And when it came time for her to enter hospice only a month after delivering Diana, she asked me the question I never could’ve expected.

I brought Diana home to Muir Farm just days later. Tatum drove us. I think, perhaps, that Olivia thought Tatum and I . . .

But I was still grieving you. And then Olivia, too. And entering motherhood. And he . . . well, he returned to school.

Tatum wants to buy the farm. I know what he’s doing, Robert. He’s trying to help me again. And I’ve no idea what to do. It would break Neil’s heart if I sold. It might very well break my own.

And if I believed in ghosts, I’d fear Alec Muir’s eternal haunting.

But Neil works so hard and the girls have other careers and . . . I worry sometimes I’m trapped in the past. I’ve been having the nightmares again, Robert. About the night of Diana’s accident. They’re so blurry . . .

I don’t know what to do.

With all my love,

Maggie

“Sydney, you don’t have to do this alone.”

It shouldn’t feel so much like winter on only the second day of November. Though the usual seaside wind was almost eerily calm, the air was brittle and biting. Heavy clouds captured the sky in a swirl of rolling gray, hiding the sun and hinting at snow.

At least Neil had thought to start his truck ten minutes ago. Might not be as slick, shiny, and new as one of the Carter trucks, but the heater worked and he liked the thought of Sydney driving this more than Maggie’s old Buick.

He just wished she’d let him go with her.

But she was as resolute this morning as she’d been last night. “This is going to be awkward enough. I need Tate Carter to be honest with me, and I think there’s more chance of that if we don’t have an audience.”

She shuffled down the porch steps. She was back to wearing her too-thin coat—and on the coldest day since her arrival. But he supposed he understood. Showing up wearing an oversized men’s coat probably wasn’t the impression she wanted to give off to the man who might be her father.

Tate Carter. Of all the blasted people . . .

He had to try once more. “I could wait for you in the truck.”

She gave him the same smile she had fifteen minutes ago when she’d come downstairs and found him in the kitchen, already filling a travel mug of coffee for her. How he’d known she’d try to sneak out this morning before the rest of them were awake, he didn’t know. But she’d been open last night about her need to go see Carter and her desire to do so without telling the rest of the household.

That, too, he could understand. There’d been enough starts and stops in this attempt to find her father. He’d probably want a concrete answer himself, if he were in her shoes—not only about whether Carter was truly her father, but which woman was her mother—before sharing anything with the others.