The Cliff House

3

STELLA

This was one amazing fortieth birthday present.

Stella Davenport looked at the array of tests laid out on her bathroom counter, a half dozen of them, all giving her the same message.

She had done it. She was pregnant.

She couldn’t deny the truth when it was staring at her from six different pregnancy tests. Positive signs in every direction confirmed everything she had been suspecting for the past two weeks but had been too afraid to verify at the doctor’s office.

Preggers. Expecting. Knocked up. A bun in the oven.

She still couldn’t seem to believe it.

For months she had been waiting for this day. She had hoped, prayed, yearned. She had charted her cycle religiously, had pored over sperm donor files to find the perfect one, had dipped into her savings account for a healthy chunk to cover the four times she had been artificially inseminated.

She had suffered the indignity of feet in the stirrups, the catheter, the waiting half an hour with her hips raised, then hoping and praying and yearning for results.

If this one hadn’t worked, she wasn’t sure what she would have done.

Nothing, she told herself. She would have been fine. She would have called the state foster care agency to see if there was any chance they would reconsider and let her foster an adoptable infant this time, as a single working mother.

Other teachers had babies and there were certainly foster care babies who needed homes.

If that didn’t work, she would go on as she always had, providing a stable, loving, comfortable home for older children and teenagers in need.

She loved her work as a foster parent. It had been both necessary and rewarding, helping young people who had few options left to them. At last count there were twenty of them who had stayed with her in the ten years since Beatriz ran off with Cruz Romero, sometimes with her only a few months, sometimes a few years. Each had left an indelible imprint on her heart.

It had all started with Bea and Daisy, of course. She had loved being a mother figure to them, struggling to form a family and build a home together when she was barely twenty-one and they were nine and eleven. She could still picture them, two lost and damaged girls who had suffered so very much because of their irresponsible, selfish, fickle mother.

The girls were the daughters of her heart and she would always consider them such.

Because of them, she had started Open Hearts, in an effort to do what she could to make sure all children who had to be in the foster care system received loving and supportive placements.

She was proud of all she had accomplished, but she wanted something else now. She wanted her own child, and according to the pregnancy tests assembled around her, she would have her wish in about eight and a half months.

Pregnant.

Joy burst through her, incandescent and perfect, and she pressed her hands over her abdomen and the tiny life growing inside her.

This was it. Everything she had dreamed about for the past year.

She was having a baby!

Dear God. She was forty years old and she was having a baby!

She was crazy! What had she been thinking? She was going to become a mother at an age many women were starting to think about becoming empty nesters.

Panic started to chew at her jubilation. She pushed it away. No. She wouldn’t let it take over. For this moment she wanted to simply savor the miracle of life.

She had to tell someone. The news was too big inside her, like a dancing, whirling wind looking for an escape.

Fortunately, her best friend, Cleo, had texted an hour ago that she would stop by with a birthday present, despite Stella’s insistence that she wanted nothing from her friends.

She had the best gift of all.

She touched her abdomen again. “Hello, little baby,” she whispered. “I love you so much already.”

Her child would never spend a moment of his or her existence wondering what it felt like to be loved.

The doorbell rang while she was whispering softly to her child and she jumped up. Cleo. She was the perfect person to tell, had been supportive from the moment Stella told her this was something she wanted. She was the only one who knew about the past months of fertility treatments. How perfect, that she was the only one who would know about the baby for now.

She scooped up the closest pregnancy test and rushed to the front door then yanked it open.

“Look. Just look! I did it! I’m pregnant!”

As soon as she said the last word, a long, drawn-out affair that seemed to take about a dozen extra syllables, shock drenched her like a January rain.

The person at her door wasn’t her best friend, the woman she considered the closest thing she had to a sister.

The person at her door was a man, lean and distinguished and gorgeous.

A man she hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years—and had tried her best to forget.

All the blood seemed to leave her head to pool somewhere in the vicinity of her favorite pair of Birkenstocks and she had to grip the door frame with her free hand to keep from toppling over.

“Ed!” she exclaimed.

“Um, congratulations,” he said at the same moment, looking as bemused as any man would under the circumstances.

She was still holding the pregnancy test, she realized on some appalled level. But she couldn’t think about that now. Not when Ed Clayton, the love of her life, had suddenly appeared out of the freaking blue.

