Chapter 38
Chapter 38
Startled by the squeaky hinges on the front screen door as it swung open and slammed shut, Oliver looked up from the kitchen table. He’d been leafing through Emma’s photo albums to keep from watching out the windows.
Emma appeared, looking lovely in her faded jeans and oversize white shirt, and he was surprised at how his heart and body calmed at the sight of her as she led their daughter into the room. Their daughter!
“Hello,” Rose said warmly. “Captain Harris. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
His anxieties and regrets, like waves, retreated again. In their place came a rush of strong love as he took in the sight of her. “Sadly, I’ve heard very little about you ,” he replied. “Only what your mother could tell me today, before you arrived. But there wasn’t much time.” Not nearly enough.
Rose gave him an encouraging nod, and he sensed by her demeanor that she was openhearted and forgiving, without hostility toward him. It came as a relief, because she was a mother—she could just as easily refuse to meet him altogether, to protect her children from developing affections for a stranger who might later walk out on them and never return. That was, after all, the thrust of his history with Emma.
“From what I understand,” Rose said, “it’s been a day full of surprises. But don’t worry. We have plenty of time to get to know each other.”
She strode forward, embraced him, and rested her cheek on his shoulder.
Oliver’s entire being shuddered with yet more love, and his heart broke wide open painfully. As he held his daughter for the first time, and heard his grandchildren’s laughter outside, he wondered how he would ever get on with his life after this. The children were running circles around the tire swing in the shade of a giant maple tree, and as he watched them through the kitchen window and hugged Rose, he felt as if he were floating dizzyingly on a cloud, but at any moment he might fall to earth and land with a punishing blow. His insides flared hotly with panic and a terrible sense of regret about a decision that could never be reversed. The lost years were gone forever. He would never get them back.
“I’m so glad to finally meet you,” Rose said, stepping back, and Oliver could have wept. “Honestly, it feels like a miracle.”
When he tried to speak, his voice shook. “I can’t believe it,” he said, wishing overwhelmingly that he had the power to turn back the clock. If only he could return to that day on Sable Island when he’d surrendered to his sorrow. If only he’d been stronger.
All he could do now was apologize. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you.”
Rose reached for his hand and regarded him with warmth and forgiveness. “You didn’t know about me,” she said. “But you’re here now . That’s what matters. And I feel blessed.”
“Me too.”
“I can’t wait for you to meet my children,” Rose added. “Would you like to come outside and say hello?”
He glanced achingly at Emma, who wiped a tear from her cheek. “Yes. I’d like that very much.” Then he stepped forward and followed his daughter out the front door.
An hour later, with Rose’s wise words still echoing in her mind, Emma walked beside Oliver down the stone path to the beach.
Who knows what he’s been through? To be honest, Mom, I’m a little shocked at how you’re so quick to judge him.
Again, Emma found herself thinking about poor Abigail McKenna and how she’d not been able to let go of painful things. She’d let them fester and never confided in anyone, or sought help. Emma wished she could go back there, knowing what she knew now, and understand Abigail better, perhaps help her work through her pain. But sadly, there was no going back.
“I’m sorry,” Emma finally said.
“For what?” Oliver asked.
“That I was so angry with you when you first arrived.”
“You had every right to be,” he replied. “I broke my promise.”
She glanced up at his profile, still as strikingly handsome as ever. “But you were told something that wasn’t true. And you’d been through a terrible ordeal, and probably other ordeals from the war that I know nothing about. So ... whatever your reasons were for going home to England, I can’t judge you. And I certainly don’t believe you deserved to miss out on the life of your child. That’s too great a punishment.”
They reached the bottom of the path and paused at the stone steps that led to the rocky beach.
“You should be proud of Rose,” Oliver said. “She’s an incredible young woman. You raised her well.” He descended the three steps, then turned and looked up. “But I’ll never be free of my regrets. I shouldn’t have given up on us that day.”
He offered his hand to her, and when Emma looked down at his open palm—at all the lines and calluses that were so familiar to her, even after all these years—she wanted to cry her eyes out. Why had this happened? What had either of them ever done to deserve so much bad luck and disappointment?
But it wasn’t all bad, she supposed, as she placed her hand in his and stepped onto the beach. At least not for her. She’d raised two beautiful children, and their love had always been enough. More than enough. It was Oliver who had been deprived, an ocean away from his daughter. And despite her own perpetual heartbreak, she pitied him deeply.
He let go of her hand and bent to pick up a flat stone, which he rubbed between his thumb and the pads of his fingers. Then he threw it like a spinning disk that skipped six times across the surface of the water.
“Well done,” Emma said, impressed.
“That was a perfect skipping stone,” he replied.
They walked in silence for a while, and Emma felt like she was back on Sable Island. Today, she was reliving an experience from her youth—the emotional and intellectual exhilaration from her walks on the beaches with Oliver, when it was all so new. It was as if he had stepped out of the past and reminded her of the young girl she used to be.
