Chapter 5 #2
The reaction was immediate—a look of shock and despair. “Mom! No. Absolutely not.”
“Hear me out.”
“He’s a guy, Mom. And a good guy.”
Kate was glad she could see that already, even in the brief time she’d been around Eli. “That’s why—”
“No!” She barked the word again. “I mean, I know you two are, like, a thing and that’s cool, but no. It’s so embarrassing.”
“We are a thing,” she said, fighting a smile at the word. “But Eli is not your father, Emma. He is a father, and, as you say, a good guy and a great listener.”
He couldn’t have been better when Meredith had made a foolish mistake with a guy a few months ago, she thought. Watching Eli navigate his daughter’s unplanned pregnancy and subsequent loss with kindness and understanding had made her fall even more in love with him.
Emma sighed, maybe one baby step closer to considering the idea.
“He wouldn’t judge you,” Kate continued. “That’s not who he is. And he cares about you.”
“He barely knows me.”
“Well, he doesn’t ‘barely know’ me,” she replied. “He loves me.”
At the admission, Emma looked up. “So, what do you think this would accomplish?”
“I think he’s wise and gentle and can offer you another ear, not one that will judge, and that you might be able to benefit from his perspective on this. Short term—as far as handling it at school—and long term. So it doesn’t happen again.”
“It won’t,” she fired back.
“But something will. Eli has…wisdom. I don’t know how else to say it.”
“You trust him?” she asked after a minute.
Kate smiled as the answer became clear and squeezed her heart. “I’d trust that man with my life.”
Emma was silent for a long moment, staring out at the picturesque world, no doubt planning a move here. Then she shifted back to Kate.
“Are you two serious? I mean, like, Aunt Tessa just got married. Are you…”
Kate let out a shuddering breath. “We have some obstacles.”
“Like long distance.”
Kate nodded, preferring that obstacle to the other. “Yeah, it’s…a challenge.”
Emma leaned in and gave a sly grin. “Not if you and me move here.”
“You and I,” Kate corrected automatically.
Emma pointed at her. “Bingo.”
Kate laughed. “Girl, when you get a bee in your bonnet…”
“I have no idea what that means, Mom, but you know what? I’ll talk to him.”
“About your issues,” Kate said with a warning voice. “Not mine. Or his. Or…ours.”
“You can’t put limitations on my conversation with the guy.”
“I can—”
“No,” Emma said, shaking her head. “I will talk to him about anything I want. That’s the deal. You have to agree that he and I can discuss anything.”
Kate eyed her suspiciously. “Anything?”
“Anything.” Emma reached across the table for a handshake. “Deal?”
What could Eli share that would upset Kate? Nothing. “Deal.” They shook and she leaned in to add, “He doesn’t know what happened yet, so let me brief him, then you talk. Anything else?”
“Uh, yeah.” She pointed at a server’s tray as a giant piece of key lime pie floated by. “That.”
Laughing, they ordered and shared the pie, agreeing that it might be the tipping point that got them to move to Florida.
The next morning, Kate found Eli on the Summer House deck, snuggling Atlas, an empty baby bottle on the coffee table.
He’d offered to work from home today so poor, frazzled Jonah could make up a lab he’d missed when Atlas came down with a cold.
“How’s he feeling?” she asked.
“Sniffles. No fever. Nothing a little sunshine and Grandpa can’t cure.” He grinned at her. “And a visit from his favorite Auntie Kate.”
Smiling, she put a gentle hand on the sleeping baby’s head, then leaned over to give Eli a kiss.
“Grandpa can cure anything, huh?” she asked, settling on the sofa next to him.
“Usually. What ails you, gorgeous?” He leaned into her playfully, holding Atlas steady so he didn’t wake.
She answered with a soft sigh, letting the morning sun slant over her face. Beyond the dunes, the Gulf was flat and silver and peaceful.
“That sounds serious,” Eli replied.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to. What’s up, honey?”
“Well, it’s the Emma thing I mentioned.”
“Can you fill me in now?” He sounded genuinely concerned and interested, which spurred her on.
Turning to him, she gently launched into a quick but honest version of her daughter’s woeful tale, not surprised that Eli listened intently to every word—from the boy at the yacht club to the picture to the betrayal of trust and the fallout.
When she finished, Eli stayed quiet, one hand cradling Atlas’s back, the other resting on the sofa’s armrest. His gaze shifted from her to the water, processing the story with slight tension in his jaw, his thumb moving absently against the baby’s shoulder.
The silence stretched, and Kate felt her chest tighten.
Some reactions were hardwired into men when they heard about a teenage girl being compromised in any way. Anger, disappointment, the need to fix or punish…someone.
Kate steeled herself for the flinch, the flash of judgment, the subtle shift in how he thought about her daughter.
None of that happened, but she wouldn’t mention the possibility of Emma talking to him until she determined where he stood on the whole thing.
“How is she right now?” he finally asked. “Is she still upset? She seemed more fragile than I remember, and now I understand why. But how is she handling it and is she okay?”
