Lucy’s eyes search her father’s face, but he doesn’t say anything more. She reaches over and squeezes his hand.
Then she looks at Fitz and says quietly, “My mother died seven months ago. She had it on her calendar to come here the week after she died. I think… I think she never had a chance to speak with mydad about her visit with you, about her plans to bring you together again.”
Fitz nods. It’s what he has begun to piece together himself over these last minutes.All these long months, he thinks. All these months of thinking his son had refused to see him, even with his kind wife hoping to set things right between them.
But that isn’t what happened. Gregory had not known that Fitz was here, just miles from his own home. He hadn’t known that his wife had tracked down Fitz and visited him, that she had looked at Fitz with her bright, endlessly forgiving eyes and told him that she would try to bring his son to him.
“That note in my mom’s calendar,” Lucy tells Fitz, wonder shining in her expression. “It’s the whole reason I ended up at the Oceanview Home. We might never have met if I hadn’t seen it. My mom brought all of us together, just like she hoped.” She pauses. “No, not all of us,” she amends softly. “I wish she were here with us.”
“I’m so sorry,” Fitz says, looking first into Lucy’s open face and then his son’s closed one. “She was a lovely woman.”
He watches Gregory’s jaw twitch with anger.
“I should never have told you not to marry her,” Fitz says in a quick, low voice, hoping he can say all he needs to say before his son stops him. “I was wrong. I remember now how it feels to love someone the way you loved her, and I know it is nothing anyone should get in the way of, no matter what may or may not come. I should never have tried to stop you from being with her. You were in love. I’d forgotten how that felt, but I remember now.”
Gregory eyes him warily. “What do you mean, you remember now? What do you remember?”
“Love!” Fitz says, lifting his hands off his walker and shouting a bit. “I remember love! It’s a spectacular feeling. It changes the whole look of your world, changes the light, changes the air, changes you.”
This is what he remembered when he smelled the roses in this very garden: he remembered how it felt to be deeply in love. He remembered in exquisite detail the night he’d asked Millie to marry him. He found himself once again on one knee, looking up into Millie’s shining, searching brown eyes. Her gorgeous chestnut hair curled around her ears. The restaurant was dimly lit, but there was a candle on the table, and her skin glowed in its light. She had never looked more beautiful. Her hand was impossibly light in his. Her perfume encircled him—the dark, sensual scent of amber mixed with the something softer and sweeter, something like honey. He wanted to look into her lovely face for the rest of his life. His heart hammered in his chest. Around them, the restaurant was a swirl of muffled conversation and low string music, but Fitz hardly noticed because he was watching Millie’s face so closely, and his body was filled with a decadent sort of warmth because he could see now, and he’d known already, really, amid the din of his clattering heart, what she was about to say, and then—oh, thank God!—she said it.
“Yes.” Her rosebud lips had spread into a smile around the word. “Yes!”
And then he was standing and pulling Millie to her feet and the sensation of kissing her, of his lips against hers, tumbled through his body in crashing, sparkling waves, once again as he stood decades later in the rose garden. He held her in his arms, his vision blurred with elation and relief, and the warmth that he felt within him when he gazed at her, his great and startling love, wrapped itselfaround both of them, pulling them into each other, binding them.
He’d carried his anger toward Millie for so long that he’d somehow forgotten this… the delicious, incomparable ecstasy of the love he’d once felt for her.
But now Fitz remembers. How could he have ever asked his son to turn his back on that feeling?
“Wait,” Lucy says slowly, staring at him. “You didn’t want my dad and mom to be together?”
“I never told Lucy what happened,” Gregory says. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“No,” says Fitz. “I can understand that.”
Lucy looks back and forth between them. “Should I leave?”
Gregory shakes his head. “Stay. It’s all in the past.”
But Fitz only needs one look at his son to know it isn’t all in the past. The pain is right there with them on that bench, making it difficult for them to reach each other. He turns to Lucy and takes a deep breath.
“Before your mother came to visit me here, I’d only met her once,” he says. “I only knew a few things about her. I knew she was an artist. I knew that as far as your father was concerned, the sun rose and set for her.” He feels Gregory shift on the bench beside him. He needs to hurry past all of this, before Gregory has a chance to stand up and leave. “When I met your mother, she reminded me of my wife, Millie. And that… well, your father knows. That upset me very much.”
Lucy glances at her father.
“My mother left us when I was a baby,” Gregory tells her quietly. “She moved across the country and married my father’s boss.”
Lucy’s eyes widen.
Fitz remembers vividly how it felt when Millie had ripped her arm free from his grip and strode out the front door of their house on Spruce Street on that horrible night decades earlier. He would have run after her and begged her to stay, but he did not want to leave Gregory—asleep in his crib—alone in the house. Long before the divorce was finalized, everyone in the office knew that Fitz’s wife was seeing his boss, Bruce Leonard. Eventually Bruce and Millie were married in New York. She wanted nothing to do with Fitz or with Gregory. Many years later, when Gregory was a teenager, Millie passed away from cancer. Fitz and Gregory attended her funeral in New York, and no one who had gathered there to mourn her had any idea who they were.
“I never wanted you to feel that kind of pain again,” Fitz tells his son. He turns to Lucy. “I worried your mother would prove to be… flighty like Millie.” He shakes his head apologetically. “That’s the truth of it—that’s how I felt at the time. I worried for your father. Maybe it was because your mother was… bohemian. I worried that she was not the type to stick around, and I didn’t want your father to repeat my mistake. I didn’t want him to be abandoned by another woman. I didn’t want his heart—his spirit—broken. And even though your father was a grown man, I thought I had the right, the obligation even, to tell him that he should not, could not, marry your mother.”
There is more to it, but Fitz isn’t going to tell his granddaughter that as charming as her mother was, he felt there was something cloaked about her expression the entire time she sat at his dining table. She had secrets, he thought, secrets that Gregory didn’t know. Fitz was convinced that there was something not quite up frontabout her, some sort of darkness or pain that she would inevitably burden Fitz’s only son with as well.
Fitz wondered if maybe when you had an enthralling mother who abandoned you, you spent your life looking for an enthralling woman who promised to never leave you. It all seemed like bad news to him. Bad, bad news. Another Barnes man cursed to do anything in the name of love.
“Nell,” Gregory says now, his voice hard. “You don’t seem to know her name. Her name was Eleanor McKinney Barnes. Nell.”
