“Not entirely,” Sam admitted. “It was a career I knew I could take anywhere I wanted to live. Whether I have one client like the newspaper or fifty clients all over the world, I can do the work wherever I go.”
“So it’s more a convenience than a passion?”
“That probably makes it sound a little more calculating than I meant to. I love the work. I always enjoyed art and design and the tech stuff came easily to me. The web side of design just seemed to be a natural fit for my passion and for my desire to be footloose and travel. And these days there’s a huge demand for what I do. Newspapers are in transition. Eventually they’ll be mostly online. Everybody wants an online presence for their business.”
“There are two parts of that we should talk about,” Carrie said. “You’ll have to get to know my stepfather better. His first love was graphic design. His father tried to steer him into running the community bank here in town, but Trace balked and focused on his design career. He gets to work from home, so he was there for Caitlyn and me when Mom couldn’t be. The same with Patrick, though Trace and Mom claim my brother is not the little angel my twin and I were.”
Sam laughed “They say that or you do?”
“Okay, that’s my interpretation.”
“And the other thing we need to discuss?”
“Your desire to wander. What’s that about?”
“I’ve never analyzed it, but I suppose it’s because my mom had always wanted to see the world. She must have had a hundred travel memoirs in the house and read them to us instead of storybooks. I was fascinated by those books.”
“Did she ever get to see all of those exotic places?”
Sam shook his head, surprised by the depth of sorrow that washed over him. “She had gotten pregnant with Laurel, married my father and spent her life stuck in a tiny three-bedroom house in the suburbs of Cleveland. The longest trip she ever took was down to Columbus, and that was only because my dad wanted to go tailgating with his buddies and their wives at an Ohio State football game.”
“No girlfriends she could travel with?” Carrie asked.
“No friends of her own,” Sam corrected. “In hindsight, I think my dad abused her psychologically by isolating her and controlling her. She didn’t have the strength to walk away, though there were some pretty intense fights from time to time. Laurel tried to protect me from all that, but I heard way too much.”
“Kids usually do,” Carrie said.
“In some crazy way I wanted to shape my life to do the things my mother hadn’t been able to do. I always intended to take her along to the places she’d dreamed about, but by the time I could have done that, she was too sick to travel. At the end, I sat beside her bed and told her stories and showed her pictures from my travels.”
“Oh, Sam,” Carrie whispered, her eyes damp with tears.
He tried to shrug off the memories. “Anyway, there will be no more trips for me for the foreseeable future now that I have Bobby in my life.”
“Are you afraid you’ll resent him because of that?” Carrie asked with surprising insight. “Do you somehow see this as a repeat of what happened to your mom?”
“I was worried about that when all of this first hit me, but you know what? I’m starting to realize being a parent is its own kind of adventure. And I’m very glad that if it had to happen, it happened after I’d moved to Chesapeake Shores. I wasn’t thinking about it when I took the job, but now I truly appreciate what a great place this will be to raise a child.”
He leveled a look into her eyes. “And then there’s you. I certainly can’t regret anything that has brought me closer to you. If you hadn’t jumped all over me for leaving Bobby in the car the night we got back to town, who knows how long it might have been before we crossed paths.”
She smiled. “You think that was fate?”
“I’m not sure how I feel about fate or destiny or whatever you want to call it. What about you? Any thoughts about whether there’s one right person for all of us?”
“I’ve grown up in a family of romantics,” Carrie told him. “How could I not believe that? I just spent a long time looking for my soul mate in all the wrong places.”
“Any regrets about that?”
Her expression turned thoughtful. “You know what? Not really. I think I learned something from all of my mistakes, even miserable Marc. I figured out what I don’t need in my life.” She met his gaze. “And lately I’ve started discovering what I do need.”
“A shift in priorities?”