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It took him a few hours, but he finally finished the last one, written just after Oliver was born. He sat back in his chair and closed his tired eyes. Lizbeth’s expectation was palpable, filling the small office with humid air and making him sweat.
She’d had a terrible childhood, which didn’t surprise him. Frasier had grown up in that same neighborhood, years earlier. If it hadn’t been for the bright spot of Camille, shining like a ray of light through the darkness with her food, many of the neighborhood kids would have spent their whole lives not knowing what love looked like. But that was only outside their homes. What went on inside was not something even Camille’s light could penetrate. Like with Frasier and his alcoholic grandfather. And Lizbeth with her tales of sitting on her father’s lap as a child, and her vitriolic jealousy of the supposed playtime her father had with Lucy behind locked doors. Lizbeth never seemed to make the connection between their childhood and their struggles later in life. Frasier had known them both for years and he’d never had to know the details to understand something must have happened.
But then there was the part that did surprise him.
Lucywas Oliver’s birth mother.
But it was Lizbeth on Oliver’s birth certificate because of an elaborate plan concocted by their mother, who had wanted another chance to raise a child. Lizbeth had only ended up with Oliver because her mother died. And in true Lizbeth fashion, she’d kept him because she lacked the ability to give anything away.
Frasier had always assumed that Lizbeth wanted him to know her story because she wanted a book written about herself. But it made no sense to him now that she wanted him, and ostensibly the whole world, to know yet she had never bothered to tell Oliver the truth. And Oliver was theoneperson who should have been told. But the boy had been, and still was, so lost among her other things that she thought it was perfectly fine if Oliver found out with everyone else when the story was discovered.
Frasier knew what he had to do. He had to protect the boy. There were no halfways about it now.
There were only two times in a person’s life when a family secret should be revealed—at the very beginning, or at the very end. When a bomb like this is dropped in the middle, it forces the person to spend the rest of their life struggling to live a life redefined, because everything they’d known as truth was suddenly false. This secret had gone on for so long that sharing it with Oliver now would only derail him.
“I’m sorry for your pain in life, Lizbeth,” he said. “I truly am.”
Oh, that made her happy.
“But it’s time for you to leave that pain behind and go. I know what you wanted me to know now.”
That confused her for a moment. Then she started spinning around the office again. She clearly wanted him to say more, to react more. But he couldn’t.
He wouldn’t.
As sad as it made him, as sad as this whole damn situation made him, he knew that ignored spirits eventually went away. That was why they were drawn to those like Frasier, who acknowledged them. It would take her some time, but Lizbeth would eventually leave.
And she would find the peace he wanted for her, the peace she’d never known how to find because no one had ever bothered to show her, if she did it sooner rather than later.
Later that evening as Charlotte and Zoey were helping Mac carry in platters of food and a birthday pie with an enormous dome of whipped cream, Charlotte said, “Look who showed up.”
Mac continued on through Charlotte’s open doors, but Zoey stopped on the patio. Oliver had just used the keypad to enter the garden. She watched as he walked to Frasier’s office and knocked. Frasier opened the door and beckoned him inside. “Oh,” Zoey said. “He’s only here to see Frasier again.”
“With a wrapped gift?” Charlotte asked.
Zoey quickly followed her inside with the platter she was carrying of tiny cheese biscuits so light they almost hovered above the plate. She deposited the platter on the kitchen counter, then hurried back outside to find Oliver walking toward her. He stepped onto the patio, but neither of them said a word, each apparently waiting for the other to say something.
“I had to stop and reschedule dinner with Frasier,” Oliver finally said, pointing over his shoulder. “It’s not every day someone turns nineteen.”
Zoey laughed. “You and Charlotte should start a club and call it I Think I’m Really Old. You’re only what, twenty-two?”
“Going on ninety,” he said. “Here. This is for you.” He held out the gift, something thin and rectangular wrapped in a fold-out road map. It was obviously a small book. Book lovers could spot a wrapped book from a mile away. “Sorry about the paper. It’s all I had to work with.”
“Can I open it right now?” she asked.
“Of course.”
He watched her carefully as she opened the map. The book inside had a gold watercolor background with a single turquoise feather floating down from the title. She gasped when she realized what it was. Oliver smiled, as if that was exactly the reaction he’d wanted. “Dancing with the Dellawisps! How did you get a copy so quickly?”
“It’s a copy I had from a long time ago.”
“And you’re giving it tome?”
“It seemed fitting,” he said. “You’re the only person besides Frasier who seems to actually like those birds.”
“Thank you, Oliver. Iloveit.” There was another awkward pause. She wanted to hug him. Was that weird? Would he think it was weird? No one was around to see if it turned out badly except for Pigeon, who was in the garden. Zoey could hear her rustle in the ferns. Her bird was still keeping her distance, but she was nearer tonight than she had been lately. She seemed worried about something.
It would be easier if Pigeon weren’t watching, but Zoey took a step forward anyway. Charlotte chose that moment to call from the kitchen, making Zoey jump back in surprise, “Oliver, do you want something to drink? A soda? Or a beer, if you’re legal?”
