"He wants to cancel it. She's badgering him to go, wants nothing to interfere with his work." Impatient, annoyed, she scowled at the elevator doors. "So damn sure she is that she can handle an infant, the inn, all those bleeding guests, and this Amanda Dougherty Bodine business as well."
"We both know that Brianna's strong enough to handle whatever happens. Just as you are."
Prepared to argue, she looked up. Rogan's amused smile smoothed away the temper. "You may be right." She sent him a saucy look. "For once." Soothed a little, she took some of the flowers from him. "And it's too wonderful a day to be worrying about something that may never happen. We've ourselves a beautiful niece, Sweeney."
"That we do. I think she might have your chin, Margaret Mary."
"I was thinking that as well." She stepped into the elevator with him. How simple it was really, she mused, to forget the pain and remember only the joy. "And I was thinking now that Liam's beginning to toddle about, we might start working on providing him with a sister, or a brother."
With a grin Rogan managed to kiss her through the daffodils. "I was thinking that as well."
Chapter Three
I am the Resurrection and the Light.
Shannon knew the words, all the priest's words, were supposed to comfort, to ease, perhaps inspire. She heard them, on this perfect spring day beside her mother's grave. She'd heard them in the crowded, sunwashed church during the funeral Mass. All the words, familiar from her youth. And she had knelt and stood and sat, even responded as some part of her brain followed the rite.
But she felt neither comforted nor eased nor inspired.
The scene wasn't dreamlike, but all too real. The black-garbed priest with his beautiful baritone, the dozens and dozens of mourners, the brilliant stream of sunlight that glinted off the brass handles of the coffin that was cloaked in flowers. The sound of weeping, the chirp of birds.
She was burying her mother.
Beside the fresh grave was the neatly tended mound of another, and the headstone, still brutally new, of the man she had believed all of her life to be her father. She was supposed to cry. But she'd already wept. She was supposed to pray. But the prayers wouldn't come.
Standing there, with the priest's voice ringing in the clear spring air, Shannon could only see herself again, walking into the parlor, the anger still hot inside her.
She'd thought her mother had been sleeping. But there had been too many questions, too many demands racing in her head to wait, and she'd decided to wake her.
Gently, she remembered. Thank God she had at least been gentle. But her mother hadn't awakened, hadn't stirred.
The rest had been panic. Not so gentle now-the shaking, the shouting, the pleading. And the few minutes of blankness, blessedly brief, that she knew now had been helpless hysteria.
There'd been the frantic call for an ambulance, the endless, terrifying ride to the hospital. And the wait, always the wait.
Now the waiting was over. Amanda had slipped into a coma, and from a coma into death. And from death, so said the priest, into eternal life. They told her it was a blessing. The doctor had said so, and the nurses who had been unfailingly kind. The friends and neighbors who had called had all said it was a blessing. There had been no pain, no suffering in those last fortyeight hours. She had simply slept while her body and brain had shut down.
Only the living suffered, Shannon thought now. Only they were riddled with guilt and regrets and unanswered questions.
"She's with Colin now," someone murmured.
Shannon blinked herself back, and saw that it was done. People were already turning toward her. She would have to accept their sympathies, their comforts, their own sorrows, as she had at the funeral parlor viewing.
Many would come back to the house, of course. She had prepared for that, had handled all the details. After all, she thought as she mechanically accepted and responded to those who walked to her, details were what she did best.
The funeral arrangements had been handled neatly and without fuss. Her mother would have wanted the simple, she knew, and Shannon had done her best to accommodate Amanda on this last duty. The simple coffin, the right flowers and music, the solemn Catholic ceremony.
And the food, of course. It seemed faintly awful to have such a thing catered, but she simply hadn't had the time or the energy to prepare a meal for the friends and neighbors who would come to the house from the cemetery.
Then, at last, she was alone. For a moment she simply couldn't think-what did she want? What was right? Still the tears and the prayers wouldn't come. Tentatively Shannon laid a hand on the coffin, but there was only the sensation of wood warmed by the sun, and the overly heady scent of roses.
"I'm sorry," she murmured. "It shouldn't have been like that between us at the end. But I don't know how to resolve it, or to change it. And I don't know how to say goodbye, to either of you now."
She stared down at the headstone to her left.
Colin Alan Bodine Beloved husband and father
Even those last words, she thought miserably, carved into granite were a lie. And her only wish, as she stood over the graves of two people she had loved all of her life, was that she had never learned the truth.
And that stubborn, selfish wish was the guilt she would live with.
Turning away, she walked alone toward the waiting car.
It seemed like hours before the crowd began to thin and the house grew quiet again. Amanda had been well loved, and those who had loved her had gathered together in her home. Shannon said her last goodbye, her last thanks, accepted her last sympathy, then finally, finally, closed the door and was alone.
Fatigue began to drag at Shannon as she wandered into her father's office.
Amanda had changed little here in the eleven months since her husband's sudden death. The big old desk was no longer cluttered, but she had yet to dispose of his computer, the modem, the fax and other equipment he'd used as a broker and financial adviser. His toys, he'd called them, and his wife had kept them even when she'd been able to give away his suits, his shoes, his foolish ties.
All the books remained on the shelves-tax planning, estate planning, accounting texts.
Weary, Shannon sat in the big leather chair she'd given him herself for Father's Day five years before. He'd loved it, she remembered, running a hand over the smooth burgundy leather. Big enough to hold a horse, he'd said, and had laughed and pulled her into his lap.
She wished she could convince herself that she still felt him here. But she didn't. She felt nothing. And that told her more than the requiem Mass, more than the cemetery, that she was alone. Really alone.
There hadn't been enough time for anything, Shannon thought dully. If she'd known before... She wasn't sure which she meant, her mother's illness or the lies. If she'd known, she thought again, training her mind on the illness. They might have tried other things, the alternative medicines, the vitamin concentrates, all the small and simple hopes she'd read of in the books on homeopathic medicine she'd collected. There hadn't been time to give them a chance to work.
There had been only a few weeks. Her mother had kept her illness from her, as she'd kept other things.
She hadn't shared them, Shannon thought as bitterness warred with grief. Not with her own daughter.
So, the very last words she had spoken to her mother had been in anger and contempt. And she could never take them back.