Substitute Daddy

“A shower sounds terrific just about now,” Brett said. “I have a change of clothes in the Rover. I didn’t stop at the motel this morning. I drove straight to the lumberyard when I got down here. I wanted to get an early start since there was so much to do. Sorry I woke you.”

Melissa banged around the kitchen minutes later, thinking he hadn’t looked the least bit sorry when he’d been ogling her at practically dawn. She threw a slap-dash dinner together and half an hour later Brett joined her in the kitchen. As she finished putting the meal on the table, Melissa ordered her pounding heart to behave. It didn’t listen.

“This looks wonderful,” he said, sitting where she indicated.

So do you, Melissa thought before taking one last glance at the table. There was leftover roast beef, oven-browned potatoes, a colorful bowl of mixed vegetables and Margaret Abramson’s home-baked bread and fresh-churned butter. Most of it was courtesy of his little shopping excursion, but still, she somehow doubted he ever ate this way at the gourmet restaurants he probably frequented.

Deciding she didn’t care if he felt the dinner lacked sophistication, she sat across from him and tried not to stare. He was so handsome and self-assured. And he was once again the picture of his aristocratic upbringing in designer clothes and Italian shoes.

So why couldn’t her more-than-adequate brain manage to make her unruly heart behave? “I never thanked you for the food you left,” she said, knowing nothing separated them so much as the disparity of the classes they belonged to.

“No thanks necessary,” he said.

His refusal of her gratitude made him seem superior and arrogant. She hated that he thought he was better than her. If only she hadn’t offered him a simple dinner in her simple kitchen.

“Brett, I’m really not as bad off financially as you seem to think. I’d been putting money aside for some time to convert the barn and I have a lot of inventory lined up for the shop already. In fact, it’s all around us. I had to put my plans for the shop on hold when Uncle Ed started failing. When he died and Leigh and Gary came down for the funeral, they asked me about the baby. The timing couldn’t have been better since I’d pretty much suspended my business so I could take care of Uncle Ed in those final months.”

“That’s why he left the farm to you alone, isn’t it? Because you gave up everything you’d built for him. I’d wondered about that. Do you ever stop giving? The timing when Leigh and Gary asked you about the baby might have been good, but it must’ve been a difficult decision. You were going to be giving away your first-born child. They asked too much.”

Melissa felt her cheeks heat. “Leigh would have done the same for me. I know she would. And I’m not pretending it would have been easy to watch them raising her but—”

“Her?” Brett arched one dark raven’s wing of an eyebrow. “Is that a guess? Wishful thinking?”

Still excited over the ultrasound picture that had been done yesterday, Melissa jumped up. She was eager to change the subject and even more anxious to share the first picture of her child, even if it was only a shadowy black-and-white image that a technician had needed to explain.

She handed Brett the picture. “They do these routinely now. And I got lucky. At sixteen weeks they can tell the sex if the baby’s in the right position and she was. That’s my baby girl.” Melissa’s voice broke and tears she tried to blink back welled up in her eyes.

Leigh had so wanted a little girl.

Not wanting to cry in front of Brett, Melissa quickly excused herself and fled the room. On the way to her grandparents’ bath just outside the downstairs bedroom, she caught sight of Leigh staring back at her from the hall mirror and froze in place. The incredible loss of her twin slammed into her once again with a two-ton force.

It was a bittersweet pain that would have taken her to her knees were she not held in place by the sight before her. Leigh but not Leigh. Gone but never farther away than a mirror. Leigh would never age and yet she would. Her own reflection would forever remind Melissa of the incredible bond she and Leigh had shared and the void her loss left.

Melissa didn’t know how long she stood there with her fingertips touching the flat cold face on the other side of the glass. She and that other part of her cried silently for both of them. The one lost and the one left behind. Only half of who she was but two people as well.

Was she forever doomed to lose those she loved and relied upon?

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