Page 71 of The Secret of Emerald Cottage

Return to Sender.

“The top one just has your name on it, like a note to draw your attention, but the rest are all addressed to you from your father, all unopened.” She glanced up, the shock in her gaze morphing into pain. “Why, Brec?”

His jaw stiffened. “I told you once before, he was dead to me long before he died.”

Tears suddenly glazed her eyes, and he felt the impact like a kick in his gut. “But you never even gave him a chance to explain,” she whispered, a deep crevice cutting in at the bridge of her nose despite the wide expanse of her eyes. “A chance to apologize, to ask your forgiveness.”

His jaw nudged up. “He didn’t deserve it and I wouldn’t give it, Molly. Not then, not now. Not ever.” A tic flickered in his cheek, warning her to back off.

But then, when had she ever done that?

Her chin rose to match his. “No, he might not deserve it, Brec, but youdo! You can’t heal without it, my friend, nor can you move forward in your commitment to God without it either.”

Her friend. A muscle throbbed in his temple. Which is all he’d ever be unless he did things her way. Temper rising, he leveled a stern finger, praying she would just let it go. Praying? The irony didn’t escape him. But his temper sure did. “Look, Molly, we’re good friends, but I’m telling you right now to butt out. You and Aunt Lilly have bulldozed me enough for a lifetime, and if and when I decide to forgive my father, it will be my timing and my decision, got it?”

She held out the letters with a plea in her tone. “So, don’t forgive him right now, you bullhead, but at least read the letters, please?”

He snatched the packet from her hands and all but hurled it back onto the shelf, hands taut on his hips as he leaned in to stare her down. “When I’m bloody good and ready, Stewart, and not a moment before, got it?”

“Yeah, I got it,” she said, jerking the letter packet back down from the shelf to shove it in her purse. “You’re a stiff-necked, pig-headed mule who’s putting your own wounded pride and pain before the God who can actually deliver you from it.” She grabbed one of the photo-album boxes and tried to heft it off the shelf.

“Move over,” he snapped, prodding her aside to lift the first of two boxes of photo albums. Heart racing, he carried them one by one to an old brocade sofa on the far side of the room beneath a lone window.

“Thanks.” She followed behind while he set the boxes down on the coffee table where he’d once played Power Rangers and Metal Masters on his Game Boy with friends.

“How ’bout I take one container and you take the other?” Molly asked in a bright tone he knew was mostly to smooth things over again … and to shore him up.

“Sure.” He stared at the worn sofa and his grandmother’s richly carved Victorian coffee and end tables that hadn’t fit into his father’s love of modern décor. His mom hadn’t been able to part with them, so they’d been relegated to the dusty attic, deemed unfit for his lifestyle.

Kind of like Mom and me.

Brec just stood there as Molly sat down and opened the box closest to her, his limbs as stiff as the stupid Victorian tables, unwilling to begin the process. Maybe he was a mule, he thought as she lugged the first of many photo albums onto her lap. Flipping to the first page, she glanced up with a tender smile that seemed to ache around the edges, nodding to the box closest to him. “Do you want to take that one?”

No! “Sure,” he whispered, and instantly his breathing began to shallow. Moving in slow motion, he sat on the other side of the sofa, hands shaking as he took the lid off his box.

Dear God, why is this so hard?

The answer came in a flash of a painfully eerie memory forever branded into his brain, where his mother lay on her bed like a porcelain bridal doll, eyes wide open, as if waiting for her groom. And Brec suspected that had been her intent, to punish her husband rather than her son, who wasn’t supposed to be home that weekend.

His eyes shuttered closed. But at the last minute, I was.

The lid in his hand dropped to the floor with a clatter, and He bowed to put his head in his hands. “I can’t do this,” he whispered, stunned anew at how damaged he was.

He felt Molly’s arm encircle him gently, her voice warm and loving against his ear. “That’s okay, Brec. How ’bout I handle the family albums and you take care of your dad’s?” She lugged several albums from her box and handed them over, the label on each reading, Blaine’s childhood, birth to eight; Blaine’s childhood, eight to twelve; Blaine’s teen years, twelve to twenty.

“Okay,” he said, not thrilled about browsing through his dad’s perfect life, but it was better than the alternative—his “perfect life,” which had been anything but.

Molly squealed. “Oh, you were such an adorable baby!” she said with hands to her chest, fawning over his “big blue eyes” and “bowl-cut hairstyle.” “I’ll tell you what, Breccan McGill, you are going to make beautiful babies!”

She continued gushing over his baby pictures, not even aware of the wayward thoughts she’d just planted in his brain.

Beautiful babies.

He watched her as she slid eager fingers down each plastic sleeve that detailed his younger years, her eyes aglow and posture giddy, and suddenly he wanted nothing more than to have those babies with her.

She glanced over and jutted a perfect blonde brow. “Excuse me, but we are working here, mister, or at least I am!”

“Is that what you call it?” He tweaked her neck, making her squeal as she hunched her shoulders, grateful she was taking the edge off of his painful past. “You sound more like a groupie at a rock concert with all your squealin’ and jumping around.”