Caelyn brushed back the hair that was damp and sticking to my forehead. “Okay, we’ll get you there. Everything’s going to be okay.”

But everything hadn’t been okay. There’d been more blood and pain, and finally, emergency surgery where my heart stopped on the operating table. My little girl was gone, and I’d been left in wreckage, broken pieces that would never fit together perfectly again.

I blinked rapidly, Grant’s face coming back into focus again. He was different, his jaw sharper, more angular. And yet he looked the same, that familiar swoop of blond hair falling into his eyes. “What are you doing here?” Ice coated my tone, a frigidity born of loss and pain and betrayal.

I saw a flicker of surprise in Grant’s expression. I wasn’t the same girl he’d left behind, no longer naïve and blindly hopeful. Life had hardened me, and I was glad for the shell it had given me now.

He smiled. That was mostly the same too, though it was a bit slicker, more practiced. “I can’t stop by my family home? I wanted to see the estate, remember my grandmother.”

“It would’ve been nice if you remembered her while she was still alive.”

A hardness slipped into Grant’s eyes. “I wasn’t sure I would be welcome.”

The assessment was fair enough. He’d been back once since he left for Boston that summer so long ago. He and his parents had come to visit a few weeks after Harriet had been diagnosed with heart disease. I’d stayed with Caelyn and the kids for the few days they were on the island. I went to work, and that was it, not wanting to risk running into any member of the immediate Abbot clan.

“And whose fault would that be?”

Grant’s expression softened, but everything about it was false, practiced. “I was a kid. You can’t exactly blame me for not being ready to be a dad.”

I hadn’t blamed Grant for being scared. Hell, I’d been terrified. But I could blame him for everything that followed. Legal paperwork demanding a paternity test. A cease and desist letter accusing me of slander. But the worst were the words I’d overheard when Harriet had called Grant and his parents from my hospital room in Seattle. She’d thought I’d been asleep and hadn’t wanted to leave me. But even over the beeping of machines, I could hear Grant’s response clear as day on the other end of the line. “Serves her right for lying about me.”