A Time To Come Home. Darlene Gardner

throat since she pulled into the neighborhood formed with a vengeance. “I’m not sure of anything.”

      Least of all the portion of her plan that would enable her to set the rest in motion. Nobody knew better than Diana what a struggle raising a child alone could be, but there was no longer any reason for her to be solely responsible for Jaye.

      She hadn’t returned to Bentonsville since she was a pregnant sixteen-year-old, but she needed to go back home now. Not to see her mother, but to tell Tyler Benton she’d lied ten years ago when she claimed she’d slept with half the guys at Bentonsville High.

      In reality, she’d only had one lover—Tyler.

      THE AIR-CONDITIONED COOL of the town house contrasted sharply with the oppressive heat inside Diana’s Chevy. So, too, did the cheerful chatter drifting into the foyer from the family room.

      Connor hung his suit jacket on one of the brass hooks beside the front door and followed the noise, easily identifying Jaye’s girlish voice. “I like the folder with the Redskins on the cover the best, but the one with the pink unicorn isn’t bad.”

      Then he heard Abby’s somewhat deeper voice, light and teasing: “I’m surprised a girl as musical as you pays any attention to football.”

      “I like how the players crash into each other,” Jaye stated with enthusiasm. “It’s way cool.”

      Connor rounded a corner and the two females came into view. His niece balanced on her knees beside a coffee table stacked with folders, packages of pens, pencils and binders. Abby, sitting on the love seat dressed in a yellow sundress, looked as pretty as a summer flower.

      “Hey, Uncle Connor.” Jaye smiled at him with her eyes as well as her lips. “We went shopping for school supplies.”

      “I can see that,” he said, moving deeper into the room.

      “And I just discovered Jaye has a passion for football.” Abby rose to her feet and walked into his embrace, looping her arms around his neck.

      He kissed her, his passion heading in a direction that had nothing to do with football, as it always did whenever he touched her. But he kept the kiss brief because Jaye was in the room.

      “Jaye watched a Redskins preseason game with me the other night,” he remarked. “Now she’s hooked.”

      “Oh, no,” Abby said dramatically. “That means I’m outnumbered. What am I to do?”

      “Learn to like football,” Connor said. “Jaye has.”

      “I’d do just about anything for you, Connor Smith.” Abby batted her long, dark eyelashes at him, then scrunched up her face. “But not that.”

      He smiled at her antics, wishing he didn’t have to break the lighthearted mood. The envelope in his hand felt as though it was scorching his skin. He held it out to his niece. “I have something for you, Jaye.”

      “Really?” Her eyes brightened with the excitement of somebody who never got mail. “Who from?”

      “Your mother.”

      The color visibly ebbed from her face, the pleasure in her expression gone. Connor glanced at Abby, whose anxiety came across as tangibly as the sick feeling in his gut.

      He extended the envelope to Jaye, praying she didn’t possess enough knowledge of post office procedure to notice the stamp hadn’t been cancelled.

      It appeared for tense moments as though Jaye would refuse his offering, but then she tore the envelope out of his hand, ripping the plain white paper open as though it contained a Christmas present.

      She unfolded a single sheet of paper and read, the hope he’d briefly glimpsed on her young face vanishing. Her mouth formed the mutinous line he hadn’t seen in a very long time. In one swift motion, she ripped the letter in two, letting the pieces drift to the floor.

      “I hate her,” she exclaimed before brushing by him and running up the stairs.

      His heart dropping like a stone in his chest, Connor picked up the two parts of the letter and pieced them together. Abby came up beside him, touching his arm. “What does it say?”

      “Only that she loves her and will make things up to her one day.”

      Abby glanced at the now-empty path Jaye had taken when she’d sprinted from the room, then regarded Connor with worry etched into her features. Their minds often operated on similar wavelengths, but never more than now.

      “I don’t think your sister realizes how difficult making things up to Jaye is going to be.”

      WAY BACK in what seemed like another lifetime, Diana’s mother used to say there was no time like the present…to do her homework, to clean her room, to practice the piano.

      The saying had been Diana’s first coherent thought upon awakening in her hotel bed. Possibly because Diana was geographically closer to her mother than she’d been since running away to her aunt’s house as a pregnant teenager.

      Or maybe because there was no time like the present—to tell Tyler Benton about Jaye.

      The realization that she had to come clean with Tyler had dawned on her slowly, the same way she’d accepted her need to rectify the mess she’d made of her life.

      It had gradually become clear that the future she planned to build for her daughter should include more than a better-educated mother with a higher-paying job. Diana had never been close to her own father, but that didn’t justify her in keeping Tyler and Jaye apart. She supposed that, deep in her heart, she’d always recognized that father and daughter deserved to know each other.

      Especially because the very valid reason she’d had for keeping Jaye a secret from Tyler no longer applied.

      “No time like the present,” she said aloud in a scratchy morning voice that no one besides her could hear.

      She had nothing else on her agenda. She couldn’t start her waitressing job at the Gaithersburg location of the national chain she’d worked for in Nashville until Tuesday, the same day classes began. The apartment building where she planned to live wouldn’t have a unit available until Friday.

      Today was Saturday, the official start of the Labor Day weekend.

      Nothing was stopping her from getting in the car and making the short drive through the Maryland countryside to the town where she’d grown up and Tyler still lived.

      Nothing except cowardice.

      A memory of the unhappiness she’d glimpse on Jaye’s face in the last few months they’d spent together flashed in Diana’s mind. To be worthy of reuniting with her daughter, she needed to start somewhere.

      She sat up and swung her legs off the bed.

      As she drove over rolling hills and past lush, green fields inexorably closer to Bentonsville a short time later, she reassured herself that this was the right thing to do. Just as she’d been right years ago when she’d lied to Tyler about her sexual history and left town without telling him she was pregnant.

      He’d been such a good friend, sticking steadfastly by her after her brother J.D. died—even after she’d sunk into a dark place where none of the other students at Bentonsville High had dared follow.

      He’d kept her company on the black nights when the thought of going home to the house with the empty bedroom her brother would never occupy again had been too painful.

      He’d rubbed her back the night she’d gotten so wasted she’d spent half of it emptying the contents of her stomach.

      And he’d held her when she cried.

      How could she have let him take responsibility for her pregnancy when it would have tarnished his excellent prospects for a bright future? Especially after he’d gushed about being accepted at Harvard?

      He hadn’t been just any seventeen-year-old, but along with