Linda Lael - Montana Creeds - Tyler

Oh, right, Lily wanted to say, but she bit the words back.

Hal chuckled, but he sounded so tired. It was time he took his medicine and went to bed. Lily started to get up, fetch the bag full of pill bottles the doctor had sent home with them.

“Sit down, Lily,” her dad said firmly.

Lily dropped back into her chair.

“I still want to know about Burke. Not the public version. Scion of a great New England family, and all that tripe. What was he really like?”

“Shallow,” Lily said, after some thought. “Funny. Smart. Self-assured.”

“And very popular with other women?” Hal put the question gently, but at the same time there was no doubt that he expected an answer and wouldn’t let her off the hook until she replied honestly. Clearly, he wasn’t going to be thrown off the trail.

“Very,” Lily agreed. “There were a lot of little signs, looking back on it—the usual hang-ups on the phone, odd charges on his credit card statements, condoms in his suitcase when we never used them, things like that. I pretended not to notice—I guess I couldn’t face the truth about us. But it was almost as though Burke wanted me to know he was running around. I’d call his room when he was out of town on a flight, and a woman would answer. He’d say the whole crew was in his room, that they were celebrating somebody’s birthday, or anniversary, or retirement….” She stopped, blushed, shook her head at her own naiveté. “Until he crashed his plane, I thought he was trying to maneuver me into making the first move, so he wouldn’t have to be the first Kenyon in history to file for divorce. But when I finally did see a lawyer, he—”

“Killed himself,” Hal supplied gently.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure of that? Maybe it was an accident.”

“I wish I could believe it was,” Lily said, very softly. “There wasn’t a note or anything, but he called me a couple of hours before he went up that last time. He was upset, begging for another chance, making all sorts of crazy promises.” She stopped, swallowed hard. “He said—he said it wouldn’t be right to break up Tess’s home—that we should have another child—”

“And?”

“I said I didn’t love him anymore. That it was no use trying, since we’d had counseling after his last affair.” Lily bit down so hard on her lower lip that she felt a sting of pain, and half expected to taste blood. She’d wanted more children so badly, but Burke had always refused. One was enough, he’d said. As though Tess were a mortgage with a balloon payment, an object of some kind. “What’s the old saying? ‘Act in haste, repent at leisure’?”

“Even if Burke did crash that plane because you were divorcing him, Lily, it wouldn’t be your fault.”

“I keep telling myself that,” Lily admitted. “But a part of me knows it’s a lie.” The truth burst out then, all on its own, too big to contain. “I didn’t love Burke—I never did. I loved the idea of love, of being someone’s wife, someone’s mother. Having a home and a family. But deep down, I never cared for Burke the way I should have, and I guess he knew it.”

She’d never loved Burke because she’d never stopped loving Tyler, and she was the kind of woman who mated for life.

“You must have had feelings for Burke,” her dad reasoned gently. “After all, you married him. You had Tess with him.”

“I guess in the beginning, I thought I’d fall in love with him in time. But it didn’t happen.” A tear slid down Lily’s cheek, and she didn’t bother to brush it away. “I shouldn’t have gone through with the wedding. He might be alive today if I hadn’t.”

“There’s no way of knowing that,” Hal told her. “Let yourself off the hook, Lily, if only because there’s no way you can change the past, and because Tess needs a happy mother, one who’s looking ahead, not backward.”

“I am happy,” she insisted, for the second time that evening.

Hal’s sigh was heavy with bittersweet amusement, and a certain degree of resignation. “No, you’re not,” he argued. “Your mother was all for the marriage, but I remember looking down into your face, just before I walked you up that church aisle and gave you away, and seeing something in your eyes that made me want to put a stop to the whole shindig, then and there. Tell all those Kenyons and their fancy friends and relations to eat, drink and be merry, but there wouldn’t be a ceremony.”

Hal Ryder had given his daughter away long before her wedding day, but that was beside the point. Still another old, dusty skeleton that shouldn’t be exhumed.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Lily asked softly. “To me, at least?”

Hal sighed again. “Because I didn’t have the right. You were a grown woman, with a college education and a good job. And because I’d already interfered in your life once before that.” Just when Lily would have asked what he’d meant by that last part, he stood, stretched, yawned. “I’m worn-out, Lily,” he confessed. “I need some rest.”

“I’ll get your pills,” Lily said, rising, too.

“Oh, yes,” Hal replied, with grim humor. “My pills. Let’s not forget those.”

In the kitchen, she opened the pharmacy bag, studied the labels on the little brown bottles and carefully counted out the appropriate doses while her father set the coffeepot for morning and locked the back door.

Lily raised an eyebrow at that. “People are locking their doors in Stillwater Springs these days?” she asked.

“I normally don’t,” Hal admitted. “But I’ve got you and Tess to think about now. And some things have been happening around here lately—”

He’d just made a speech, in the living room, about what a good place Stillwater Springs was to raise a child—specifically Tess. Knowing he was tired, Lily didn’t call him on the contradiction between his words and his actions.

I’ve got you and Tess to think about now.

Had he convinced himself they would be staying on in Stillwater Springs permanently, after he’d recovered enough to live on his own?

She set the handful of pills on a paper towel, and handed them to him, along with a glass of water. Watched as he forced down his medication.

“Good night, sweetheart,” he said, when he’d finished, and set his empty glass in the sink.

When was the last time he’d called her sweetheart?

The night Tyler handed her her heart in fragments, that was when. Had it really been that long?

Lily closed her eyes and waited until Hal had left the room. Until she heard his bedroom door close, just down the hall from the kitchen.

And then she cried, for little girls without fathers.

And for big ones, too.

T HE FIFTEEN-YEAR GAP between their ages showed in Doreen’s haggard face in ways it hadn’t way back when. She looked thin in her casino-waitress uniform, and lines in her forehead were etched deep. She was developing jowls, and her mouth was hard, the lipstick too red and slightly off-center.

Still, her weary eyes softened a little when she recognized Tyler, standing in one of the casino’s several restaurants. Davie sat in a booth nearby, nursing a soda and pretending to read one of those glorified comic books that pass as a novel.

He doesn’t look much like me, Tyler thought, with distracted regret. But, then, he hadn’t looked much like Jake Creed, either. Secretly, he’d fantasized that his mother had been fooling around, conceived him with some lover, but he doubted his own fantasy. Poor Angie didn’t seem to have the strength to defy Jake that way. Or maybe she’d just loved her husband too much to cheat.

In the end, that love had destroyed her.

“Tyler,” Doreen said, almost breathing the name.