The Cliff House. RaeAnne Thayne

apparition. Somehow she was able to refrain.

      “I take it from what you said that you’re not married. Does that mean you’re planning to raise the baby by yourself?”

      She refused to let herself panic about how very daunting that task suddenly seemed.

      “Yes. I’m certainly not the only woman in the world who has ever done that.”

      “True enough. And you raised the girls yourself, so you had plenty of practice, right?”

      With preteens and teenagers. Not with an infant. That panic flared again and she stuffed it down. She was forty years old, far more experienced than she’d been when she took custody of the girls. She could do it.

      “What are you doing here, Ed?” If she asked enough times, he would have to answer her, right?

      He again looked uncomfortable, his gaze shifting away from her. “It’s a long story. The short answer is that I wanted to give you fair warning that I’m moving to Cape Sanctuary with my daughter.”

      Moving. Here. Of all the places in this vast and beautiful country, he was moving here? She had spent twenty years trying to forget him. How on earth was she supposed to do that if he was living in Cape Sanctuary, a town of only ten thousand people?

      She couldn’t wrap her head around that. Instead, she focused on what was probably the least earthshaking part of his sentence. “You have a daughter.”

      The somewhat harsh planes of his face softened with a tenderness that made her throat feel tight and achy.

      “Yes. Rowan. She’s almost twelve. Smart, funny, curious. Amazing.”

      As a middle school teacher, she couldn’t help being touched by his words. She knew too many parents who came to parent-teacher conferences armed with only criticism and frustration toward their child for not measuring up to expectations.

      “How lovely. And her mother?”

      His smile slipped. “She...died two years ago,” he said curtly.

      Oh. Poor Ed and poor Rowan. Compassion nudged its way past the shock. She knew what it was to lose her own mother at a young age and how hard it had been on Bea and Daisy, too.

      She had so hoped that by leaving him after she took custody of the girls, by allowing him the freedom to pursue his dreams unencumbered by all her baggage, she was providing him the chance to find the happy-ever-after she had been incapable of providing him.

      After his own rough youth, largely putting his own life on hold from the age of twelve to help his single mother raise his own brother and sisters after his father walked out, she couldn’t ask Ed to do the same thing all over again with two orphaned, needy girls.

      It hurt more than she might have expected to know her hopes for him to have a beautiful, happy life hadn’t been realized. He had walked his own tough road. He had loved again, lost again and was now a widower.

      “I’m so sorry.”

      “Thank you. That’s why I’m here, actually. Not here in your living room but here in Cape Sanctuary. My daughter and I were in need of a fresh start and a good friend from medical school told me her partner was retiring and asked if I wanted to go into practice with her. You might know her. Joanne Chen.”

      Her stomach suddenly twisted with the vague nausea of the past few weeks that had been hinting at the truth she had been afraid to verify.

      “I do know her,” she said. “Quite well, actually. She’s my doctor.”

      He made a face. “When I saw you standing there with the pregnancy test, I feared as much. That’s one of the reasons I looked you up and decided to stop by, so that neither one of us had any sudden shocks when we run into each other at the clinic or on the street somewhere.”

      “You mean like the kind of shock I might have had when I opened my front door to find you on the other side, after all these years?”

      He gave her a rueful look. “Yeah. Exactly like that one. I’m sorry. I should have thought things through a little more and phoned you first. In retrospect, I probably should have reached out to discuss it with you when Rowan and I were first considering the idea of moving here.”

      “You can move wherever you want, Ed. I’m not queen and supreme ruler of Cape Sanctuary. Though I have to ask, of all the places you could have gone, why here?”

      “My previous practice was in Pasadena and I wanted more of a small-town atmosphere. And Rowan wanted somewhere with a beach. She is learning to surf and wants to be a marine biologist. I bumped into Jo at a conference several months ago and she mentioned what a lovely town it was. It seemed the perfect place for us. Not tiny but small enough to feel like we’re part of the community.”

      “You remembered that I lived here?”

      “I remembered that this is where you took the girls when you left. I remember you talking about how much you loved it here, how your time in foster care in Cape Sanctuary was the happiest of your life, when you felt the most safe.”

      Had she said that? Probably. After their mother died when she was eight and her only sister, Jewel, ten years older, took off with the first of a long string of boyfriends, Stella spent five difficult years being bounced from foster home to foster home throughout Northern California. At thirteen, she finally landed in Cape Sanctuary with a wonderful, loving couple that showed her by example how a family should function. With mutual respect, with kindness, with compassion.

      Cape Sanctuary had become home. Naturally, this was also where she had been compelled to bring Daisy and Beatriz when she obtained custody of them after Jewel’s lifestyle caught up with her.

      “I guess, maybe I was looking for some kind of peace for me and for Rowan. She’s struggling a great deal over losing her mom. Holly’s death was...difficult. The idea of finding a sanctuary somewhere held a great deal of appeal. To be honest, I figured you probably weren’t here anymore. I just assumed you would have married and moved away and had the half-dozen children you always talked about wanting.”

      She hadn’t. Just the girls and this tiny life growing inside her, though she wanted to think she had been a mother figure to all the foster children who had found temporary refuge here at Three Oaks.

      “I’m still here,” she said, stating the obvious. “Thank you for warning me. Now I guess I’ll have no excuse to freak out if I see you in the street.”

      He was quiet, those handsome features she had loved so much looking tense and uncomfortable. “I want this move to work for my daughter, but not at the expense of you and your comfort here in town.”

      “It’s fine. It doesn’t bother me at all,” she lied. “You can move wherever you want, Ed. I hope that after all this time, we can be friends.”

      “I would like that,” he said softly. “I’ve learned that true friends in this life are as rare as they are precious.”

      He gave her a careful look. “Now that we’ve cleared the air and gotten the initial shock of seeing each other again out of the way, tell me about this pregnancy. How far along do you think you might be?”

      She knew exactly how far along she was, five weeks to the day since her last rendezvous with the doctor’s turkey baster. She wasn’t about to tell him that, though.

      “About a month,” she said.

      “Jo is an excellent doctor. You’re in good hands.”

      “Yes. She’s been my OB-GYN for years.”

      “Then you know her skills well.” He cleared his throat. “Thank you for being understanding. It’s really great to see you, Stella. And congratulations again.”

      “Thank you.”

      “I guess I’ll see you around.”

      Not if I see you first, she wanted to say, but that would