But it was Rose—older and wiser than her years—who had reminded Emma of who she truly was: A psychologist. A lifelong student of the human condition. Emma had felt that calling long before she’d ever met Oliver Harris on that fateful day, when he was pulled from a deadly shipwreck and dragged onto her shore.
She wished that her younger self could see who she had become: a retired psychoanalyst with a triumphant career behind her, a cozy house on the sea, and grandchildren who kept her busy and entertained. She wished that she could have known, back then, how beautifully her life would turn out. She might have spent less time crying over what she couldn’t have.
“You know,” Oliver said as they strolled leisurely along, “for years I fantasized about what our lives might have looked like if I hadn’t hit that mine.”
Emma raised a hand to shade her eyes from the sun. “I did the same thing,” she confessed.
They continued walking, and she breathed in the pungent but pleasant aroma of kelp on the rocks at low tide.
“I don’t know what you imagined,” Oliver continued, “but I always liked to think of us getting married and having children and living on Sable Island. I even thought that I might become superintendent one day, when your father retired.”
“That would have been a nice life for us,” she replied. “I sometimes dreamed about the same thing, but I knew it was just fantasy, because even if you had come back that Christmas, the lifesaving station was doomed.”
Oliver bent to pick up another flat stone and skipped it across the water. “We would have survived that,” he said. “Because I also imagined supporting you to get the education you’d always wanted. I saw us living in Oxford or Cambridge.”
“University of Oxford?” she replied, her eyebrows flying up. “How ambitious of us.”
He smiled back at her. “But clearly, in real life, you had all the support you needed right here. I saw the diplomas and awards in your den. Congratulations, Dr. Baxter. You did well.”
“Thank you.” The compliment filled her with pride.
They reached the west point and stepped carefully from one large beach boulder to another, then stopped on a flat outcropping.
“I suppose it was fate that had other plans for us,” Emma said. “We weren’t meant to be together back then, for all sorts of reasons. We weren’t lucky that way.”
He pondered that notion while they watched a fishing boat motor toward open water. “Not many people were lucky after the war. But bad luck touches all of us, even during peacetime.”
The sun moved behind a cloud, and the harbor turned gray. The temperature cooled, and ripples appeared on the surface of the water.
Emma touched Oliver’s arm. “Maybe we should start over. I’ve already apologized for being rude when you first arrived. But now I know that we were both told things that weren’t true. You thought I went back to Logan, and I thought you were dead. If I’d known you were alive, I would have tried to contact you again. Which makes me wonder ... Didn’t your wife ever tell you about the letters I sent?”
Oliver turned to her, his brow furrowed. “What letters?”
Emma stared at him, processing his response, thinking back to that day in Ruth’s living room, when she’d learned of his alleged death.
Slowly, Emma began to grasp the true course of events, the source of their lifelong separation—the rudder that had steered them away from each other.
“I wrote to you about being pregnant,” she said. “I sent a number of desperate letters to your flat. That’s how I learned about your death, because your wife read them and wrote back to inform me.”
He frowned and shook his head with confusion. “You learned about the explosion from Mary?”
“Yes.”
“But when I came home, she never mentioned any letters from you. Are you telling me that she knew you were expecting my child?”
Emma was overcome with dismay. “Yes.”
Oliver stared at her in shock. “That can’t be.”
Emma closed her eyes and said nothing. She’d thought she understood everything before, but this was something else. She gave him time to comprehend the facts and accept them, as she was doing.
“In all the years we were together,” he said, “she never told me anything about that.”
A breeze blew in from the east, and small whitecaps appeared on the harbor.
Oliver bowed his head and grabbed great clumps of his hair in both fists. “Mary, you didn’t.” His voice was low and gruff with ire.
Over the years, Emma had counseled many patients about how to cope with shock, anger, and the fact that they had been lied to. But now she, too, was a victim of manipulation. She and Oliver, together, had lived separate lives with no knowledge of the truth. And it was his unfaithful wife, Mary, who had misled them both.
All Emma wanted to do in that moment was call Mary directly and rail at her with hateful words and threatening accusations. How could she have kept a father away from his child, even if it was a child born out of wedlock?
“Where is your wife now?” she asked in a threatening tone.
“Dead,” Oliver replied numbly.
His response came down on Emma like a hammer. She couldn’t form words.
Meanwhile, Oliver’s eyes were wild. He was clenching his teeth as he spoke. “She should have told me. It would have changed how our lives turned out. All of us.”
“Maybe that’s what she was afraid of,” Emma replied.
They stared at each other, dumbfounded, while the wind grew stronger and hissed through the evergreens.
“This is all my fault,” Oliver said. “I shouldn’t have lost faith, and I shouldn’t have trusted my wife not to do something like that. She’d betrayed me before. Why didn’t I at least try to see you? Why in God’s name did I give up?”
