LITMIR.BIZ

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Trying to find out what really matters.”

      “Wainscoat Construction matters,” Kathy said, looking up. “It always has.”

      “But my son matters more,” Amelia replied. Yes, the company meant the world to her, but Charles was life itself. And what good was a world without life?

      “From now on, I’m a mother. First and foremost. I’m going to be delegating many of my day-to-day responsibilities at the office,” she said now, imagining Cara’s reaction when she heard Amelia’s decision. Would her best friend think she’d lost her mind?

      Somehow Amelia doubted it.

      This was right.

      “I’m going to spend the next fifteen years here at home, raising my son. Caring for him, practicing the piano with him. Encouraging him. Teaching him.”

      Kathy paled. “And where does that leave me?”

      Amelia almost caved then. Almost.

      “Finding the life that’s out there waiting for you…”

      “You’re letting me…go?”

      Amelia nodded.

      The nanny looked as though she might faint.

      Once the decision had been made—and delivered—Amelia wanted to get Kathy out of her home immediately. Safely away from Charles.

      There was no justification for the urgency.

      Still, the urgency drove her.

      While Kathy was packing her essentials, Amelia called Cara at the office and then her secretary to have all her morning appointments rescheduled. She also arranged for Celeste and Clifford Smith—the couple who’d been looking after the Wainscoats for thirty years—to have the remainder of Kathy’s things packed up and sent to her. And she canceled Charles’s morning swim lesson.

      Then she escorted Kathy into Charles’s playroom, where the little boy was painstakingly drawing a picture with a big purple crayon clutched in his left hand. Left-handed like his father. The picture was for “Daddy’s grave to leave when they had the annivers’y day” the following week.

      As they filed slowly into the room, Charles looked up from his child-size wooden table, pushing his glasses up his nose with the side of the hand still holding the crayon.

      He didn’t say a word, but Amelia’s heart lurched at the expression on her son’s face as he saw the two of them together. He knew something was up.

      What was she doing?

      Charles had already lost so much. Far too much.

      She couldn’t meet Kathy’s eyes as the woman hesitated at the door.

      “Charles…” Both women spoke at once.

      Kathy approached the little table, kneeling down until she was nose to nose with Amelia’s son.

      “Charles,” she said, a forced smile stretching her unnaturally taut lips, “I just came in to say goodbye.”

      His feet stopped swinging beneath the table. “Where ya’ goin’?”

      “To my mother’s,” Kathy said. “I spoke to her a little while ago and she asked me to come for a visit.”

      Charles wrinkled his nose. “I thought you said she’s not good at games.”

      Kathy shrugged. “So I’ll teach her.” She ran a finger lightly down his nose. “Before I go, though, I want you to promise me you’ll be a good boy.”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “You know it’s what your daddy would want.”

      Amelia didn’t miss the nanny’s lack of reference to her.

      Charles nodded, picked up his picture of four square-bodied people standing in the air above what could have been a grove of purple trees or a crowd of very sunburned people at a baseball game. “You think he’ll like my picture?” he asked Kathy, the need for his nanny’s approval evident.

      “Oh, yeah, buddy, he’s gonna love it,” she said, real warmth in her voice.

      Charles sat up a little straighter, grinning at Kathy. His denim-clad legs were swinging again. “I know he will.”

      Throat tight, Amelia was tempted just to call it off. Kathy’s love for Charles was so obvious—as obvious as Charles’s was for her. How could Amelia rob them of something so precious? What kind of mother did that make her?

      Just as she was about to change her mind, a mental flashback to the scene in her living room half an hour ago held Amelia rigid. There’d never been any doubt that Kathy loved Charles. The doubt lay in whether or not that love was healthy.

      Charles grew still again, his brows drawn together beneath those black frames that made him look too serious sometimes. His dark hair skimmed the collar of his polo shirt when he tilted his head back slightly to peer at Kathy. “Will you be done visiting to come home for the annivers’y party? That’s what Daddy would want, right?”

      “My mom’s pretty lonely, Charles,” Kathy said. “I’m going to be living with her for now and then probably getting a little house of my own.”

      “You don’t like our house?”

      “Of course I do!” Kathy said, moving a little closer to the boy. “I love your house! But I’ve been here a long time and everybody needs a house of their own when they’re grown up.”

      “Is that why Daddy went to live in heaven? To have a house of his own?”

      “I don’t think so, Charles,” Kathy said. “This is your daddy’s house. He didn’t choose to go away from you. It was an accident.”

      Feeling completely ineffective, Amelia simply stood there. Kathy was handling things so well—and deserved the chance to handle them.

      Kathy knew exactly what to say to Charles. How to say it. And she was, even now, putting all her effort into making her departure something Charles could accept.

      She had been a remarkable nurturer from the very beginning. It was one of the qualities that had made her such a great addition to their home.

      Still frowning, so serious for his five years, Charles asked, “But you’re choosing to go away from me?”

      “Oh, sweetie, no!” Kathy shot Amelia a half gloating, half lethal glance. “I don’t really have a choice, either, just in a different way.” Amelia was poised and ready to discontinue the conversation before anything damaging was said. Only the loving tone of Kathy’s voice as she spoke to Charles gave her pause.

      “I’m a daughter,” the nanny said softly, “just like you’re a son. And as a daughter, I don’t have any choice but to mind my mother, who told me this morning that I should come home.”

      “Like we do what Daddy would want?”

      “Just like that.” And then, with another glance over her shoulder, “and what Mommy wants, too.”

      Charles was silent, his legs swinging slowly, as he seemed to ponder his nanny’s words. At last he spoke.

      “But if you go make your mom not lonely, doesn’t that make me be lonely?”

      Tears sprang to Amelia’s eyes.

      “Oh, buddy, come here,” Kathy said, pulling Charles onto her lap. She hugged him tightly, rocking back and forth slowly. “No matter where I go, I’ll always be loving you,” she said. Charles’s chubby little face was visible over the nanny’s shoulder. His eyes were squeezed shut.

      “You only have to think of me and you’ll be able to feel me loving you, okay?”

      “’Kay.”

      Amelia started to panic. Wondering what had ever made her think

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