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“Yeah, honey. I found it. I’ll give it to you after dinner. Maybe you and Grandma can practice fixing up your hair. ”
She smiled. “Thanks, Dad. ”
Dad.
The word had a hook that drew blood.
Jacey had called him that almost from the start. She’d been a little bit of a thing back then, a baby-toothed four-year-old with jet-black pigtails and ears that seemed so big she’d never grow into them.
He could still remember the day Mike had shown up in the clinic, carrying Jacey. It was only a few months after Liam’s father had died, and he’d been trying to find an excuse to talk to Mikaela again.
Jacey had had a dangerously high fever; convulsions racked her body. One minute she was stretched taut and shaking, and the next, she was as limp as a rag doll, her brown eyes drowsy and unfocused.
“Help us,” Mikaela had said softly.
Liam had canceled his nonemergency appointments for the day and rushed to the ER with them. He’d stood in the OR, watching as the surgeon gently sliced through Jacey’s abdomen and removed her burst appendix. His was the last face she saw before the anesthesia took her, and the first one she saw when she woke up in Recovery. He transferred his patients to Dr. Granato and spent the next three days in the hospital with Mikaela and Jacey; together they watched the Fourth of July fireworks through the rectangular window of Room 320.
He’d sat in the hospital cafeteria for endless hours with Mike, listening to her ramble from topic to topic. At some point she’d looked up at the wall clock and started to cry. He’d reached across the table, past the remains of her uneaten meal, and taken hold of her hand. She’ll be all right, he’d said. Trust me …
She’d looked up at him then, his Mike, with her brown eyes floating in tears and her mouth trembling. I do trust you.
That had been the beginning.
Jacey had called him Dad for so long, he’d forgotten that there was another father out there, another man who could lay claim to both his wife’s and daughter’s hearts.
“Dad. DAD. ”
Bret stared at him. His little face looked unbalanced with the one black eye. “You’re gonna take me to basketball tryouts aren’t you?”
“Of course, Bretster. ”
Bret nodded and started talking to Jacey about something. Liam tried to pay attention, but he couldn’t do it. A single sentence kept running through his mind. She was married to Julian True.
When he looked up again, he saw that Rosa was staring at him, her dark eyes narrowed and assessing.
“Do you have something you want to say to me, Rosa?”
She flinched, obviously surprised by his tone of voice. He knew he should have softened his tone, pretended that everything was okay, but he didn’t have the strength.
“Sí, Dr. Liam. I would like to speak to you … privately. ”
He sighed. Perfect. “Sure. After the kids are in bed. ”
Liam knew that Rosa was waiting for their “talk,” but he wasn’t ready yet. He’d spent almost an hour reading to Bret, then kissed Jacey good night and taken a long, hot shower.
Jacey was bunkered in her room now, probably talking on the telephone to one of her many friends and trying on her mother’s dress. Liam hadn’t gone to her, afraid that if he saw her wearing that beautiful gown, looking like her mother, he’d lose it.
Right now he wanted to hole up in his own quiet space. Christ, he’d give almost anything to be able to go downstairs, sit at the piano, and play the hell out of some sad bit of music.
He wanted to be angry, to scream and rail and feel honest-to-God outrage. But he wasn’t that kind of man. His love for Mikaela was more than just an emotion; it was the sum total of who he was.
This one thing he knew above everything else. He loved Mikaela too much. Which in its way was as bad as loving someone not enough.
Slowly he went downstairs.
The piano stood in the empty living room like a forgotten lover.
Liam closed his eyes and remembered a time when music swirled through this room every night … He could almost hear the squeaky joint of the bench as Mike sat down beside him.
