At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories) - By Barbara Bretton Page 0,107
because she knew it could never happen again.
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He unfurled the future for her like a flag of silk. The fact that they would have a future seemed like a miracle to him, like the first snowfall or a baby's smile. They had been handed a second chance and he wasn't about to waste a moment of it.
Words poured from his mouth the way they had poured from his fingers onto the keyboard. She was the key to everything. Without Gracie by his side, life was nothing more than a counting down of the days. He created castles in the air for her, castles with a foundation of unshakable love, and after a bit he realized that she lay curled on the bed next to him but she hadn't said anything at all.
"Gracie?" He rolled on his side and looked at her through the darkness. "Is something wrong?" He reached out and touched her cheek. It was damp with tears. "Did I hurt you?"
She took his face between her hands and ran her thumbs across his cheekbones, down to the corners of his mouth. "I love you so much," she said. "Nothing will ever change that."
He felt the icy breath of fear against the back of his neck. "What is it?" Eight years was a long time to be apart from the one you love. He knew nothing about that time. "You can tell me anything."
"I tried to find the nerve to tell you all day but there was one interruption after the other." She sat up straight with her back against the headboard. "I don't know. Maybe I was looking for a reason not to tell you at all."
"This is about that day, isn't it?"
"Yes." The look in her eyes scared him. Sadness was in her eyes and regret. She drew in a deep breath and the sound struck him like a physical blow. "Your father knew about us. A friend at the courthouse in Portland sent him a copy of our marriage license."
The icy breath grew colder still. "How did you find out?"
She clasped her hands together but her fingers still shook. "He came to my house that afternoon. He told me we were all wrong for each other, that I would only hold you back—"
"But you were the one with the ambitions. I—"
She wouldn't let him continue. If she stopped, she would never manage to say the words and she needed to say them more than anything in the world. "He knew me, Noah. He knew what made me tick. But I wouldn't give in. I told him I loved you, that I would make you happy, that you were the best thing that ever happened to me. He even tried to buy me off, as if money was the one thing I couldn't refuse but I wouldn't give an inch."
Noah leaned back against the pillow as the story took shape in front of him. He'd found his father parked along the side of the road not far from the docks where Gracie lived. Simon's dying words had been about Gracie. Why hadn't he realized that before?
"Did he threaten you? What did he say that made you run?"
"He told me about my mother, that they loved each other." Her voice broke and the sound tore at Noah's heart. "He said they were going to leave their spouses, take me and run away. They were only forty, he said, still young enough to build a new life. I didn't want to believe him but all the bits and pieces suddenly started to fit together, all those things about my life that had never made sense before—"
"Spit it out," he demanded, as fear downshifted into anger. "What does any of that have to do with us? I don't give a damn what happened between them. All I want to know is what made you throw away our dreams."
"Oh God, Noah, don't you see?" She knelt in front of him, forcing him to meet her eyes. "Simon was my father too."
Chapter Seventeen
Her words tumbled around inside his head like Scrabble tiles.
"Say that again." Maybe if he heard the words a second time, he'd be able to make sense out of them.
She was crying. He saw that. He understood that. She knelt in front of him, knees sinking into the mattress, her slender body illuminated by a thin ribbon of moonlight spilling through the window.
Then she said it again. "Simon Chase was my father, too."