“Ed!” she said again. She couldn’t seem to make her brain connect to her voice to say anything else.

“Hello, Stella.”

This couldn’t be real. Maybe this was all some kind of bizarre dream, brought on by the Italian food she and the girls had the night before. No. The pregnancy tests were certainly real.

She couldn’t seem to catch hold of her wildly scrambling thoughts. Was this the pregnancy brain she’d read about, where cheerful, perky bloggers nearly half her age warned that her synapses would turn into a jumbled mess?

Or was this simply a normal reaction to the bizarre confluence of events, suddenly discovering the only man she had ever loved on her doorstep the very moment she learned she was going to be a single mother in approximately eight months and change?

“May I...come in?” He sounded real enough, with a wary hesitance in his voice. She couldn’t really blame him for that. The last time she had spoken to the man, she had made it more than clear she had no use for him and never wanted to see him again.

The blatant lie of her words couldn’t be more obvious as she all but drank in the sight of him.

He had aged, of course, with lines at the corners of his eyes and a little sprinkling of gray in his brown hair. She found it totally unfair that those things only added to his appeal.

“Ed. Wh-what are you doing here?”

He gestured to the pregnancy stick in her hand. “I don’t think I’m quite the person you were expecting.”

“How could I possibly have been expecting you when I haven’t seen or heard from you in years?”

“I’ve obviously come at a bad time. I can come back later. You probably need to call someone else besides me to tell them the news. Your...husband? Boyfriend? Significant other?”

She obviously didn’t have any of those things, which was why she had to be artificially inseminated.

“I don’t need to call anyone,” she said. “This is my baby. Mine alone.”

He arched an eyebrow. “You do remember I was a medical student with plans to become an OB-GYN when you walked away. I’ve been in practice for more than a decade now. I think I have a pretty firm grasp on the basics of what’s required for a successful pregnancy.”

He had been twenty-three when they met, already finishing his second year of med school, earnest and compassionate and eager to make a difference in the world.

While she could never claim to have any gift for telling the future, she had known without a doubt that he would be a brilliant doctor someday.

How many times over the years had she wondered about him? She could admit to herself it had taken all her self-restraint not to google him or find him on social media.

Somehow she had known that making contact with him would be a mistake, would stir up all the emotions she had struggled bitterly to overcome.

“This is obviously not a good time.” He scratched his neck, looking rueful. “I think it would be better if I came back later.”

Yes, she wanted to tell him. Go away.

Stella needed at least a few moments for the joy to sink in, to savor the idea of being pregnant. She wanted to imagine burying her face in her baby’s neck to inhale the intoxicating scent, to think about how wonderful it finally would be to cradle that sweet, warm weight against her after all these months of dreaming.

She had no desire to traipse down memory lane with a man she had done her best to forget.

She should invite him in but she didn’t want to. She wanted him to walk back out the way he had come, to go on and live his life without her, as she had forced him to do.

Good manners wouldn’t let her go quite that far. “You’re here. You obviously have a reason for that. You might as well come in.”

She held the door open, and after an awkward moment, he moved past her. She had a wild urge to pinch him to make sure he was truly there and not some strange pregnancy-induced apparition. Somehow she was able to refrain.

“I take it from what you said that you’re not married. Does that mean you’re planning to raise the baby by yourself?”

She refused to let herself panic about how very daunting that task suddenly seemed.

“Yes. I’m certainly not the only woman in the world who has ever done that.”

“True enough. And you raised the girls yourself, so you had plenty of practice, right?”

With preteens and teenagers. Not with an infant. That panic flared again and she stuffed it down. She was forty years old, far more experienced than she’d been when she took custody of the girls. She could do it.

“What are you doing here, Ed?” If she asked enough times, he would have to answer her, right?

He again looked uncomfortable, his gaze shifting away from her. “It’s a long story. The short answer is that I wanted to give you fair warning that I’m moving to Cape Sanctuary with my daughter.”

Moving. Here. Of all the places in this vast and beautiful country, he was moving here? She had spent twenty years trying to forget him. How on earth was she supposed to do that if he was living in Cape Sanctuary, a town of only ten thousand people?

She couldn’t wrap her head around that. Instead, she focused on what was probably the least earthshaking part of his sentence. “You have a daughter.”

