She found the courage to face her daughter again. “There is no excuse. Your father and I were no longer intimate, were barely even civil, but there were other alternatives open to me. I had thought about divorce, but that takes courage, and I was a coward. Suddenly there was someone who was kind to me, someone who found me attractive and desirable. Because it was forbidden, because it was wrong, it was exciting.”
Vanessa felt the tears burn the back of her eyes. She had to know, to understand. “You were lonely.”
“Oh, God, yes.” Loretta’s voice was choked. She pressed her lips together. “It’s no excuse—”
“I don’t want excuses. I want to know how you felt.”
“Lost,” she whispered. “Empty. I felt as though my life were over. I wanted someone to need me again, to hold me. To say pretty things to me, even if they were lies.” She shook her head, and when she spoke again her voice was stronger. “It was wrong, Vanessa, as wrong as it was for your father and I to rush together without looking closely.” She came back to the bed, took Vanessa’s hand. “I want it to be different for you. It will be different. Holding back from something that’s right for you is just as foolish as rushing into something that’s wrong.”
“And how do I know the difference?”
“You will.” She smiled a little. “It’s taken me most of my life to understand that. With Ham, I knew.”
“It wasn’t.” She was afraid to ask. “It wasn’t Ham that you… He wasn’t the one.”
“All those years ago? Oh, no. He would never have betrayed Emily. He loved her. It was someone else. He wasn’t in town long, only a few months. I suppose that made it easier for me somehow. He was a stranger, someone who didn’t know me, didn’t care. When I broke it off, he moved on.”
“You broke it off? Why?”
Of all the things that had gone before, Loretta knew this would be the most difficult. “It was the night of your prom. I’d been upstairs with you. Remember, you were so upset?”
“He had Brady arrested.”
“I know.” She tightened her grip on Vanessa’s hand. “I swear to you, I didn’t know it then. I finally left you alone because, well, you needed to be alone. I was thinking about how I was going to give Brady Tucker a piece of my mind when I got ahold of him. I was still upset when your father came home. But he was livid, absolutely livid. That’s when it all came out. He was furious because the sheriff had let Brady go, because Ham had come in and raised holy hell.”
She let Vanessa’s hands go to press her fingers to her eyes. “I was appalled. He’d never approved of Brady—I knew that. But he wouldn’t have approved of anyone who interfered with his plans for you. Yet this—this was so far beyond anything I could imagine. The Tuckers were our friends, and anyone with eyes could see that you and Brady were in love. I admit I had worried about whether you would make love, but we’d talked about it, and you’d seemed very sensible. In any case, your father was raging, and I was so angry, so incensed by his insensitivity, that I lost control. I told him what I had been trying to hide for several weeks. I was pregnant.”
“Pregnant,” Vanessa repeated. “You— Oh, God.”
Loretta sprang up to pace the room. “I thought he would go wild, but instead he was calm. Deadly calm.” There was no use telling her daughter what names he had called her in that soft, controlled voice. “He said that there was no question about our remaining together. He would file for divorce. And would take you. The more I shouted, begged, threatened, the calmer he became. He would take you because he was the one who would give you the proper care. I was—well, it was obvious what I was. He already had tickets for Paris. Two tickets. I hadn’t known about it, but he had been planning to take you away in any case. I was to say nothing, do nothing to stop him, or he would drag me through a custody suit that he would win when it came out that I was carrying another man’s bastard.” She began to weep then, silently. “If I didn’t agree, he would wait until the child was born and file charges against me as an unfit mother. He swore he would make it his life’s work to take that child, as well. And I would have nothing.”
“But you…he couldn’t…”
“I had barely been out of this county, much less the state. I didn’t know what he could do. All I knew was that I was going to lose one child, and perhaps two. You were going to go to Paris, see all those wonderful things, play on all those fabulous stages. You would be someone, have something.” Her cheeks drenched, she turned back. “As God is my witness, Vanessa, I don’t know if I agreed because I thought it was what you would want, or because I was afraid to do anything else.”