“Do you honestly think I want my children to meet you?” he asked scornfully.
“My children know her and they love her, and they call her Auntie Cady and they’re old enough to call her Cady. Cady’s told them to call her Cady, but they refuse to call her anything but Auntie Cady because it shows her the respect she deserves.”
“Well, bravo for your children,” Caylen sneered.
Kath opened her mouth but I stopped her from speaking when I asked, “Do you need to go sit in the car?”
“Do you think I’m leaving you alone with this fool?” she asked back.
“All right, I’ve had enough. I don’t need to stand in my own front door and be insulted,” Caylen declared.
I turned back to him. “Caylen, seriously, please just give me ten minutes. Kath will sit in the car.”
“Cady, seriously, no, not ten minutes, not ten more seconds. I don’t know why you’re here out of the blue but I don’t want to spend ten minutes listening to you talk circles, when in the end you’re going to ask for money or tell me you and your friend need a place to stay or whatever it is you think you can get out of me,” Caylen retorted then ordered, “Take your hand from my door.”
“Uh, dude, do you not see her bodacious Jag?” Kath asked under her breath.
Caylen shot her a scowl.
I stayed on target.
“Mom loved me,” I told him softly.
He looked back to me. “She birthed you, she had no choice.”
“Dad—” I kept trying.
He pushed hard on the door. “We’re not doing this.”
I wasn’t going to let another important man in my life shut me out until I’d given it my all, so I put my weight in my hand.
“They would want us to try—”
“Get your hand off my door.”
“Caylen, okay, just five minutes,” I haggled.
“Get your hand off my door, Cady, or I swear to God, I’m phoning the police.”
“But you’re my brother and I’m your sister.”
“You can think that, but just so you know, you’re nothing to me. I haven’t thought of you in years. I wish I didn’t have to think of you now. And when I close this door, I won’t think of you again, I hope, until the day I die.”
Hearing that, I took my hand off the door. Caylen wasn’t ready for it so I caught the flash of surprise in his face before it slammed hard into its frame.
Though even if he was ready for it, he’d probably have done the same.
“Oh my God, he isn’t a dick, he’s a total—” Kath started to fume.
I turned to her and she took one look at my face and clamped her mouth shut.
She then took my arm and guided me back to the Jag. She led me to the passenger seat. She took my keys. She got into the driver’s side and adjusted the seat (Kath was tall—tall, blonde, brown-eyed, sporty and willowy—a California girl raised in the Mile High City), reversed out of Caylen’s drive and set us on the road to home.
I stared out the side window.
After some time, she said softly, “Your mom did that.”
I drew breath in through my nose and said nothing.
“You were the black sheep. Didn’t fit. Instead of celebrating your differences and opening their eyes to see how kind and caring and generous you are, or any of the many wonderful things that make you, they only saw the part about you being different. Your dad would have gotten there. But your mom was controlling and she wanted to carve you into the model that fit in with the little world she’d decided you were all going to live in, and her behavior toward you gave your brother permission to be that way, treat you that way, feel superior the way he feels. He grew up with that. He doesn’t know anything else.”
I didn’t have a reply so I didn’t say anything.
“Though, now I’m thinking it also has a lot to do with him just being born mostly an asshole,” she muttered.
I had no reply to that either.
“You want him to be your father,” she continued gently. “You want a chance to relive the time before you lost your dad so you have another shot of winning at least your father back. But he’s not your father, Cady. He’s not your mother. He’s that guy and that was going to happen no matter if you got down on your knees and begged him to give you a chance.”
I looked forward. “You’re probably right and I love you, but I have to say I’m not sure you helped very much.”
“I’m Patrick Moreland’s daughter-in-law and I have been for twenty-five years, and in that honored position and as your friend it’s my job not to let anyone shit on you, Cady. You have all the patience in the world for that kind of thing because your parents and brother taught you that. Patrick, Pat, Mike, Pam, Daly, Shannon, me . . . not so much.”
She was right.
We both fell silent.
She broke it, asking hesitantly, “Did you have hope it would go another way?”
“Not even a little bit.”
I felt her relief hit the car that she hadn’t messed things up.
I looked out the side window and murmured, “But it would have been a lovely surprise.”
She reached out and squeezed my knee.
I sighed.
She drove.
I rode.
I encouraged her to stop in the town with the cute shops.
We had dinner there too.
So we got back to the studio late.
It was the next morning and I had no idea how he got in. The gate was closed. The workers were careful to do that.
But he got in.
And he got in while I was sitting on my veranda with my mug of coffee. I had on a pair of heather-gray jersey men’s-style pajamas with a bright-pink drawstring on the bottoms. And in such an outfit, and with Kath still asleep enjoying a holiday with me in Maine, away from mom and wife duties and determined not to get too far out of her time zone sleep-wise, I wasn’t ready and I had no backup.
Truth be told, I’d probably never be ready.
And what I wasn’t ready for was Sheriff Coert Yeager strolling around the side of my studio in his sheriff shirt and his impeccable jeans, wearing smoky-lensed aviator sunglasses looking tall and beautiful and in command.
Even through his glasses I could feel his eyes on me as he walked across the front of the studio, stopped at the bottom of the steps and put his hands to his narrow hips.
I sat frozen, one leg curled under me, one leg bent with my bare foot in the seat, my coffee cup held aloft in both hands in front of me, my eyes glued to him.
His deep voice growled across the ten feet between us.
“Got a call from the boys up in Waldo County.”
“I’m sorry?” I whispered, wondering if he could even hear it.
I didn’t know if he did or not with what he said next.
“They reported that Caylen Webster contacted them to share two foul-mouthed women came to his door and harassed him, refused to leave when asked repeatedly, and barred the door when he tried to close it against them.”
My God.
Did Caylen hate me that much?
“I’m gonna have to ask you not to return to your brother’s, Cady,” Coert stated. “And whatever,” he jerked his chin up toward the house, “friend you got in there with you, I’m gonna have to ask you to make sure she does the same.”
“I was attempting—”
“Don’t need an explanation.”
He didn’t need one seventeen years ago either.
“Of course you don’t,” I murmured.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing, Sheriff,” I said louder. “Rest assured, we won’t be returning to Caylen’s.”
He tipped his chin this time like a man would do if he was touching his hand to the brim of a hat then he said outrageously, “I’m gonna have to ask you not to make trouble in town either.”
I stared at him with my lips parted.
I parted them farther to state, “I don’t have a brother who hates me so much he reports a visit from his sister who was attempting to reconcile with him to the police living in Magdalene, so you can rest even further assured that there’ll be no problems from me in town. Unless the folks at the Lobster Market take issue with people eating too much seafood, that is.”