Winnie made a sound of exasperation and annoyance. “You know perfectly well. Lucy and Daisy should be raised by blood relatives, not by Sam Holland. He can call himself their father until the cows come home, but that doesn’t make it true.”
“Wait.” Angie raised a hand. “I don’t understand your meaning.”
“You really don’t know?” Winnie said after studying Angie’s flushed face. She shook her head, then released a long low breath. “Laura eloped when she was seventeen. The man was unsuitable, of course. Laura chose unsuitable men.” Winnie twisted her hands together in her lap. “Mr. Payton owned a feed store on Myers Street, down near the stables. He had consumption when Laura married him, and that’s what finally killed him. We asked her to come live with us, but she said this was her home, where her friends were and where her children had been born. A year later she met Mr. Holland and you know the rest.”
“Lucy and Daisy are not Sam’s children,” Angie whispered. Shock stopped her breath.
“Of course they’re not,” Winnie said, her voice hardening again. “Adoption is just a piece of paper. Adoption doesn’t make Mr. Holland their real father. It doesn’t make him a blood relation.”
“They aren’t Sam’s children.” He’d adopted them, but they weren’t his natural children. Angie shook her head, then stared.
“That is exactly my point.”
She would deal with the shock later. If she could. “Tell me something. If Sam was their true father, would you fight so hard to take the girls away from him?”
“Why can’t you understand this? Mr. Holland has no blood tie to my granddaughters.”
“I see.” Suddenly the Govenors’ position made a lot more sense. “Mrs. Govenor, do you really want to raise Lucy and Daisy, or is it that you don’t want Sam to raise them?”
“We have a family obligation to our granddaughters. Mr. Holland does not. And it isn’t just him. We have to consider who he brings into their lives, what woman he takes up with next. Who do you think a skirt-crazy man like him would put first? My granddaughters or his next woman?”
“He’d choose his daughters,” Angie said without hesitation. There was no doubt in her mind. “Sam loves his girls. He’ll never neglect them or put them second to anyone.”
“What if he someday has a child of his own?”
“That’s an insulting implication. Sam wouldn’t stop loving his daughters if he had another child. If he can love two children, I think he can love three or four, don’t you?”
“You’re shockingly naive, Mrs. Holland. Either that, or you’re as besotted by that man as my daughter was.”
Angie climbed out of the vis-à-vis and looked up at Winnie Govenor. “You’re trying to force something that no one wants, not even you, not really. I wish you’d stop thinking about obligation and ask yourself where the girls will be happiest and where they will flourish. It’s true that Sam can’t give them the material comforts that you and your husband can. But will those comforts make them feel less lonely and less abandoned at Miss Washington’s? Or would they be happier at home with a father who loves and wants them?” Angie’s gaze hardened. “I’m not naive, and I’m not besotted. I’m also not blind to what’s best for Daisy and Lucy.”
Mrs. Govenor tossed her head and ordered her driver to drive on.
Angie stood in the street, watching until the vis-à-vis turned downhill toward Bennet Street. Then she raised a shaking hand to her forehead.
Lucy and Daisy didn’t resemble Sam because they weren’t his daughters. Angie’s arrival hadn’t exposed Lucy and Daisy as illegitimate because they weren’t born out of wedlock. And Sam hadn’t had five years to arrange Daisy’s operation, Daisy had been born before Sam met Laura. Sam hadn’t been with Laura for eight years as Angie had jealously assumed, hadn’t been present for the miracle of his daughters’ births as she had also assumed.
Later, after the girls were finally tucked into bed, Angie followed Sam out to the back steps and sat in the darkness looking at the silhouette of his tent while he told her that he wouldn’t be building the school after all.
“I’m sorry. I know building the school was important to you.” When he crawled into his tent at night, did he think of her? It was a silly thought that came out of nowhere, and she looked away from his tent. “I guess you’ll be looking for a new project.”
“I won’t put any more clients at risk.” Sam related his theory as to why the Dryfus place had not burned. “Govenor isn’t totally lacking in principles, just almost. I don’t think the Dryfus fire was intended to burn down the place. I think it was a warning to me.”