True Love Read online

  It took several nights and multiple bottles of rum before he got Addy to tell him the whole truth.

  It seemed that his dear daughter, Alix, at four years old, used to regularly converse with a ghost. If Ken had known back then what was happening, he would have … The truth was he didn’t know what he would have done. At that time he’d been so angry and depressed that he wasn’t rational. If he’d been given any reason to do so, he feared that he would have taken his wrath out on Victoria, which could have meant that the rage would have filtered down to little Alix.

  As it was, Ken had shown only Jared his fury at what life had done to him. Oh, but the shouting matches the two of them used to have! Never before or since had Ken yelled like that. Cursed like that. But then he’d never again been so unhappy. Nor had Jared.

  There was one night when Ken found Jared crying. He was a six-foot-tall teenager who had an attitude of Don’t Mess with Me, but he was sitting by a pond on land his family owned, and crying. Ken reacted naturally and put his arms around the boy. They didn’t say a word but Ken knew of the boy’s continuing grief. Jared’s mother had told him what a good and loving man her husband had been, and how he’d doted on his son.

  “I couldn’t have any more children after him,” she’d told Ken. “I begged Six to divorce me and get some healthy girl who could give him a lot of babies. But he said that one perfect son was all he needed.”

  When Ken met Jared—or Seven, as his mother called him—the last word he would have used to describe the boy was “perfect.”

  Somewhere in there, he and Jared stopped fighting. Ken was sure it was when the boy showed his extraordinary, dazzling talent for architectural design. Only by accident did Ken see Jared drawing in the dirt. No one else paid any attention to the marks, but Ken recognized them as a rudimentary floor plan.

  Ken discussed it with Jared’s mother, and she showed him a whole drawer full of sketches her son had made. “He and his dad were planning to add a big room to this old house. Six told him that he could design it. But after … afterward, Seven put it all away.”

  Ken had to push Jared to get him to show his ideas. As Ken looked at the drawings, he acted as though he was just thinking about them rather than ready to set off cannons in praise. Slowly, Ken showed the boy how to put on paper what he saw in his mind. And since Jared knew nothing about construction, over the years Ken taught him how to build what he envisioned.

  But no matter that Ken had made a life for himself on Nantucket, he knew that if he wanted to see Alix regularly he had to leave the island. He felt torn in half. He had a daughter in America and an honorary son on Nantucket—and his ex-wife was decreeing that Ken couldn’t openly have both of them.

  The day Ken left, he saw in Jared’s eyes that he didn’t think Ken was coming back. But he had. Every holiday he wasn’t with Alix, Ken was on Nantucket. Vacations, accumulated sick days, playinghooky days, whatever time he could manage to scrape together, he spent on the island.

  Even after Jared left for school, Ken still visited as often as possible. By that time he and Addy were good friends and he knew a lot of other people on Nantucket. It was natural that he began to look after the houses owned by the Kingsley family. He’d tell Addy what needed to be repaired, then she’d tell Victoria, who would pay the bills. At first Ken hadn’t liked that arrangement, but Addy said that all Victoria’s money came from the Kingsley journals, so why shouldn’t she pay? Ken didn’t argue. Roofs that didn’t leak took precedence over his pride.

  All in all, Ken thought everything had worked out well—except that Alix had been left out. Victoria never budged on her rule that her daughter was not to go to Nantucket, not even to hear about it. At first Ken had fought her, argued with her, questioned her, but she never showed the slightest weakness in her resolve.

  It was on a snowy night when the big old drafty house was colder than the outdoors and Ken had made a roaring fire that Addy had told him about Alix and the ghost.

  “Does Victoria know about this … this person?” Ken asked, not sure whether to believe or not.

  “No,” Addy said, smiling. “Victoria thinks I’m a boring old woman. She thinks I’m …” She leaned toward Ken. “Victoria thinks I’m a virgin.”

  Laughing, he told Addy that she was much too sexy for men to be able to stay away from. She’d laughed in delight, poured them both more rum, and told him that none of the other women had written about Caleb. “They could see him but they never told about him.” She took a drink. “They wrote about their affairs and even about murders, but they told no one about seeing and talking to a ghost.”

  “But you did,” Ken said, smiling as the rum coursed through him.

  “Oh yes, I did,” Addy said. “And when Victoria finds out, she’s going to look hard for my journals.”

  “Where are they?” Ken asked.

  “I’ve hidden them quite well,” Addy said, smiling. “And Caleb and I worked out a plan so that someone who can see him will be told many things. But that will be after I’m gone.”

  At the time Ken had been too mellow to question her, and he’d only found out at the reading of Addy’s will that “someone” was his daughter.

  It was after that conversation that Ken thought about what he’d been told. Years before, even if Victoria didn’t know about a ghost that Alix could see, she’d known something was wrong. After that, Ken quit badgering her to tell Alix about Nantucket. They never spoke of it, but it seemed they had reached an understanding.

  When Addy died and her will decreed that Alix could stay in the house for a year, Ken was fairly sure he knew why and he hadn’t liked it at all. As a father, he wanted to protect his daughter.

  But Victoria hadn’t felt the same way—and Ken thought it had more to do with her quest to find Addy’s journals than it did with Alix. When he told her so, they’d had one of their blistering fights. Years before, he’d stopped beating himself up with thoughts that his neglect of his beautiful young wife was what had driven her away. It had taken a few years after the divorce, but he’d realized that Victoria’s strong personality was more than he could take. If they’d stayed together, they probably would have murdered each other. But then during one of their arguments Victoria had admitted that she’d only married him to escape her small hometown. That had hurt more than Ken allowed her to see.

  After Addy’s will was read, Victoria had begged Ken to stay away from the island and let Jared and Alix have some time alone. And it had all worked out. Ken had shown up to find Jared and Alix very much together. And he’d stayed to…

  Ken wanted to think that his reasons for staying were altruistic. First, he wanted to protect his daughter from a ghost. And he needed to be there in case Jared got a wandering eye and hurt Alix. And he should…

  Ha! Ken wasn’t fooled by his own lies. He was staying because for the first time in his adult life he had a feeling of family. True, deep down, delicious family.

  By the end of the first week he’d moved into the guesthouse and Jared was back in his own home, staying with Alix in the big bedroom that should have gone to him when his great-aunt died.

  How comfortable the three of them were together! Ken had taught both Jared and Alix about architectural design and building, so they tended to agree on everything. Jared had taught Ken about the sea and its inhabitants. In turn, Ken had relayed it all to his daughter.

  As for Alix, she bound the men together. She looked out for them, made their lives comfortable, and above all, she put new life into them.

  Several times in the past weeks, the three of them had been out on Jared’s boat. They liked the same food, baited hooks the same way, enjoyed the same scenery.

  When they were home, Ken made sure he gave the couple time alone. He often went to visit Dilys. One lovely summer long ago, they had been lovers. Dilys was older than Ken and he’d enjoyed her quiet company—and the sex she’d learned in the freewheeling seventies. But he knew he could never stay on Nantucket and she was never going