“Do you want to ride with me, Beck?”
“I’ll walk,” he answered with a careful look at June.
“Okay. Thanks for the tent, then.”
He stood and hugged her. “You’re welcome. Have fun. Be safe.”
Ali smiled at both of them, warm to Beck and more tentative to June, then she slipped out the door.
Chapter 32
Beckett
After Ali left, the cabin was silent. June looked shaken, her features pale and her mouth pinched.
He wanted to pull her into his arms.
“Are you okay?” he asked, sitting down next to her at the table that was covered with her father’s journals.
She gave a short laugh. “No. In fact, I’m about as far from okay as possible. And that’s coming from someone who recently had a cardiac arrest. How would you feel if you just found out everything you thought you knew about yourself and about your life might be wrong?”
“It doesn’t change who you are. You are still Juniper Connelly, a woman of strength and courage who has worked damn hard to create her own success. You are still a loving daughter who has cherished memories of your mother. You are still a survivor.”
“I loved my father. I never knew him so I didn’t lovehim, per se. I have no memories of him at all. But I loved theideaof him. My mother always talked about what a good, honorable man he was and how much he had loved being my father.”
She suddenly pressed a fist to her stomach, a single tear dripping out to slide down the side of her nose. He felt helpless, not knowing how to comfort her in the face of this kind of upheaval.
“How could she have done it?”
He frowned. “Alison?”
“My mother! How could she have passed me off as Jimmy Connelly’s child?”
“She might not have known otherwise, June.”
“If Alison is right, my mother had an affair. She was married to my father and she slept with Carson Wells.”
“People do all kinds of things for reasons we can’t know.” He wished he had a better answer for her, but it was all he could come up with.
“You don’t understand. This is Elizabeth Connolly we’re talking about. She was always going on about character and integrity. How your actions defined your character. You are what you do, she always said.”
She let out a shaky breath. “Once, she found a hundred dollar bill in the pocket of a coat she bought at a charity shop and she returned it to the store! I asked her why, when we never had any spare change and could have used a windfall like that ourselves—and when the store probably wouldn’t be able to find the owner, anyway. She said that while it was true we could have found a use for the money, she would rather have it go for a good cause than to keep it and spend it, knowing it didn’t belong to us.”
Ah. That must be where June had inherited her sense of honor, of decency, that seemed an integral part of her. He admired it, even as he understood those traits would also make it even harder to accept that her mother might have made some difficult choices.
“She sounds remarkable.”
“She was. Or at least I always thought so. How could that same woman cheat on her husband?”
He reached for her hand and folded his own around her cold, trembling fingers, trying to give her some of his warmth. “I wish I had answers for you. Your mom is gone so we can’t ask her side of it. We will probably never know the details about what happened between her and Carson.”
June looked down at their joined hands, then her gaze shifted beyond them to the stacks of journals on the table.
“But we do have Carson’s journals from that time. He talked about everything.”
She pulled her hands away and picked one up, flipping it open. “Maybe my mother was his lost love. His ‘E.’ I think she is the woman he wroteThe Forgotten Roadabout! We have to find that manuscript!”
He was relieved that the stricken look in her eyes had given way, if only temporarily, to excitement. At the same time, he didn’t want her to have to process more disappointment with everything else.
