The Vineyard of Hopes and Dreams. Kathleen O'Brien

to avoid sounding pushy or entitled. “I understand that you may well have nothing to say to me. But I have something I’d like to say to you.”

       She wasn’t going for it. He could tell by the way her full lips tightened. “Colby, I—”

       “Please,” he said. It wasn’t a word she—or anyone else—had often heard him utter. “I’ve owed you an apology for seventeen years, and I don’t want to lose this chance to make it now.”

       She clearly hadn’t been expecting that. Her arms fell to her sides, as if suddenly limp with surprise. Her gaze scanned his face—though he had no idea what she searched for.

       Finally she nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’m listening.”

       He glanced at her lightweight suit—a sign that wherever she lived probably didn’t have the chilly nights of Northern California. “You look cold. May I come in?”

       “No.”

       He had to laugh at little at that. “You aren’t planning to make this easy for me, are you?”

       She smiled, too, but it was cool and unamused. “I’m not planning to make it difficult for you, if that’s what you’re implying. But neither do I see why it’s my responsibility to make it easy. I didn’t ask for an apology. I don’t require one, and I don’t think you owe me one. As I said, I believe it’s all ancient history, and best left alone. You’re the one who seems to feel it’s important.”

       He felt slightly stunned, as if her attitude were an unexpected jab to the gut. He had really been a romantic idiot, hadn’t he? All this time he’d secretly thought that, if they were ever to meet again, even if it was by accident, on a crowded street, some irresistible force that had survived the whole heartbreaking mess would draw them together.

       Like some sad sack in a chick flick, he had actually believed that, if he ever got the chance, he could make things right.

       He looked straight into her blue eyes. “God, Hayley. Are you really as indifferent as you sound?”

       “Yes.” She shrugged. “I’ve had seventeen years to make peace with what happened. I’m not saying I wasn’t angry at first. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard. But it’s over. Life goes on.”

       She didn’t so much as blink. He couldn’t detect even a microscopic flinch that might have suggested she lied. She still looked only tired, cold and slightly irritated.

       “Fair enough,” he said, refusing to be thrown off his course, even by that total apathy. “But the truth is, I’m still looking for the peace you say you’ve found. I’ve done a lot of soul searching over these years. And I think the reason I can’t get over…over what happened…is that I was to blame.”

       She didn’t contradict him. She just waited.

       “What I did was indefensible, Hayley, and I’ve never had a chance to apologize. I’ve never had a chance to make it right.”

       He thought he might have seen a sudden flare of color in her cheeks, but when she moved, the light changed and the pink disappeared. She shook her head once, crisply. “Those are children’s words, Colby. There’s no making it right. In the real world, there are some mistakes you can’t undo.”

       “Maybe. But I still need to say it. I need to tell you how sorry I am. From the minute you told me you were pregnant, I knew the baby was mine. I knew there hadn’t been any other men—boys…”

       He cringed at the awkward phrasing. Where had all his fantasy speeches gone? In his dreams, he was so eloquent he moved her to forgiving tears. Where had all those powerful words gone now that he finally needed them?

       She still didn’t move a muscle. But she was clearly listening. And that was something, he supposed.

       “I was a coward. Partly, I was afraid of what my grandparents would think.”

       Hayley’s news had come only three months after his parents’ deaths. He’d been eighteen, grieving, both for his beloved mom and dad, and for the loss of his sheltered, idyllic life. His grandparents, who were the strongest people he knew—then or now—had been devastated by the death of their son and daughter-in-law, but they’d rallied for the sake of the boys.

       How could he tell them he’d let them down already? How could he add another disaster to their burden? That’s actually how he had thought of the baby: a disaster. And so he’d jumped through the one escape hatch he could find. He and Hayley had always been off-again, on-again. For a teenager, the forty minutes between San Francisco, where Colby lived, and Sonoma, where Hayley lived, might as well have been half a world away.

       He’d met her the summer he was sixteen, when he’d been sent to the little Sonoma town of Ridley to work in the Diamante just opened there. They’d dated all summer, and they’d hung out sometimes over the school breaks, too—Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, spring break. Then the next two summers, he’d requested the Ridley assignment again, and picked up right where he left off with Hayley.

       But that last summer, they’d broken up. A fight about Colby going away to college. The gossip that had been circulating among their friends was that she’d taken up with her old boyfriend, who was consoling her in the time-honored way.

       Colby’s pride had been wounded when he heard the rumors, and he wasn’t in the mood to believe her when she came to him, crying and saying she was going to have a baby. He told himself she was just trying to trap him. She’d been needy all summer, fearful that he’d forget her when he left for college in the fall.

       So that’s what he had told his grandparents—that, even if her story was true, and she was pregnant, Hayley had probably slept with another boy. She was just trying to pin it on Colby because he was richer and a better catch.

       Whether they believed him or not, they backed him. They’d met with Ben and Evelyn Watson and told them that their grandson felt he was being wrongly accused. They requested a paternity test.

       Nana Lina and Grandpa Colm had seemed satisfied, and reported that the meeting had been more civilized than they’d expected, given Ben Watson’s temper. But that night, without a word to anyone—including Colby—Evelyn Watson and her two daughters had driven off into the night, never to return to Foggy Valley Vineyard.

       He’d been shocked, but selfishly, a little relieved. Colby had told himself, and his grandparents, that her flight was proof enough that she’d been lying.

       It made him wince to think of all that now. Who did that kind of thing? He’d been one mixed up young man that year, but that was no excuse.

       Hayley seemed to have been digesting his statement about being afraid to tell Nana Lina and Grandpa Colm. Her jaw and mouth had a hard, cynical set—and he suddenly realized he had seen that look before. That was the look she had turned on him when he asked her if she was sure the baby was his.

       “Your grandparents worshipped the three of you,” she said. “Their perfect young lions. They might have been angry, but they would never have stopped loving you. They would have supported you, no matter what.”

       She was right, of course. His fear of letting them down had been only part of his motivation for being such a fool. The other part was even less admirable.

       “I know,” he admitted grimly. “The truth was, I simply didn’t want to believe the baby was mine. I was spoiled, and I was excited about going away to college—the girls, the parties, the whole frat-boy experience. I didn’t want to be tied down with a wife and baby.”

       “No,” she said, her tone dry. “Of course you didn’t.”

       He didn’t blame her for the sarcasm. It was a lot less than he deserved. In fact, he might have felt better if she had yelled at him, or slapped him or burst into tears. The idea that he was too unworthy to hate made him feel cold, and strangely empty inside.

       “At first,” he went on, “when I heard you were gone,