The High Price of Secrets

“Stay, at least for Alexis’s sake. She wants to meet you properly.”

About to step around him, he was relieved to see that his words had temporarily stopped her in her tracks.

“Alexis? She wants to talk to me?”

“More than that, she really does want to get to know you,” he assured her.

Tamsyn visibly sagged. All the bravado, all the fight leeching out of her before his eyes.

“All right. For her, I’ll stay, but not in here. If I didn’t know for a fact that the whole town is booked solid, I’d get a hotel room. Instead, I’ll use the room I had before.”

“Thank you.”

She lifted her head, her eyes hollow and filled with sorrow. “I’m not doing it for you.”

No, of course she wasn’t. He understood that as he’d understood nothing else before. But it was a small victory. She was here, still under his roof. As she walked from the room and down the hallway he closed his eyes and thanked his lucky stars he still had this much. And, he hoped, time enough to convince Tamsyn to stay for good.

* * *

Tamsyn hung on the outskirts of the throng of mourners attending Ellen’s wake at Finn’s house. She’d never felt more utterly alone in her life. Ethan and Isobel had tried to come but, this close to Christmas, they’d been unable to secure flights to get them here in time. As it was, with Christmas only three days away, she’d been lucky to get a flight out of Blenheim to Auckland for later this evening.

The local townspeople had done Ellen proud. The hall was used for her funeral and it had been filled to the seams—with more chairs, speakers and screens outside—with those who’d come to pay their respects. Several people came up to Tamsyn, to offer their condolences, many with apologies for their own guilt at keeping the truth from her reflected in their eyes.

Throughout the activity of the day, Tamsyn was constantly reminded that no matter how well everyone had known and loved her mother, nobody here could answer her questions. No one could explain why Ellen had abandoned her children and left them to grow up thinking she was dead. The last remaining person who could have done that was being laid to rest in the small graveyard beside the church.

She’d sat between Finn and Alexis for the service—dry eyed, stoic—and learned for the first time how others had seen her mother. Yes, she’d been flawed and, yes, she’d struggled with alcohol abuse, but in her stronger moments she had been the kind of woman that Tamsyn knew she would have wanted to know. Ellen’s contributions to the district had varied and she was fondly remembered for the art classes she’d taught in the community. It reminded Tamsyn of the paintings she’d seen at Finn’s house in the gallery, signed with her mother’s initials. She ached to possess something of her mother’s. The closest thing she had was the new sister in her life.

Alexis had been a surprise. Sunny-natured with not an unpleasant bone in her body, her half sister was easy to be with and even, Tamsyn knew, to begin to love. That Alexis held Finn in a state of near hero worship reminded Tamsyn very much of her relationship with her own brother growing up. And, like Tamsyn with Ethan, Alexis was clear-eyed about her foster brother’s flaws.

Under Alexis’s less than subtle onslaught of friendship over the past five days, Tamsyn had begun to rationalize, again, Finn’s reasons for keeping the truth from her, but that did nothing to ease the pain and emptiness that echoed inside her every day. And, rationalization aside, she was still angry with him. However valid he’d made his reasons seem, she’d deserved the opportunity to make the final judgment about trying to see her mother herself. Just one last glimpse, one final opportunity to hold her hand, to feel the connection that had been missing for most of her life. Her right to choose what to do had been stolen from her and she struggled to forgive that.

Distance and space to think in was what she needed most right now. She was waitlisted on several flights out of Auckland, hoping to be home in time for the twenty-fifth, where she could lick her emotional wounds among her own people.

“Miss Masters?”

Tamsyn wheeled around at the accented sound of Lorenzo’s voice. He’d avoided her completely since his return to the cottage at the bottom of the hill and she couldn’t mask her surprise at having him approach her now. Her eyes roamed his face. He was still a handsome man, although grief clouded his eyes and aged him.

“I would speak with you. Will you walk with me a moment?” he asked, offering her his elbow with old-fashioned courtesy.

Every instinct within her wanted to refuse the man who’d deliberately thwarted her attempts to find her mother and she opened her mouth to do exactly that.