“I’m sorry to drag you away from your friends.”

“That’s all right.”

“I’m Mallory.” She swallowed hard as if she were nervous. “Mallory Vaughn.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Mallory.”

“It’s nice to meet you, too. Does the name Vaughn mean anything to you?”

“I can’t say that it does. Should it?”

She withdrew a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. “You should read this.”

Holding her earnest gaze, Big Mac took it from her with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. What was this about? Turning his attention to the paper, he began to read handwriting that obviously belonged to a woman.

My dear Mallory,

Now that I am gone, I feel it is only fair to share the one piece of information I was too fearful to give you in life. You have asked me for years about who your father is, and I had good intentions of telling you when the time was right. Then I got sick, and time became our most precious commodity. I had other things I wanted to do besides revisit my painful past.

Your father is a good man; at least he was during the short time that I knew him. He had an opportunity to start a business on Gansett Island, and since I was tied to my home and family here, there was no future for us. So I let him go to pursue his dream and stayed here to pursue mine. A short time later, I discovered I was expecting you.

“Oh my God,” Big Mac whispered as the dock beneath his feet seemed to move as his entire existence shifted. “Your mother was Diana Vaughn.”

“Yes.”

“So that makes you…”

“Your daughter, apparently.”

Big Mac couldn’t seem to breathe as he stared at the young woman before him and tried to make sense of what she was saying.

She gently removed the letter from his hand and read the rest to him. “‘Your father owns a marina called McCarthy’s Gansett Island Marina. His name is Mac McCarthy, and he will be surprised to know you exist because I never told him I was expecting you. By the time I learned you were on the way, he and I had ended our relationship, and a short time later, I heard he was engaged to someone else.