"Then open your eyes, girl!" he snapped, standing up. "I'm right in front of you."

Meredith stared at him in blank confusion. He was slim and fit, with thick wavy white hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and piercing pale blue eyes. "There must be some mistake. I've come to see Mr. Farrell—"

"You sure have a problem with names, girl," Matt's father interrupted with biting contempt. "My name is Farrell, and yours isn't Bancroft, it's still Farrell, from what I hear."

Meredith suddenly realized who he was, and her heart skipped a teat at the hostility emanating from him. "I—I didn't recognize you, Mr. Farrell," she stammered. "I've come to see Matt."

"Why?" he demanded. "What the hell do you want?"

"I—I want to see Matt," Meredith persisted, almost unable to believe this towering, robust, angry man could possibly be the same brooding, dissipated person she'd met at the farmhouse.

"Matt isn't here."

Meredith had already been through a great deal this afternoon, and she had no intention of being thwarted or bullied by anyone else. "In that case," she replied, "I'll stay until he returns."

"You'll have a long wait," Patrick said sarcastically. "He's in Indiana at the farm."

She knew that was a lie. "His secretary said he was at home."

"That's his home!" he said, advancing on her. "You remember it, don't you, girl? You should. You walked around, looking down your nose at it."

Meredith was suddenly very frightened of the rage that was gathering force behind his rigid features. She backed away as he started toward her. "I've changed my mind. I—I'll talk to Matt another time." Intending to leave, she turned on her heel, then gasped in terror as Patrick Farrell gripped her arm and spun her around, his thunderous face only inches from hers. "You stay away from Matt, do you hear me! You almost killed him before, and you're not going to walk back into his life now and tear him to pieces again!"

Meredith tried to jerk her arm free, and when she couldn't, fury overcame her fear. "I don't want your son," she informed him contemptuously, "I want a divorce, but he won't cooperate."

"I don't know why he wanted to marry you in the first place, and I sure as hell don't know why he'd want to stay married to you now!" Patrick Farrell spat out, flinging her arm away. "You murdered his baby rather than have a lowly Farrell in that hallowed womb of yours!"

Pain and rage ripped through Meredith, slashing at her like a thousand knives. "How dare you say a thing like that to me! I miscarried!"

"You had an abortion!" he shouted. "You had an abortion when you were six months pregnant, then you sent Matt a telegram. A goddamned telegram, after it all was done!"

Meredith's teeth clenched against the hurt she'd kept bottled inside her for so many years, but it couldn't be contained any longer. It exploded from her, aimed at the father of the man who had caused all her suffering: "I sent him a telegram all right—a telegram telling him that I'd miscarried, and your precious son never even bothered to call me!" To her infuriated horror, she felt tears leap to her eyes.

"I'm warning you, girl," he began in a terrible voice, "don't play games with me. I know Matt flew back to see you, and I know what that telegram said, because I saw him and I saw that telegram!"

Meredith didn't immediately register what he said about the telegram. "He—he came back to see me?" Something strange and sweet burst into bloom in her heart, and just as abruptly, it died. "That's a lie," she said flatly. "I don't know why he came back, but it wasn't to see me, because he didn't do it."

"No, he didn't see you," he jeered furiously. "And you know why he didn't! You were in the Bancroft wing of the hospital, and you had him barred from it." As if he'd finally expended most of his rage, his shoulders slumped, and he looked at her with helpless, angry despair. "I swear to God, I don't know how you could do a thing like that! When you murdered your baby, he was wild with grief, but when you wouldn't let him see you, it nearly killed him. He came back to the farm and stayed there. He said he wasn't going back to South America. For weeks I watched him drowning himself in a bottle. I saw what he was doing—what I'd been doing to myself for years. So I sobered him up. Then I sent him back to South America to get over you."

Meredith scarcely heard the last part of that; alarm bells were exploding in her brain and clanging in her ears. The Bancroft wing was named after her father because he had donated the money that built it. Her private nurse was employed by her father; her doctor was her father's crony. Everyone she'd seen or talked to in the hospital had been accountable to her father, and her father despised Matt. Therefore he might have ... he could have ... A piercing happiness shot through her, shattering the icy shell that had surrounded her heart for eleven long years. Afraid to believe Matt's father, and afraid not to believe him, she lifted her tear-glazed eyes to his stony face. "Mr. Farrell," she whispered shakily. "Did Matt really come home to see me?"

"You know damned well he did!" Patrick said, but as he stared at that stricken face of hers, what he saw was confusion, not cunning, and he had an agonizing premonition he'd been dead wrong; that she didn't know anything about any of this.

"And you saw that—that telegram I supposedly sent him—about my having an abortion? Exactly what did it say?"

"It—" Patrick hesitated, searching her eyes, torn between doubt and guilt. "It said you'd had an abortion and you were getting a divorce."

The color drained from Meredith's face, the room began to spin, and she reached out for the back of the sofa, her fingers biting into it as she tried to steady herself. Fury at her father pounded in her brain, shock shook through her, and regret almost sent her to her knees, regret for those anguished, lonely months after her miscarriage and all the years of suppressed pain at Matt's desertion that followed them. But most of all what she felt was sorrow; deep, fresh, wrenching sorrow for her lost baby and for the victims of her father's manipulations. It tore at her, ravaging her heart and sending hot tears pouring from her eyes and down her cheeks. "I didn't have an abortion, and I didn't send that telegram—" Her voice broke as she stared at Patrick through a blur of tears. "I swear I didn't!"

"Then who sent it?"

"My father," she cried. "It must have been my father!" Her head fell forward, and her shoulders began to shake with silent sobs. "It had to have been my father."