Born in Shame
Page 8

“You’ll tell me, as soon as you know something,” Brianna insisted.
“One way or the other, so don’t fidget about it in the meantime.” A glance around the room had Maggie smiling again. “Would you like if we took some of these flowers home for you, Brie, set them around so they’d be there when you bring the baby home?”
With some effort Brianna held back the rest of the questions circling in her head. There were no answers for them yet. “I’d be grateful. Gray got carried away.”
“Anything else you’d like, Brianna?” With cheerful good humor, Rogan accepted the flowers his wife piled in his arms. “More cake?”
She glanced down, flushed. “I ate every crumb, didn’t I? Thanks just the same, but I think that’ll do. Go home, both of you, and get some sleep.”
“So we will. I’ll call,” Maggie promised. The worry came back into her eyes as she left the room with Rogan. “I wish she wasn’t so hopeful, and so sure that this long-lost sister of ours will want to be welcomed into her open arms.”
“It’s the way she’s made, Maggie.”
“Saint Brianna,” Maggie said with a sigh. “I couldn’t bear it if she was hurt because of this, Rogan. You’ve only to look at her to see how she’s building it up in her head, in her heart. No matter how wrong it might be of me, I wish to God she’d never found those letters.”
“Don’t fret over it.” Since Maggie was busy doing just that, Rogan used his elbow to press the elevator button.
“It’s not my fretting that’s the problem,” Maggie muttered. “She shouldn’t be worrying over this now. She has the baby to think of, and Gray may be going off in a few months on his book tour.”
“I thought he’d canceled that.” Rogan shifted tilting blooms back to safety.
“He wants to cancel it. She’s badgering him to go, wants nothing to interfere with his work.” Impatient, annoyed, she scowled at the elevator doors. “So damn sure she is that she can handle an infant, the inn, all those bleeding guests, and this Amanda Dougherty Bodine business as well.”
“We both know that Brianna’s strong enough to handle whatever happens. Just as you are.”
Prepared to argue, she looked up. Rogan’s amused smile smoothed away the temper. “You may be right.” She sent him a saucy look. “For once.” Soothed a little, she took some of the flowers from him. “And it’s too wonderful a day to be worrying about something that may never happen. We’ve ourselves a beautiful niece, Sweeney.”
“That we do. I think she might have your chin, Margaret Mary.”
“I was thinking that as well.” She stepped into the elevator with him. How simple it was really, she mused, to forget the pain and remember only the joy. “And I was thinking now that Liam’s beginning to toddle about, we might start working on providing him with a sister, or a brother.”
With a grin Rogan managed to kiss her through the daffodils. “I was thinking that as well.”
Chapter Three
I am the Resurrection and the Light.
Shannon knew the words, all the priest’s words, were supposed to comfort, to ease, perhaps inspire. She heard them, on this perfect spring day beside her mother’s grave. She’d heard them in the crowded, sunwashed church during the funeral Mass. All the words, familiar from her youth. And she had knelt and stood and sat, even responded as some part of her brain followed the rite.
But she felt neither comforted nor eased nor inspired.
The scene wasn’t dreamlike, but all too real. The black-garbed priest with his beautiful baritone, the dozens and dozens of mourners, the brilliant stream of sunlight that glinted off the brass handles of the coffin that was cloaked in flowers. The sound of weeping, the chirp of birds.
She was burying her mother.
Beside the fresh grave was the neatly tended mound of another, and the headstone, still brutally new, of the man she had believed all of her life to be her father.
She was supposed to cry. But she’d already wept.
She was supposed to pray. But the prayers wouldn’t come.
Standing there, with the priest’s voice ringing in the clear spring air, Shannon could only see herself again, walking into the parlor, the anger still hot inside her.
She’d thought her mother had been sleeping. But there had been too many questions, too many demands racing in her head to wait, and she’d decided to wake her.
Gently, she remembered. Thank God she had at least been gentle. But her mother hadn’t awakened, hadn’t stirred.
The rest had been panic. Not so gentle now—the shaking, the shouting, the pleading. And the few minutes of blankness, blessedly brief, that she knew now had been helpless hysteria.
There’d been the frantic call for an ambulance, the endless, terrifying ride to the hospital. And the wait, always the wait.
Now the waiting was over. Amanda had slipped into a coma, and from a coma into death.
And from death, so said the priest, into eternal life.
They told her it was a blessing. The doctor had said so, and the nurses who had been unfailingly kind. The friends and neighbors who had called had all said it was a blessing. There had been no pain, no suffering in those last forty-eight hours. She had simply slept while her body and brain had shut down.
Only the living suffered, Shannon thought now. Only they were riddled with guilt and regrets and unanswered questions.
“She’s with Colin now,” someone murmured.
Shannon blinked herself back, and saw that it was done. People were already turning toward her. She would have to accept their sympathies, their comforts, their own sorrows, as she had at the funeral parlor viewing.
Many would come back to the house, of course. She had prepared for that, had handled all the details. After all, she thought as she mechanically accepted and responded to those who walked to her, details were what she did best.
The funeral arrangements had been handled neatly and without fuss. Her mother would have wanted the simple, she knew, and Shannon had done her best to accommodate Amanda on this last duty. The simple coffin, the right flowers and music, the solemn Catholic ceremony.
And the food, of course. It seemed faintly awful to have such a thing catered, but she simply hadn’t had the time or the energy to prepare a meal for the friends and neighbors who would come to the house from the cemetery.