The somewhat harsh planes of his face softened with a tenderness that made her throat feel tight and achy.

“Yes. Rowan. She’s almost twelve. Smart, funny, curious. Amazing.”

As a middle school teacher, she couldn’t help being touched by his words. She knew too many parents who came to parent-teacher conferences armed with only criticism and frustration toward their child for not measuring up to expectations.

“How lovely. And her mother?”

His smile slipped. “She...died two years ago,” he said curtly.

Oh. Poor Ed and poor Rowan. Compassion nudged its way past the shock. She knew what it was to lose her own mother at a young age and how hard it had been on Bea and Daisy, too.

She had so hoped that by leaving him after she took custody of the girls, by allowing him the freedom to pursue his dreams unencumbered by all her baggage, she was providing him the chance to find the happy-ever-after she had been incapable of providing him.

After his own rough youth, largely putting his own life on hold from the age of twelve to help his single mother raise his own brother and sisters after his father walked out, she couldn’t ask Ed to do the same thing all over again with two orphaned, needy girls.

It hurt more than she might have expected to know her hopes for him to have a beautiful, happy life hadn’t been realized. He had walked his own tough road. He had loved again, lost again and was now a widower.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. That’s why I’m here, actually. Not here in your living room but here in Cape Sanctuary. My daughter and I were in need of a fresh start and a good friend from medical school told me her partner was retiring and asked if I wanted to go into practice with her. You might know her. Joanne Chen.”

Her stomach suddenly twisted with the vague nausea of the past few weeks that had been hinting at the truth she had been afraid to verify.

“I do know her,” she said. “Quite well, actually. She’s my doctor.”

He made a face. “When I saw you standing there with the pregnancy test, I feared as much. That’s one of the reasons I looked you up and decided to stop by, so that neither one of us had any sudden shocks when we run into each other at the clinic or on the street somewhere.”

“You mean like the kind of shock I might have had when I opened my front door to find you on the other side, after all these years?”

He gave her a rueful look. “Yeah. Exactly like that one. I’m sorry. I should have thought things through a little more and phoned you first. In retrospect, I probably should have reached out to discuss it with you when Rowan and I were first considering the idea of moving here.”

“You can move wherever you want, Ed. I’m not queen and supreme ruler of Cape Sanctuary. Though I have to ask, of all the places you could have gone, why here?”

“My previous practice was in Pasadena and I wanted more of a small-town atmosphere. And Rowan wanted somewhere with a beach. She is learning to surf and wants to be a marine biologist. I bumped into Jo at a conference several months ago and she mentioned what a lovely town it was. It seemed the perfect place for us. Not tiny but small enough to feel like we’re part of the community.”

“You remembered that I lived here?”

“I remembered that this is where you took the girls when you left. I remember you talking about how much you loved it here, how your time in foster care in Cape Sanctuary was the happiest of your life, when you felt the most safe.”

Had she said that? Probably. After their mother died when she was eight and her only sister, Jewel, ten years older, took off with the first of a long string of boyfriends, Stella spent five difficult years being bounced from foster home to foster home throughout Northern California. At thirteen, she finally landed in Cape Sanctuary with a wonderful, loving couple that showed her by example how a family should function. With mutual respect, with kindness, with compassion.

Cape Sanctuary had become home. Naturally, this was also where she had been compelled to bring Daisy and Beatriz when she obtained custody of them after Jewel’s lifestyle caught up with her.

“I guess, maybe I was looking for some kind of peace for me and for Rowan. She’s struggling a great deal over losing her mom. Holly’s death was...difficult. The idea of finding a sanctuary somewhere held a great deal of appeal. To be honest, I figured you probably weren’t here anymore. I just assumed you would have married and moved away and had the half-dozen children you always talked about wanting.”

She hadn’t. Just the girls and this tiny life growing inside her, though she wanted to think she had been a mother figure to all the foster children who had found temporary refuge here at Three Oaks.

“I’m still here,” she said, stating the obvious. “Thank you for warning me. Now I guess I’ll have no excuse to freak out if I see you in the street.”

He was quiet, those handsome features she had loved so much looking tense and uncomfortable. “I want this move to work for my daughter, but not at the expense of you and your comfort here in town.”

