none of them knew their father as well as they thought they did. Gemma’s hero, and the man Kate had given up her life for, to serve and protect, was the same man who had dismissed Caroline all her life because she was different from him. If this was true, he had a cruel side to him too.
Caroline had always thought him controlling and domineering. He knew how to manipulate all of them, and even Juliette, who loved him so deeply. He got them all to do what he wanted, supposedly for their own good. Had he taken the children from Scarlett, a young, innocent girl in Texas, who was probably no match for his strength and willfulness? They had each paid a price for not having a mother. Their lives would have been so different if she’d been there. Caroline could remember easily all the times she’d missed having a mother growing up, and fantasized about her. Girl Scouts, dressing for prom, becoming a woman with only Kate to explain it to her. And not being the son her father wanted or wanting to ride in the rodeo like Kate. It had taken years of therapy to find herself after she married, and even while she was in college. Now it turned out that their mother was alive all along? Was she a derelict of some kind? It took Caroline’s breath away just thinking about it. She and Gemma went for a walk that afternoon, before starting an inventory of their father’s belongings, which was painful enough, without adding this to it. Kate went back to their father’s house to see Juliette again. She was trying to make sense of it too.
Juliette was wearing jeans and an old black sweater when she opened the door to Kate. She looked like she’d lost weight in the last few days, and she’d been thin enough before. Her mane of red hair, which she sometimes wore in a braid or a bun, was loose, and made her look a little wild when she let Kate in. She was intrinsically feminine and sexy, and very French, although she’d been in the States for twenty-four years. She spoke English well now, but had never lost her accent. She offered Kate coffee or wine, and had a glass of red wine in her hand. She wasn’t a heavy drinker, but she liked good wine, especially at a time like this. From one moment to the next, the bottom had fallen out of her world.
“Hello, Kate, come and sit down. It sounds like you found some big surprises in the safe. It’s strange. I always wondered about your mother, but Jimmy wouldn’t talk about her. He didn’t even say how she died. Only that she broke his heart when she died, and he couldn’t stay in Texas, so he came here. But I never suspected she was alive. You were so young when you moved here. What woman leaves three babies that age?”
“Maybe she was crazy or on drugs and he was trying to protect us,” Kate said, looking pensive. She preferred to think the best of him, especially now that he was gone. “Are you doing okay?”
Juliette shrugged in answer in her very Gallic way. “Not so okay,” she admitted. “He was too young to die. And he was so strong. I don’t understand. Life is so fragile. What about you? What will you do now about the ranch? Will you sell it?”
“Never,” Kate answered immediately. “I’ve got Thad to help me…and you.” She smiled at the woman who had been a friend but not a mother to her. Juliette was more of a woman than anything, and had no maternal instincts, and said so. She had never wanted children with him, although she loved him passionately, and hadn’t pretended to be a mother to his. She and Jimmy’s daughters were just good friends. Maybe it was why they got along with her. She never tried to displace the memory of the mother they fantasized about and had never known. Jimmy liked that about her too. She wasn’t someone who interfered, or imposed her will on him. She went with the flow, and had survived a loss of her own. She had been very much in love with the husband who had died in France when she was twenty-nine. She shared a more mature love with Jimmy, and a deep physical passion that had lasted until the end.