Page 103 of Ebbing Tides
He’s never gotten over her.
“Brett,” I said, “hear me out for a second, okay?”
He glowered but offered a curt nod, gesturing for me to continue.
“What would she want you to do right now?” I asked quietly. “I know you did what you thought was best back then, and I respect that. Ihaverespected that.”
“Until now,” he interjected.
I held up a staying hand. “And I apologize for that. But look at them now.Listento them. What would she want you to do?”
Lizzie and Jane both turned to their father, twin looks of betrayal on their faces. They were putting the pieces together, and they would be angry with him, and, no, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything in front of them. But what other opportunity was I going to get? This was the only one I had been given, so I had taken it.
“What is he talking about?” Lizzie asked.
“Daddy, what did you do?” Jane asked.
Brett frowned, his chest rising and falling heavily. Yet, somehow, I knew that frown wasn’t aimed at me.
It was directed inward.
“I won’t apologize,” he said to me, ignoring the questions and angry expressions from his daughters.
“I never asked you to,” I replied.
“But I guess, if they want a relationship with you as adults, it wouldn’t be fair of me to intervene,” he reasoned, speaking slowly, carefully.
I nodded, full of gratitude and feeling like, for once, I had finally won in this life full of losses.
I pulled my phone out. “Girls, give me your numbers,” I said. “Next time I’m in the area, we can meet up.”
“I have to go get mine,” Jane said hurriedly, bolting into the house. “Hold on!”
Lizzie took off after her. “Same!”
I watched them run through the house and up the stairs. They looked like young women now, a far cry from how they’d been when I last saw them. But in my eyes, I only saw the little girls I’d helped to raise for a handful of years. Little girls I tucked in and read bedtime stories to. I braided their hair and made their lunches and wiped their runny noses when they were sick. They had been mine, and all those years between then and now, I had missed. They’d been taken from me, just as Laura had.
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” Brett said once again, as if reading my mind.
“I know,” I assured him. “I never blamed you for that.”
He had hurt his daughters—that much was clear. God only knew how many times throughout the years they had mentioned me, asked about me, wondered about where I was, what I was doing—and God only knew what Brett had said in response. Thelies he must’ve told, the panicked diversions of conversation. Perhaps it should’ve angered me more than it did … but hadn’t I thought I was doing the right thing by obeying his orders and staying away?
As it turned out, we’d both been wrong.
The girls were quick to return, phones in hand. They asked if they could call me, text me, video-chat, and to every request, I said, “Of course.”
As I punched their numbers into my phone, Jane looked over my shoulder and exclaimed, “Oh my God, you got a dog?!”
With a glance behind me, I saw Lido’s tongue slobbering out the open window to taste the air, and I chuckled. “Yeah, that’s Lido. Uncle Sid and Aunt Grace gave him to me a while back,” I said, the titles and names rolling off my tongue easily, like we hadn’t skipped a single beat.
“Lido?” Lizzie asked, awestruck. “Like that song you used to play for us?”
I turned to look at her, shocked she remembered. It had been so long ago, they’d been so young …
“‘Lido Shuffle’ by Boz Scaggs,” I said. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
“I remember that,” Jane chimed in, holding her phone, a mournful expression befalling her face. “Mommy loved that song. And we’d turn it up really loud and sing at the top of our lungs during the chorus.”
