“Good-bye, Emma,” he said, and while his voice wasn’t unkind, she flinched when the call disconnected.
Please don’t let that be our final good-bye, she thought as she lowered her hand holding her phone.
Her mind seemed to be running in two tracks. One moved slow enough for her to understand what she needed to do next. The other raced right up against the rails. She ignored that part for now and crouched down in front of her daughter.
“Missy,” she said. “It’s time for you to know who your father is and why I’ve had you living here with Fran and Matt and not me.”
The little girl said nothing, and Emma knew she was the one who needed to talk. In every instance, she was the one who needed to find the courage to open her mouth and talk. To Missy. To Ginger. To Robert.
And especially to Ted, at least if she wanted to keep him in her life.
It had only been a few weeks since he’d come into her life, but so much had changed in such a short time.
“Okay, Momma,” Missy said, drawing in a long breath. “I’m ready.” She’d asked innocent questions about her father in the past, and Emma had been able to put her off, because she was a child. She’d been asking a lot more questions about where Emma lived and why Missy couldn’t be there with her in the past couple of years, and Emma knew she’d started to grow her “big kid” eyes.
She was almost finished with fifth grade now, and she could handle this.
“Let’s go sit in the swing on the back porch,” she said. “And I’ll tell you everything.”
As she walked with her daughter through the kitchen, she tried to put on a brave face for Fran and Matt. Ted’s words from a while ago rang in her ears.
Everything comes out when it’s the right time.
Everything comes out in the end.
All she could do now was pray that it was the right time, and that her daughter would understand why Emma had done what she’d done.
Chapter Seventeen
Ted sat on the front steps of the Annex, watching the gravel lot in front of the homestead. Paula lay at his feet, while Randy, Simon, and Ryan had taken up spots at the bottom of the steps. The sky looked like an old bruise, but he couldn’t enjoy it. Emma should’ve been back by now.
What he had to judge that by, he didn’t know. Last week, she’d returned to the ranch while it was still light. Tonight, he hadn’t seen her car or heard from her—and he’d called twice.
He would not allow himself to call again. He’d told her about Robert and William. He’d told Ginger too. And Nate. They’d counseled him to just wait and see what Emma would say when she got back.
He was starting to think she wasn’t coming back. She could literally be anywhere, and his foot started to bounce again. He hated this gnawing, anxious feeling in his chest, the way his stomach felt too heavy one moment and then like it had lost gravity the next.
The sun went completely down, and darkness draped over everything. Emma still hadn’t come back.
The front door opened behind him, and Nate said, “Teddy, you’ve got to come in.”
“I can’t,” he said.
Nate sighed as he sat on the hard cement with Ted. “This is so uncomfortable.” He nudged Paula, who just lifted her head and glared at Nate.
Yes, it was, but Ted couldn’t force himself to get up. Nate let the silence go on and on between them, and finally Ted said, “I started to fall for her.”
“I know.”
“I feel like an idiot.”
“I know.”
“She’s never going to tell me anything.”
“You don’t know that.”
Ted looked toward the faint yellow lights leaking out from between the slats in the blinds at the West Wing. “What if she doesn’t come back?”
“Ginger says she will. She says she’s been this late before.” Nate sat with him a while longer, and then he went in with the words, “Ten more minutes, Teddy. Then I’m dragging you back inside. You can’t do this to yourself.”
Ted nodded, and as soon as Nate closed the door, sealing Ted outside in the blackness alone, he set a timer for nine minutes. He wasn’t going to make his best friend come drag him inside. He wasn’t pathetic.
He just wanted to see Emma and make sure she was okay. Yes, he wanted to question her again. Maybe in person, he could get his earnest and genuine feelings across. Couldn’t she tell he just wanted to help her?
Why wouldn’t she let him help her?
Nine minutes later, his alarm buzzed, and Ted stood up. His backside and legs pricked with pins and needles, and he almost went down again. He steadied himself and whispered, “Please bring her home safely, Lord,” and went inside.
He slept fitfully, his window open so he could hear the noise if anyone should pull onto the gravel or close a car door. When he woke in the morning, he felt like he’d never truly settled to sleep, and he’d lost count of how many times he’d sat up to peer through the blinds when he’d thought he’d heard something.
He couldn’t stop himself from looking through the blinds first thing, but he didn’t see Emma’s car parked in the driveway.
She really hadn’t come back to the ranch.
Surly and with his mind swollen with worry, he dressed and got to work, skipping breakfast completely. He was on cleaning stalls that morning, and he moved Raindrop and Lucky Penny to the pasture. With several more horses out of their stalls and his four canine friends close by, Ted put on his gloves and picked up the shovel.
He could work, work, work to distract himself. He wished he had a pair of earbuds so he could play really loud music and drown out his thoughts. As it was, all he had to entertain him while he scooped sawdust and straw was his own circular thoughts about Emma.
He finished the stalls in record time and went to feed her babies. “Do you know where she is?” he asked Second Best. He could relate to the colt’s name, because Ted felt about two inches tall and invisible. He knew Emma had seen him when he’d come to the ranch, but it didn’t matter. She was so far into her own narrative that she couldn’t see the possibility of telling him the truth. Doing so would unravel so many of her other carefully crafted lies until her entire existence would collapse.
She’d have to admit that everything in her life was a fraud, and Ted didn’t know many people who would do that. He’d seen it before as a lawyer. It was easier to live inside the lies one told themselves. They made their own reality, and they would not deviate from it, even when presented with facts and direct evidence to the contrary.
That’s where Emma existed, and Ted was simply not enough of a pull to get her to come out and see a new way of being.
He sighed as Second Best cried for more milk, and bless his heart, Ted wanted to give it to him. So he did, despite Emma’s strong warnings not to feed the babies more than one bottle each morning and night. She was actually trying to wean them, and she would not approve of Ted giving in to Second Best.
“But she’s not here,” he muttered to himself, a muted sense of darkness gathering in his very soul. He was well-acquainted with this feeling, and he struggled mightily against it. In River Bay, all he had to do was look at Nate for the man to know of the storm in Ted’s soul.