The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,90
what I think you’re thinking.”
I didn’t say anything.
“No,” Calvin said, correctly interpreting my silence. “No, no, no, no. You cannot seriously be thinking about inviting your cousin to move in with you. You hardly know him.”
“That’s not true,” I countered. “I see him almost every day at the coffee shop. And after that day I ran into him and we went out for ice cream, I really feel like we’ve gotten to be friends.”
“I’m sure you have. But that doesn’t mean you should be roommates. Look, Celia, I love your compassion. I’m sure Teddy is just as nice as you say he is, and it’s sweet that you’re worried about him. But I worry about you. What about the birth mother? She might not be that keen on placing her baby in a home with some strange man.”
“He’s not a strange man,” I protested. “He’s family.”
“I know,” Calvin said gently. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you know almost nothing about him. You can’t rescue the whole world, cupcake. What if helping Teddy means that you won’t be able to adopt Peaches?”
Calvin wasn’t asking me anything that I hadn’t already asked myself fifty times since leaving the restaurant. When I didn’t respond, Calvin said, “Promise me you’ll really think it through before you do anything, okay?”
THAT WAS AN easy promise to keep. For the next couple of days, it was impossible to do much besides think it through. There was so much to think about.
In the ideal scenario, the birth mother might actually like the idea of seeing the baby placed into a home that came complete with an on-site uncle. It was possible. But it was also possible that offering a home to Teddy might jeopardize the chances of my being able to adopt Peaches. Was I really prepared to take that risk?
But Teddy was family and I knew in my bones that this is what Calpurnia would have wanted. Possibly even what she’d been trying to tell me all along?
Charleston was a small town, but not that small. What were the chances of our meeting the way we had, of my just happening to choose the shop where he worked as my regular coffee shop? There were a dozen places closer to the house but, for some reason, I’d decided that Bitty and Beau’s was the right one for me.
Could that have been a coincidence? Maybe. But what about finding the pictures? And the fact that, on the very day I’d gone to my aunt’s grave with a picture of Calpurnia and the father of her child, I’d left the churchyard, rounded a corner, and literally run into my cousin? Was that a coincidence too? And what about the dream?
I’d assumed that the bearded man in the shadows was Trey Holcomb, but couldn’t it just as easily have been Teddy? In the dream, Calpurnia held the baby in her arms out to me. Couldn’t she have been pointing me to her baby just as much as to mine?
It was only a dream, a strange one. And I still wasn’t sure I knew exactly what it meant, if anything. The whole thing could have been a result of my subconscious brain trying to sort through the confusing confluence of desire and circumstance that had become my life since returning to Charleston. It was possible that the dreams were just dreams. It was also possible that being thrust into Teddy’s orbit even before knowing we were related was a coincidence, however unlikely. There was no way to know for sure.
But one thing I did know. No matter what the law said about the nonexistent inheritance rights of adopted children, my aunt would not have wanted her son to be unhappy or lack a proper home. Teddy was Calpurnia’s son; he had just as much right to live here as I did.
No matter how much you think or consider the consequences or try to justify going another direction, some things are impossible to ignore. That’s what I tried to explain, when I opened my journal that night.
Dear Peaches,
When you know in your heart that something is right, that’s what you have to do, even if other people think it’s a mistake, even if it means losing something you’ve wanted very, very much for a very long time.
There is something that I am thinking about doing— No, that’s not quite it. There is something I know that I have to do, because I know that it’s right. Following through on it