“Just tell me why my father didn’t give me the cards or this letter.”

“Did Ruth know you were coming?”

“Not until today,” Gavin said. He could tell Odelia was stalling as she calculated how little she could say. “Give me an honest answer. Then I’ll leave you in peace.”

“Peace? I haven’t known a moment’s peace since I birthed my first baby.” His stepmother looked up at him. “Sit down.”

Gavin took the chair opposite hers, deliberately stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankle, a casual pose he knew would annoy her.

“Your father, God rest his soul, told me he didn’t give you the cards at first because he was afraid it would upset you. He figured you’d get over missing your mother faster if you didn’t get reminded of her all the time.”

As if his mother had ever been out of his mind for even a second in those months after she’d left. Gavin reached into his jacket pocket to touch the velvet box that held his mother’s locket. He’d had it messengered out from his house in New York, where it sat in a dark corner of his bedroom safe.

“Once we got married, your father wanted you to look upon me as your mother, so he went on hiding the cards. I told him he should burn them, but he said it wouldn’t be right because they were yours. I should have burned them myself after he died, but I honored his memory by keeping them.”

Thank God his father and stepmother had held on to at least that much conscience.

“It’s the plane ticket that’s got you all riled up, isn’t it?” Odelia looked down at her hands twisted together in her lap. “When your mother called up with that damn fool idea of sending the ticket, I knew you’d jump at the chance to run away to her, even though she’d left me to do all the hard work of raising her child. But your father said we had to give you the choice.” She lifted her head to glare at Gavin. “Only your father needed you here to help him with the store. I didn’t want him lifting those heavy feed bags anymore. It was going to kill him. It did kill him.” Her voice hitched on the last two words. She cleared her throat before she continued. “So I made sure to get to the mail before your father did. Once I had the letter, I told him Susannah had called to say she’d changed her mind, but she was too embarrassed to admit it to him.”

Disbelief rolled through Gavin, making him feel nauseated. Odelia had kept him away from his mother just to have a strong back in the feed store.

She looked away. “I tried to burn that cursed ticket about half a dozen times, but I’d hear your father’s voice saying that it wasn’t right, so I hid it until he died. Then I put it in his desk drawer with all the other cards. Until that interfering Ruth found ’em all.”

“But I went away to college,” Gavin said, still not quite able to grasp her motive. “I wasn’t home.”

“You came home for summers and holidays. Busy times at the store. You owed him that.”

And he’d hated every minute he’d spent in the store under the critical eye of his father. Whatever way he stacked the feed bags, it could have been done better. If he took an order on the phone, he should have known the customer wanted alfalfa, not timothy hay. His father always justified it by saying, “I’m telling you so you can do it properly the next time.”

Odelia turned her face back to him. “He shouldn’t have let you go away to college, but your father said he’d promised your mother, and he couldn’t go back on his word. So he worked himself to death, like I knew he would.”

“I sent him money so he could hire help,” Gavin said. “When he refused it, I sent it to Ruth, and she got Tobias to use it.”

“He didn’t need money. He needed his son to do his duty.”

Gavin felt a sudden buoyancy, as though he’d dodged a bullet he hadn’t known was aimed at him. For all the darkness he carried inside him, at least he’d escaped Odelia and his father’s vision of his future and made his own life—and a damned successful one at that.

While he watched, Odelia seemed to shrivel up and turn into a bitter old woman, but one who no longer held any power over him.

“I wouldn’t have stayed with you, no matter what you did,” Gavin said. “New York was always my goal.”

“None of us understood how much you wanted that until you up and left.”

“I was the cuckoo’s egg in the sparrow’s nest.” Gavin tucked the letter back into his pocket. It was good to know his father’s integrity had held firm. The idea of his father breaking a promise had unsettled him more than he realized.

His anger transmuted into a sense of triumph. Somehow his younger self had found the strength to stand against the pressures of his parents and gotten him to the right place. Maybe the difficulty of the journey made the destination that much more satisfying. Gavin stood up. “You won’t care, but I forgive you, Odelia.”

It was a gift he was giving himself. For Allie’s sake.

His stepmother shot up as though she’d been hit with a cattle prod. “I’ve got nothing to be sorry for, so don’t go acting like I do.”

Gavin turned on his heel and walked out of the parlor, out of the front door, and out of his miserable childhood into his future.

Chapter 31

His mother’s neighborhood in Casa Grande, Arizona, was a weird patchwork of well-irrigated green lawns and arid cactus gardens. As they neared her address, he tried to guess which style Susannah would prefer. He thrust his hand into his jacket pocket and stroked his fingers over the soft velvet of the locket’s case, trying to draw some reassurance about his mother’s welcome from her last gift to him.

He should have had Allie with him. But he’d lost the one person he could have counted on to understand how he felt. The one person who wanted him to be whole. This would be the test of whether he was capable of being the man Allie needed. He’d better not screw it up.

“This is it, Mr. Miller,” the driver said as the limo glided to a stop by the curb.

Gavin peered out the window. Maybe he should have given his mother some warning instead of appearing on her doorstep after more than twenty years.

While he gathered his courage, he let his gaze roam over the stucco house with its red-tiled roof, noting the huge saguaro cactus that dominated the front yard, catching the flashes of vivid color from the flowers in the large clay urns on either side of the front door. His mother had chosen native plants and patterns of rocks rather than a water-gulping green lawn. An intriguing entrance with an angled roof over a blue-and-white-tiled porch added eye-catching style while still working within the context of the houses around it.