It was a shock when I found out what exactly he was, but when I had time to calm down and think about it, it wasn’t a surprise and that’s what it was all about. When we began. When he practically begged me to believe in him, stick with him, not give up on us. Because I saw it in his eyes. I knew he was good down to his soul. I knew in some part of me he was not the man he was pretending to be. And when it all happened, I let it all get to me and I stopped believing when I’d promised him I would never do that.”
“And through all of that he couldn’t know who you were enough to trust you?”
This was the part I hadn’t been able to come to terms with.
However.
“I was a twenty-three-year-old girl perfectly okay with starting an emotionally and physically intense relationship with a man I suspected of being a not very good one, in those terms. And then, even if I’d promised to stick with him, weeks after my world collapsed around me, when he came back to me to put us back together, he found I was engaged to a very wealthy, sixty-five-year-old man. He didn’t know why. He jumped to conclusions. But honestly, Kath, could you blame him?”
She turned to the sea.
She couldn’t blame him. She, too, had not been my biggest fan when Patrick essentially decided to adopt me and do it the only way he could—as bizarre as it was, it made sense in a time when everything happening was bizarre—adopting me by marrying me.
“It was weird, what Patrick and I did, even you thought that,” I reminded her carefully.
“I got it in the end,” she muttered.
She did.
“Coert thought it was a betrayal,” I told her.
She turned screwed up eyes to me. “Yeah, he did, and he made sure you weren’t in any question about that, didn’t he? He didn’t even listen. And if he’d shut up and listened, maybe you would have never married Patrick. Maybe that baby of his would be a fifteen-year-old baby of both of yours and you’d have a couple others besides.”
“Then I wouldn’t have had Patrick, and Pat, and you, and you know I could go on.”
“Do you think Patrick would have given up on you? Let you out of his life?” she scoffed. “Hardly. He always wanted a daughter and you know the lengths he went to for that years before he’d even met you.”
I tried not to wince at the memory of learning that knowledge but Kath was on a tear, so she didn’t notice my struggle, she just carried on.
“He’d always wanted his sons to have a little sister. If that came with her boyfriend, he’d take it. He wanted you to have his last name because he didn’t think those two jerks deserved you carrying theirs. But if you took this sheriff guy’s name, he wouldn’t have cared. He’d have done anything to give you what you wanted, including getting back that cop for you. Why do you think he had him followed all these years?”
“I know that and that’s why this is all on me,” I returned.
And it was all on me like everything was all on me.
“You know, this is beautiful and it’s peaceful and I’m so glad this place rocks, and I’m okay leaving you here because half of me wants to drag Pat out here just to live in this studio. Not to mention this is our first night here and all. But I’m gonna shatter all of that right now by saying I’m sick of that shit.”
I blinked at her.
She kept talking.
“You were twenty-three years old, barely more than a girl, and hurting. Your family had totally turned their backs on you. Your best friend hated your guts, and I say that part since I don’t wanna get into all the other insanity she perpetrated. It turned out the man you were desperately in love with lied to you from the second you met and used you to hurt people who were, let’s face it, not that great but they were yours. Your friends. People you cared about. So your head was screwed up and some old guy with a kind heart and a gentle way with words offers you love and support and an end to all that garbage, and you took him up on it. So what? You know, if all that happened to me and I met Patrick knowing how he can be and he said, ‘Let me help you leave this all behind.’ I’d say yes too. In a second. So give yourself a break with all that for once, would you?”
“I don’t even—”
She shook her hand at me. “No. And no again with you cutting this sheriff some slack when you won’t cut yourself some. You’ve forgiven him for using you and lying to you and putting you in danger too but you can’t forgive yourself for trusting the right man who pulled out all the stops to take care of you. And furthermore, you have no problems with that sheriff holding a grudge after all these years when he never gave you the opportunity to explain where you were with all that.”
It was then she shook her head and turned back to the sea.
“No,” she continued. “He doesn’t get my forgiveness that easily. You can do that, okay. But he doesn’t get that from me.”
I didn’t share with her Coert wouldn’t care because he didn’t know her, and furthermore, he wasn’t like that. I knew Tony, not Coert, but I figured both were one and the same (at least the Tony he gave to me, mostly) and he never cared what anyone thought.
Which meant Coert didn’t even care how I felt about these things.
However, the bottom line was it was a long time ago. So he was still beautiful. So he was still single. So he had the most adorable little girl I’d ever seen (outside of Verity, Ellie, Melanie and Bea).
It was a long time ago.
So it was time to move on.
I’d come out here not even knowing what I’d wanted to come of it (exactly).
But what I got was my lighthouse. A place of peace that wasn’t full of memories of Patrick but was still another something beautiful he gave me.
And that was a good place to be.
“It was almost two decades ago, Kathy,” I reminded her. “It’s time everyone moved on.”
She turned again to me. “And you tense and looking over your shoulder at the gol’darned market? Is that moving on?”
“That will stop too. We just got here today. I’ll settle in. I promise.”
“He should have told you he was a cop,” she spat.
“He didn’t.”
“He should have listened to you when he came back to you.”
“He didn’t.”