Emma shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe that’s what finally broke me,” he said. “Hearing that you’d moved on.”
She touched his arm. “But I didn’t move on. And it wasn’t all your fault, how things turned out. It was a postwar world. We were surrounded by trauma from all directions. You, especially, Oliver. Dear God! What you’d been through and survived! You were right. It’s a miracle you’re alive today, and I’m amazed.”
He cupped his forehead in his hand. “But what does it matter now?”
She grabbed hold of his forearm and shook it. “Oh, Oliver. Don’t be foolish. We’re still here, aren’t we? What good can come from regretting the decisions we made when we were young and didn’t know anything? Maybe we need to consider how lucky we’ve been to have spent our lives with our children, even though you’re late to be meeting Rose. But it’s never too late. And you didn’t abandon Lydia and Arthur. You were a good father to them, present in their lives, and now you have grandchildren. Joanna clearly loves you.”
They stared at each other for an emotionally charged moment. Oliver’s shoulders rose and fell as he exhaled. Then he closed his eyes. “We can’t have it all, can we.”
“No,” she replied. “Sometimes we have to choose one path over another, and live with that choice, and be happy with it.”
Oliver opened his eyes. He looked up at Emma, who stood on a higher slab of stone. He held his hand out to her, and she stepped lightly across the flat rock as he escorted her down to the pebbly beach, where they strolled to the water’s edge. For a while, they watched sailboats on the harbor and seagulls in the sky, and listened to the waves that lapped gently onto the shore.
Oliver turned to Emma. “I retrieved something from Sable Island,” he said, “and I’d like for you to have it, no strings attached. But it was meant for you.”
“What is it?” she asked, curious.
He reached into his jacket pocket, withdrew a small box, and handed it to her. She opened it and gasped at the sight of a large princess-cut diamond ring, set in a gold band. Breathless with shock, Emma covered her mouth with her hand.
“It’s the ring I promised you,” Oliver said. “When I went back for you, I left it there.”
“Where?” she asked. “On Sable Island?”
“Yes. I put it in a cupboard in that old house that was half-buried in sand. Do you remember when you took me there?”
“Of course. I remember everything.”
“Well ... the house is almost gone now,” he said. “Only the roof and dormers are still sticking out of the sand. But miraculously, the ring was still there.”
“You went inside? Oliver, what were you thinking?”
He waved a dismissive hand. “I know. I shouldn’t have.”
“Is that why you went back to Sable?” Emma asked. “To retrieve it?”
He shook his head. “No. I’d assumed it was long gone. But when I got there and walked into the rose garden, it felt like everything happened only yesterday. Something came over me, and I had to go and look for it.”
Emma admired the ring for a moment, how it sparkled in the sunlight. “My goodness, Oliver. It’s stunning. But I can’t possibly accept it.” She closed the box and held it out to him. “You should give it to one of your children or grandchildren.”
“But it was meant for you ,” he replied, sounding baffled by the mere notion of giving it to anyone else.
Emma hesitated, then rubbed her thumb over the top of the velvet box. “Well ... I suppose I could at least try it on.”
She opened the box, withdrew the ring, and slid it onto her finger. It fit perfectly. When she held up her hand to admire it, the diamond sparkled like a thousand exploding stars. Her heart nearly gave out at the beauty of it, and she exclaimed “Oh!” and completely lost her breath.
But it was so much more than just a beautiful ring. Suddenly Emma was twenty-seven again and feeling the long-awaited rapture of her beloved captain’s return—just as she’d dreamed about for days, weeks, and years.
She looked up at Oliver, and he smiled at her.
Emma’s every emotion, even those she’d thought long dead, rose up and flooded over her walls. She bowed her head, covered her face with her hands, and wept.
Oliver took her into his arms. “I know, I know.” He rubbed her back and whispered gentle words of comfort in her ear.
When she finally regained her composure, she stepped back. “I should show you this,” she said, then reached into the top of her blouse to withdraw the gold chain she still wore around her neck, with her mother’s locket and his signet ring.
“My word. You still have it.”
“Yes. I never stopped wearing it. Wait. That’s not true. I did take it off for a while when I was angry with you. But then I put it back on.”
She reached out, took hold of his hand, turned it over, and studied how their fingers entwined. These were the hands of a ship’s captain, strong and sure, but they were also the hands of a gentleman. A husband. A father. An honorable man. These were loving hands, and she’d never forgotten the joy of his touch on that precious day in the rose garden. It had remained forever in her heart, a cherished memory like no other.
Somewhere in the distance, a ship’s bell rang. Oliver raised Emma’s hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. When her eyes lifted and she met his handsome gaze, the past came rushing forward. It coursed toward her like a fast wave and swept her off her feet.
This time, Emma surrendered to the incoming tide. She simply let herself float.