Open Your Heart (Kings Grove #4) - Delancey Stewart Page 0,64

at me, smiled faintly. “She was furious with me when I insisted that we weren’t right for each other, and she told me she’d never give me a divorce.”

“But she did, eventually.”

He lifted a shoulder, smiled a sad smile with his eyes still on the road. “She didn’t. She told me I’d come around eventually, and that neither of us could remarry. She wouldn’t divorce me, but she left. She disappeared while I was at work—took you with her. She left me a note saying that if I cared enough to find her, it would be a sign that we were meant to be together. I think she believed that if she was gone, I’d realize how much I really loved her. But all I realized was that I couldn’t live without you, Harper.”

“What did you do?”

“I lost my mind. I went everywhere I could think of, tried to understand where she would go, where she would take you. Called everyone we knew. Finally I hired a private investigator.”

“Oh my gosh.” I hadn’t known any of this.

“It took three years,” he said, his voice breaking. “I missed three years of your life then—because your mother thought it would teach me a lesson. And when I finally found you, finally got to see you again, she was with another man. I told her I’d take her back, that I was wrong.” He looked at me then, his eyes wet. “Harper, I would have done anything to get you back. I would have suffered through the marriage, put up with her accusations. I missed you so much, worried so much.”

He was quiet for a long minute, shaking his head slowly.

“She didn’t want me then. But she wanted you—I honestly think she kept you from me partly to continue hurting me. She never went through with the divorce, you know.”

“You’re still married?”

“Technically, yes.”

“Why didn’t you just take me, Dad?” I tried to imagine what my life would have been like, growing up with my dad instead of my mom.

“Your mother was caring for you. She wasn’t a bad mother, and she loved you. She’d moved in with the man she was seeing—he was a stable, rational man. He seemed to care about you. They argued that they could take good care of you, send you to the best schools.”

“You didn’t want shared custody?”

“Your mother convinced me it would be bad for you, to be shuttled back and forth.”

“You could have sued,” I tried.

The sad smile flashed again. “I should have done so many things I didn’t do. But I didn’t. I let you stay with them. I thought your mom was finally happy, that it would be stable for you, that it’d be good.”

“We didn’t stay there long,” I said, a vague memory of packing up the car late at night flashing through my mind. “We left.”

“Over and over again. She would move from one relationship to another, one city to another. And she never told me where she was… where you were. Years would go by in between contacts. I spent a fortune on private investigators, trying to keep track of you. When I found you again at sixteen and I called you, she’d already convinced you I didn’t want you. Do you remember talking to me on the phone? You were in Florida then.”

I did. I’d been evil to him. Mom had told me he didn’t visit because he didn’t care. She’d fed me lies about my father, and kept me moving for years so he couldn’t find me… all the things I’d believed growing up started to dissolve and shatter. “Oh my God.” I couldn’t look at him, and I stared out the window, not seeing anything passing the car. I could only see the memories flashing through my mind, reassembling into something I’d never recognized before, finally seeing the truth.

“Why didn’t you tell me when I went to college? Or started work in New York?” I finally asked, wanting to continue being angry at him, but now feeling a creeping anger at myself for not asking more questions, and at my mother for lying to me for so long.

“Would you have talked to me?”

“Probably not.”

“I did try, Harper. I came to see you once. But you were with a man—you looked happy.”

“You came? You saw me?” I scanned my mind, looking for my dad standing on a street watching me with Andrew, maybe someone I’d noticed in the periphery of my busy life in New York, but nothing was