Kate exhaled, deeply grateful for the question and all it said about Eli’s priorities.
“She’s mad at herself and the kid. She’s terrified of going back to Ithaca. She barely ate for the first week. She’s a little better here—we had a good talk yesterday in Seaside—but she’s carrying so much shame, Eli. It’s crushing her.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “She’s seventeen. In general, it feels like the whole world can see the most vulnerable side of you. And in this case, it’s true.”
“Yep.”
Atlas shifted against Eli’s chest, making a small, congested snuffle, and Eli adjusted him with that effortless, one-handed competence that Kate never tired of watching. The baby sighed and settled deeper, his breathing evening out.
“She made a bad choice,” Eli said. “A real one, with real consequences. But Kate—that’s not who she is. I can tell that and I hardly know her. And one regrettable decision doesn’t define a person. Not at seventeen, or any age.”
Her heart tumbled around as she felt her whole being fall a little more deeply in love with this man.
“Her father blew a gasket,” Kate told him. “It was so bad, she ran away from his house and came to mine.”
“What would she have done if you’d been here?” he asked, the question throwing her. She hadn’t considered that—but Eli did.
“I didn’t have to find out, but the state she was in that night? I’m so glad I was in Ithaca.”
“Protected,” he murmured, leaning forward as if to test just how deeply asleep the baby was. Very deeply.
In one smooth move, he set Atlas in the bouncy seat on the table in front of them, careful not to wake him as each buckle fastened the child in securely.
“What do you mean—protected?” Kate asked.
“God protected her, and you. That’s why he had you go back to New York.”
She felt her features form her usual scowl, but forced herself to be as non-judgmental as he was. In Eli’s mind, God did protect her. In Kate’s? A happy coincidence.
With his arms free, Eli turned to her and took her hands. “Would it be too much if I talked to her?” he asked.
The question nearly took her breath away, but she gave a soft laugh. “That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you to do.”
“Really?” His blue eyes brightened. “Thank you for that trust. I will be gentle, I promise, but candid.”
“I expect that.”
“I might be, uh…Christian.”
She smiled. “I expect that, too. But she won’t, so go easy.”
“I just want to tell her what I told you—that she’s more than this. And that making a mistake with someone she trusted doesn’t mean she was wrong to trust. It means she needs to choose boys more wisely. She can learn a lot from this, you know.”
Kate’s throat tightened with gratitude. She thought about Jeffrey, who had taken their daughter’s personal nightmare and made it worse. Jeffrey had never once, in the entirety of their marriage, responded to a crisis with anything other than analysis of who was at fault.
And then she thought about her father.
Artie would have handled this exactly the way Eli was handling it.
He would have listened first. He would have been gentle.
He would have found the words that made you feel safe instead of small, because Arthur Wylie had believed—truly, deeply believed—that the people he loved deserved patience more than correction.
Kate had married Jeffrey because he was safe and stable and logical, all the things she valued in her own personality. But safe and stable and logical had not been enough when Emma needed warmth and grace and a father who could sit with her pain instead of punishing her for it.
She’d married the wrong kind of steady. She was looking at the right kind now. The realization rocked her a little.
“I want her to learn that,” she told him. “In fact, I’m glad it happened if this opens her eyes up to the value of a good man.”
Because it certainly was opening hers up to that value…and the man in front of her.
He nodded, looking like he was about to say something, then caught himself.
“What?” she prodded.
He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s…never mind.”
“Eli.”
“It’s a God thing,” he admitted with a smile.
“Hit me with it,” she said with a light laugh.
“Okay.” He took a breath and steadied his gaze. “I believe God allows bad things to happen to us as a way to bring us wisdom and clarity and closer to Him.”
Well, she didn’t. But she swallowed any argument.
“She might be reluctant at first,” she said instead. “She was nervous about you knowing at all but agreed to talk to you if I thought it was a good idea.”
“You do?” he asked.
“Yes.” She leaned into his strong shoulder, relief and appreciation washing over her. “I have no doubt it’s a good idea.”
Atlas let out a small cough, then settled again. Eli reached to his tiny, socked foot and stroked it with a touch so light and loving it ripped her heart out.
“I’ll let her come to me,” he said. “When she’s ready. If she doesn’t, that’s okay. Her call.”
The sting of tears caught Kate off guard. She blinked it back, adjusting her glasses the way she always did when she needed a moment—a lifelong habit that Eli had probably already decoded.
“You know,” she said, “when everything happened with Emma, before I even thought about what to do or who to call, the first person I wanted to talk to was you.”
“You should have told me.”
“I had to clear it with her,” she replied. “But I really wanted to talk to you.”
“That’s nice.” He took her hand and drew her knuckles to his lips, smiling through the kiss at her.
She looked at him with the sun in his silver-streaked hair and the quiet faith that sometimes frustrated her—and suddenly he felt like the most solid thing in her world. He was the very definition of a good man.
If that meant she had to accept his religion as part of the package? How bad a deal was that, really?