“It’s fine. It doesn’t bother me at all,” she lied. “You can move wherever you want, Ed. I hope that after all this time, we can be friends.”

“I would like that,” he said softly. “I’ve learned that true friends in this life are as rare as they are precious.”

He gave her a careful look. “Now that we’ve cleared the air and gotten the initial shock of seeing each other again out of the way, tell me about this pregnancy. How far along do you think you might be?”

She knew exactly how far along she was, five weeks to the day since her last rendezvous with the doctor’s turkey baster. She wasn’t about to tell him that, though.

“About a month,” she said.

“Jo is an excellent doctor. You’re in good hands.”

“Yes. She’s been my OB-GYN for years.”

“Then you know her skills well.” He cleared his throat. “Thank you for being understanding. It’s really great to see you, Stella. And congratulations again.”

“Thank you.”

“I guess I’ll see you around.”

Not if I see you first, she wanted to say, but that would probably sound juvenile coming from a forty-year-old schoolteacher who was about to become a mother.

“Right.”

To her astonished dismay, he leaned in and kissed her cheek, then turned around and walked through her door, leaving behind a little swirl of his distinctive scent that took her right back to those intense college days when she had been young and completely in love.

Those heady months they had been together had seemed full of amazing possibilities. She had been close to graduating, in the middle of her last semester of coursework before doing her student teaching.

It had been an important time for her scholastically but she had barely been able to keep her mind on her schoolwork that final semester because she’d been in love for the first and only time.

Stella sank into her favorite chair, the one she had saved and saved to buy, with its whimsical forest scene created by her favorite artist, the anonymously infamous Marguerite.

The chair usually centered her. It was the one she meditated in, read in, sat in to write in her diary. This time she couldn’t seem to find anything resembling peace as the memories crowded in.

She had been so in love with the gorgeous medical student she’d met at the UCLA student health clinic when she had sprained her ankle playing beach volleyball with friends over the holiday break.

Sparks had flared between them instantly and she had slipped him her phone number, something she had never done before or since. He called her the next day, ostensibly to check up on her ankle, and the two of them ended up talking for hours. Ed had dropped by the next night with a pizza and a bouquet of flowers and she had fallen hard. From that instant on, they spent every available moment together. They studied together, met up for meals on campus, spent all their free time hiking, riding bikes, or just taking a drive and talking.

He had proposed after two months. It was entirely too early in their relationship and they were both too young. Plus, he had years of med school, residency and internship ahead of him.

Both of them knew getting married had been a crazy idea but things seemed so right and real and perfect. Ed had been old-fashioned, hadn’t wanted to move in together without marrying her, and by that point neither of them could imagine being apart.

She had known she wanted to build a life with him, so she had said yes. He was warm and loving, honorable and kind and amazing.

She wasn’t sure what he saw in her, a former foster child with an alcoholic mother and a deadbeat father who had disappeared long ago, but she didn’t care. She had been lost in the wonder and magic of knowing he would be hers and they would build the family she had always wanted.

And then she had found out purely by accident that her sister, Jewel, had died months earlier of a drug overdose, and Jewel’s daughters, her nieces, had been put in separate foster homes.

And that was that. In that single moment her entire future had changed and she had known exactly what she had to do.

The girls needed her.

She had broken things off with Ed. What choice did she have? She could never ask him to help her raise two troubled girls, not when he needed all his energy and focus to become the brilliant doctor she saw inside him.

He would have done it. He would have put all his dreams on hold to help her obtain custody of the girls and would probably have quit med school to help support them all.

She couldn’t let him. So she had just...walked away. Eventually, she had told him she wasn’t in love with him, that she was too young to be married. That part was probably truth. She told him she had an offer to do her student teaching in Cape Sanctuary, at the other end of the state and a world away, and she was taking it.

She had cried herself to sleep the first three months she was away from him and had tortured herself by keeping a picture of them on the beach in the drawer of her bedside table until she had finally forced herself to put it away.

And now he was here.

What kind of weird wind had carried him back into her life now? And what was she going to do?

She wiped at the tears she hadn’t realized she still had inside her for Ed Clayton and a love that seemed as real and strong now as it had then.

It didn’t matter. She touched her abdomen, to the tiny life growing there. She couldn’t let it matter. She had more important things to worry about now, like how in the world she was going to raise this child by herself.