like a banshee to keep him.”
Alice studied Molly speculatively. “Did you fight for Daniel, Molly?”
“No,” Molly admitted. “I don’t know that it would have changed anything, but I’ll still regret it till the day I die.”
Alice forgot for a moment how angry she was about Molly’s role in her breakup with Patrick. She reached for her hand. “I’m so sorry. Why don’t you do something about it now?”
“It’s too late for some things.”
“It’s never too late,” Alice said fiercely.
Molly gave her a sly look. “Then why not go to Patrick and tell him you made a mistake, that you want to fight for a relationship with him?”
Alice frowned at her. “Nice try, but I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Too much pride?”
Molly’s words lingered in Alice’s head long after Molly had left to go back to work. Was it just stubborn pride that kept Alice from going to Patrick? Or was it that she’d really finally seen the light and accepted that they couldn’t make a go of things?
Images of the way they were together tumbled through her head, like snapshots falling to the floor in a jumble. She wanted to freeze each one, linger over it, but they slipped away in rapid succession, leaving only an overall impression of a joy she’d never expected to find.
Wasn’t that worth fighting for? Of course it was, even if it was an uphill battle. She’d painted a rosy picture for herself of the way it could be, of marrying Patrick and making his family her own. But to make that happen, Patrick had to do something he felt was wrong. He had to be willing to let go of the past. If he couldn’t, who was she to demand it? No one had been able to make her see the light when it came to her own parents. Why should she expect so much more of him?
Maybe his stubbornness was a mistake he would come to regret…or maybe it wasn’t. But it was his decision, not hers.
She sighed and stuck her trowel back into the well-worked soil, then brushed the dirt off her hands. Love was a little bit like gardening. It required patience, and sometimes things got messy. But the end results were worth any amount of effort.
Pleased with her analogy, she headed inside to shower and change into something that would send an unmistakable message to Patrick that they weren’t over. Not by a long shot.
Chapter Fifteen
For days after Alice had gone, Patrick wrestled with his conscience and his heart. He knew she would never accept a halfway attempt on his part. He had to be ready to face the past before he could stake any claim at all on a future with her.
Because he couldn’t bring himself to call Daniel, he picked up the phone and called Ryan, turning to his oldest brother for advice as if it were something he’d been doing his whole life.
“I know what Alice wants from me, but I don’t know if I can give it to her,” he told Ryan.
“Has it occurred to you that all she really wants is for you to be truly happy?” Ryan asked. “It took me a while to understand that that was what Maggie was after with me. She could see how burying the past had only given it a power over me that it didn’t deserve. I wasn’t happy. I was just denying my real feelings.”
Like Ryan, Patrick wanted to deny that his folks or even Daniel had any power at all over his life, but he knew that wasn’t true. Without doing a thing, they were standing squarely between him and the future he wanted with Alice.
“Funny thing about finding the right woman, isn’t it?” Ryan said thoughtfully, when Patrick remained silent. “It was Maggie who made me face the fact that I needed to find my family before I could ever move on. She was right. I still have one more step to take, and there’s no way of knowing if it will turn out okay, but once I’ve taken it, I’ll be free of all that weight I’ve been carrying around inside me. It takes a lot of energy to go on hating people, especially after all these years.”
Patrick thought of how consumed he’d been with bitterness and resentment. It had colored the choices he’d made, the lifestyle he’d chosen, even the people he saw and those he avoided because their connections to his folks were too painful. Ryan and Alice were both right.