An older man sat alone at a table near the railing, both hands wrapped around one of the photographs from the castle, studying it like it might answer a question he’d been carrying a long time. And I did recognize him, the moment the sunlight caught his face.
Robert. Adam’s father.
I hadn’t seen him since Adam’s funeral, where he’d stood on the far side of the grave and never once looked at me, as though grief had a side and I was standing on the wrong one of it. After Lily was born, we’d traded a handful of letters — his first one accusing me of keeping his son’s child away from him, mine firing back that he hadn’t called once during my pregnancy, hadn’t asked if I needed help, hadn’t done anything but disappear into his own grief and call it an excuse. The letters got uglier. Then they stopped altogether. I had spent nearly a decade believing that man wanted nothing to do with my daughter. It had apparently never occurred to me that he might have spent that same decade believing the opposite — that I was the one who’d shut the door.
I crossed the lobby fast enough that the automatic doors barely had time to open, and I walked straight past Robert without a word, out to the parking lot, my shoulder nearly catching in the closing glass.
“You invited Robert here?” I said, before Tony had even turned around.
“Claire, let me explain—”
“You contacted him. Without telling me.”
“Yes.”
“You let him pay for pieces of our daughter’s dying wish?”
“Only the breakfast. The beach equipment.”
“That is not the point, Tony, and you know it.”
He lowered his voice, the way he does when he’s trying to slow a conversation down that’s already moving too fast to stop. “I found the letters while I was looking for Lily’s birth certificate, for the travel paperwork.”
“You read them?”
“I read the last one.”
I remembered that letter as one more piece of an old argument, something I’d filed away under things I never wanted to think about again. Tony remembered a single sentence in it that I had apparently skimmed right past — Robert had written that I should call him whenever Lily was ready, and left a number.
“He said you should reach out when she was ready to know him,” Tony said. “So I called him.”
“Without asking me.”
“Yes.”
“And told him about the trip.”
“He offered to pay for something Lily would enjoy. I gave the hotel’s guest services line to him. He arranged it after I told him what she wanted to do.”
“You brought her biological grandfather into her last trip and didn’t say a word to me. Why would you do that?”
Tony looked toward the hotel, and for the first time his composure cracked. “Because Lily is running out of time, Claire.”
The sentence landed like a hand against my chest. He kept going before I could recover.
“He wanted to come at the start of the trip. I told him no. I told him it wasn’t his decision, or mine — that you had to decide whether he ever got to meet her at all.”
“And yet he’s here.”
“He called me last night. He said he couldn’t stand the thought of losing his chance without at least asking you himself, in person, instead of over the phone.”
“You still made the decision without me.”
“I know.”
“You had no right to make it.”