they never got over it. In the case of Ethan—a man with so much to offer—going through life alone would be a real tragedy.
She was considering that and whether she had the fortitude to wait him out while he wrestled with old demons, when a car pulled into the driveway. To her shock, her father got out and headed toward the house.
“Dad!”
He stopped in his tracks and stared into the shadows. “Sammi? Is that you?”
“It is. What on earth are you doing turning up here this late?”
“Command performance,” he said succinctly. “Your grandmother informed me that I was behaving badly by not being here for every wedding-related event. She said if I missed her brunch for Emily and Boone tomorrow, I might as well not bother showing up at all. She said I didn’t have to be here to pay the bills. She’d send ’em over to Raleigh and add a ten percent surcharge to cover her consulting work. I got the impression she was ready to step in and walk Emily down the aisle in my place, as well.”
Samantha chuckled. “Blackmail, huh?”
He nodded, his expression sheepish. “I’m probably lucky she wasn’t planning to add thirty percent.” He sat down in a rocker beside her. “What are you doing out here at this hour? It’s going on midnight.”
“Things to ponder,” she admitted.
“Such as?”
She hesitated, uncertain how much insight her father could really have to offer. He’d never been around before to give advice. That had been her mom’s domain. Still, he was here now and she could use a friendly ear...and a male perspective.
“Have you ever wondered what you’d have done if the whole biomedical research thing hadn’t worked out?” she asked.
She could see his blank expression in the moonlight and knew that she was asking for something beyond his frame of reference.
“Never mind,” she said, resigned to muddling through on her own. “I guess you never had any doubts about what you wanted, did you? You were driven, dedicated and determined from the get-go.”
“Sure I was,” he replied, then startled her by adding, “But what I truly wanted was to be the finest pediatric oncologist in the country.”
Samantha regarded him with shock. “Are you serious? I never knew that. What happened?”
“Are you sure you want to hear all this? It’s old news.”
“I definitely want to know.” Not only might it help her now, but it would give her a rare insight into this man who’d been an enigma to his family for so long.
“The minute I went through my pediatric rotation in med school, I realized I’d never be able to look into those sweet little faces and know that I couldn’t save them. It would have torn me apart. I was lucky that I recognized that about myself in time to choose a new direction.” He shrugged. “So I dedicated myself to the research side of medicine. No tricky emotions to face. No losses. I have some regrets about that even now, but it was the healthier decision.”
“Why didn’t any of us know this?”
“The decision was made long before you came along.”
“And Mom supported you? She didn’t think any less of you for giving up?”
He smiled. “She told me once that she admired me for admitting I was on the wrong path. See, that’s the thing about unconditional love. You always want what’s best for the other person, even if you have to shift your own needs to accommodate it.”
She tried to reconcile that with her grandmother’s emphasis on compromise. Surely he’d grown up with the same reminders about its importance.
“What about compromise?” she asked.
He laughed. “Ah, that’s the thing. If you truly love the other person, you won’t let him make all the sacrifices. And, yes, I know you girls think your mother did make all the sacrifices, but it’s not entirely true. We worked through every decision together. We were in Raleigh, rather than New York or another Northeast city, because she felt more at home down here and insisted we be close to your grandmother. She wasn’t that close to her own family, and she liked the ties to mine that being just a couple of hours away from here gave us.”
“I never knew that. Of course, I knew she didn’t talk too much about her parents, but I had no idea you’d ever thought about living in New York or some other big East Coast city.”
“There was no reason you should have known. That’s another decision that was made before we even discussed having