He couldn’t take any more of this. Gripping his bag more tightly in his fist, he turned abruptly toward the stairway. “Goodbye, Molly.”
She didn’t respond. She just stood there, watching him limp away.
Downstairs, Cassie and Jared waited to see him off. It seemed wryly ironic that Jared stood by a bookshelf on which were grouped framed photographs of former foster sons. Kyle’s senior portrait was among them. He had avoided looking at that photograph much while he was here. The memories tended to overwhelm him when he did.
Jared held out his weathered hand, his too-knowing navy-blue eyes searching Kyle’s face. “It was good to see you, Kyle. Thanks for coming.”
Kyle gripped Jared’s hand, and realized somewhat disconcertedly that there was still a touch of hero-worship in the way he felt about Jared Walker. “It was good to see you, too, Jared.”
“Give us a call sometime, okay?”
“I’ll do that.” And maybe he would. But then, again, he thought, remembering the tears in Molly’s eyes, maybe he wouldn’t.
He turned to Cassie then. Holding a large, sealed tin in one hand, she reached out to hug him with the other arm. Standing back then, she offered the tin. “I made a batch of cookies after breakfast,” she told him with a slightly misty smile. “I remember how much you always liked them.”
Damn. Shaken by the gesture, he nodded and said gruffly, “That was nice of you. Thanks.”
Outside on the porch, the boys waited. One by one, Kyle shook hands with Colin, Elias and Emilio, then turned to Jacob. Jacob clung to his hand a bit longer than the others, his face twitching.
“You’ll be okay,” Kyle assured him quietly. “You’re safe here. You should know that by now.”
“Will you come back sometime?”
“I don’t know,” Kyle answered honestly. “But you’ll be all right, Jacob. You’re a decent kid, with a strong heart and a good brain. Don’t screw up, okay?”
“I won’t.” Drawing a deep breath, Jacob took a step backward.
“Ready?” Shane asked, tossing Kyle’s bag into his pickup.
Kyle shook Kelly’s hand, then blinked in surprise when both the little girls threw their arms around his legs to hug him goodbye. He patted their heads awkwardly, told them to be good and then climbed into the passenger seat of Shane’s truck.
As they drove away, he couldn’t help but glance back toward the house, up to Molly’s window. A movement of the curtains there let him know that, despite what she had said, she’d watched them drive away.
Molly sat curled in a big chair in her parents’ den. A thick stack of photographs rested in her lap. One by one, she studied them, her gaze lingering on the smiling faces.
There was her aunt Lindsey, with her husband, Dr. Nick Grant, and their two teenagers, Jenny and Clay. Jared’s twin brothers, Ryan and Joe Walker, stood with their wives, Taylor and Lauren. In the background of that photo, Joe and Lauren’s twenty-two-year-old son Casey clowned around with Ryan and Taylor’s twenty-one-year-old twins, Andrew and Aaron.
Layla and Kevin Samples beamed proudly at their grown offspring, Dawne, Keith and B.J. Daniel Andreas made a handsome addition to that family, Molly mused. Layla was already hoping for grandchildren—and beginning to nag Dawne and Keith to follow their younger sibling’s marital example. Dawne claimed to be in no hurry to wed again after a youthful disaster of a marriage.
Another group snapshot showed Michelle and Tony D’Alessandro with their brood, Jason, Carly, Katie and Justin. Justin, at fourteen, was the youngest of Molly’s first cousins. Carly’s handsome fiancé was also in the shot, apparently making a place for himself within the family that had been so wary of him at first.
There were photos of Brynn and Joe D’Alessandro and their nine-year-old son, Miles Vincent, and of Joe’s parents, Vinnie and Carla D’Alessandro, still fit and sharp in their eighties. And more snapshots of the now-grown former foster boys and their families, of food being eaten and horses being ridden, of hugs and smiles and a few happy tears.
Yet, in all those photographs, she found only two of Kyle, who seemed to have an uncanny ability to avoid the lens. In one, he stood between Cassie and Jared, self-conscious for the camera, but smiling a little, nevertheless. In the other, he sat in the background of a random crowd shot, listening gravely to something Jacob was saying to him.
Her heart aching, Molly slipped those two photos out of the pile, replacing the others in the envelope. Studying the picture of Kyle with her parents, she wondered how the pain could still be this intense even three weeks after the photographs had been taken.
She had thought—hoped, really, that her feelings for Kyle would prove to be no more than a passing infatuation, and would fade when he was no longer around every day. After all, they’d spent less than a week and a half together, hardly enough time to change her entire life, right?
Wrong. Nothing had been the same since Kyle left. Her former, rather smug contentment with her safe, predictable, sheltered existence had been diluted by the suspicions that she could have much more, if only she had the courage to pursue it.
She was living someone else’s dream here, she acknowledged with a sigh. The ranch, and the group-home facilities—those were plans her parents and brother had made. She had pursued a degree in education because it had seemed useful for their plans—and though she enjoyed working with the boys, she still wasn’t pursuing a course she had mapped for herself.
She had to ask herself now if her determination to live very close to her family was due to a real desire to see them every day—or to an insidious fear of moving away. Becoming fully responsible for her own decisions, her own mistakes.
She had so often used her aunt Lindsey as an excuse, reminding herself of how many impromptu gatherings Lindsey missed by living more than five hours away from the rest of her siblings. Yet now she could see that Lindsey had a good, happy life of her own in Little Rock. She loved her extended family very much, but she didn’t have to be with them all the time to feel connected to them.
Of course, Lindsey had family in Little Rock, too, she reminded herself. She had been adopted as an infant by a couple with two sons, all of whom still lived in the Little Rock area. So it wasn’t entirely accurate to say that Lindsey’s situation was the same as Molly’s would be if she…well, if she decided to move some distance from the ranch.