Kathleen O'Brien - The Vineyard of Hopes and Dreams

“Yes, ma’am,” he said in a phony meek voice. He sat on the edge of the bed, glancing at the magazine she’d been reading. It was a catalog of elaborate play sets designed to look like castles, forts and other magical places. One touted itself as Atlantis.

“You know,” he said, “if you don’t want the ever-expanding offspring to sap your life force, maybe you shouldn’t keep adding to the Disneyland you’ve built in the backyard.”

She whisked the magazine away with a low tutting sound. “I was just relaxing my mind after studying last month’s receipts, and Red’s proposal for the new store in Sonoma.” She fiddled a little more with her robe. “He seemed to think you might be heading over there today to take a look at it. Did you?”

He chuckled again. She was good, but they all knew each other too well. “Don’t try to smooth-talk me,” he said in a teasing imitation of her words. “What you really want to know is whether I went to Ben Watson’s funeral.”

She smiled, well aware the jig was up. “Well?” She tried to mimic his one-eyebrow query. But no one could beat Colby on that look, not even Red and Matt, though they’d spent their youths trying.

She settled for a scowl. “Well? Did you?”

He nodded. “Yes. And the answer to your next question is yes, as well.”

She lifted her chin haughtily. “My next question?”

“Yes. You want to know whether Hayley was there. It’s a fair question. I know you’ve wondered…all these years… We’ve all wondered. So yes, she was there. And she looked fine.”

“Fine?” His grandmother rolled her magazine into a tube, the paper making a soft, slithering noise. When it was safely rolled, she gripped it firmly. “What does fine mean?”

As Colby searched for the right words, a vision of Hayley Watson rose before his mind’s eye. What did fine mean? What exactly should he say to describe how she’d changed?

The transformation was dramatic. She had changed so much that, on a conscious level, he probably wouldn’t have recognized her. He might have had to ask someone to be sure—except that his body had identified her in an instant. The minute he laid eyes on her, every nerve ending he possessed zapped him with a small electric charge.

“She looks completely different. Poised, and well dressed. And she was wearing her hair—” He put his hands up and waved them around his head, trying to imply the complicated halo-braid kind of thing that had controlled her long, thick, honey-colored waves. “I don’t know. Sophisticated. She looks like someone else, actually.”

His grandmother tilted her head. “That’s the best you can do? I never saw her—or her hair—back then, except in pictures. Why would I care how she wears it now? I mean, does she look well? I don’t expect happy, given the circumstances, but does she look healthy and content?”

Did she? “Healthy, definitely. Content… I really couldn’t say. Maybe.”

Nana Lina nodded, tapping the magazine roll against her knee slowly. “Well, considering that until today we thought she might be buried out in that vineyard, along with her mother and her sister, I guess that’s saying a lot.”

Colby cut his gaze to the picture window, even though the drapes were shut and there was nothing to see.

Nana Lina didn’t know, of course, that twelve years ago, Colby had hired a private investigator to make sure all three Watson women were safe and well.

All he’d wanted, really, was to know that Hayley was alive. He shouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life wondering if there might be any truth to the local rumors that three ghostly beauties went weeping through the Foggy Valley Vineyard on nights with a full moon.

Finding them had cost a lot of money—at least, it had seemed like a lot to a twenty-three-year-old still in his last year of law school. Obviously the women had been desperate to keep their location a secret, in case Ben decided to follow them and make good on his threat that, if Evelyn Watson didn’t live with him, she wouldn’t live at all.

Something Colby’s investigator did must have tipped Evelyn off, because when Colby got the information and tried to contact her a few weeks later, all three of them—Evelyn, Hayley and Genevieve—were gone. No notice at their little apartment or their jobs. No forwarding address.

He hadn’t tried again. He knew Hayley didn’t want to see him—not if she’d remained away, without so much as an email, for years. And if she didn’t want to see him, he wasn’t going to push himself back into her life.

Especially since the investigator had told him there was no sign of a child. Colby had tried to forget it—forget her. She’d probably been mistaken about the baby, done some wishful thinking and turned a late period into an imaginary pregnancy. He’d been just a few months shy of going to college, and she had been desperate at the thought of being left behind. It wouldn’t, he told himself, be the first time a clingy female had tried to will a baby into being, just to trap a man.

It made Colby cringe to remember the bullshit he’d try to sell himself.

“Did she seem surprised to see you?”

He looked up, and he saw Nana Lina’s gaze on him, sharp and probing.

“She didn’t show it, but of course she must have been. She kept it short and…” Sweet wasn’t really the right word, was it? “We exchanged only a very few words, and they weren’t particularly personal.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Let’s just say she doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve anymore.”

“Good.” His grandmother nodded, and he wondered what that tone was in her voice. It didn’t sound judgmental. It sounded…sad. Was it possible that she, like Colby, had found herself regretting what they did all those years ago? If she regretted what they’d said, what they’d done, she’d never showed it.

“Was she alone?”

Alone? For a minute, he could see Hayley standing there, in the wooded cemetery, with a storm building around her, and her dead father’s casket hovering just above the big rectangular hole. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone who looked more alone.

“Her mother wasn’t with her,” he said, deciding he’d just stick to the facts. “Neither was Genevieve.”

“No husband? No boyfriend?”

He shook his head. “No. No husband. No wedding ring. No—” He took a deep breath. “No family at all. At least, no one who had come to the cemetery with her.”

And he left it at that. But he knew that, as they sat there in silence, they were both thinking the same tangled thoughts.

No husband, no boyfriend.

And no sixteen-year-old total stranger, no nameless child with black hair and blue eyes who might, just might, have been Nana Lina’s unacknowledged great-grandson.

“THAT’S BEAUTIFUL, ELENA,” Hayley said, picking up the crayon drawing Roland’s granddaughter had made for her as they played and colored after dinner. “Is that me?”

Elena nodded somberly, and Hayley was glad she had interpreted it correctly. At four, the child’s art skills were still fairly primitive, but it seemed to be an illustration of a girl sleeping on the fragile tip-top branches of a tree. The stick figure, which stretched out rigidly across the branch, had bright yellow hair, and the tree’s leaves were made of circles so vigorously drawn they had left little green crayon shavings behind on the paper.

The four of them—Hayley, Elena, Roland and his wife, Miranda—had gathered in the front room of the little square adobe foreman’s house—well, what used to be the foreman’s house, back before her father started selling off the acreage. Now it was just Roland’s house.

Hayley smiled over at the serene-faced man, who sat in his straight-backed chair near the fireplace, watching quietly. “You must have made this tree story seem very romantic.”