Free The Man From Her Past by Anna Adams Page A

helping hands.
    “Cassie, I didn’t mean to upset you. This is going to be difficult enough.”
    “I’m all right.”
    He said nothing, holding the car door for her. He’d always done that, as if he hadn’t noticed hardly any other guy still did those things.
    He drove in silence. She was grateful. Anxiety crowded the breath in her lungs as they got closer to the hospital.
    She stole a peek at Van as he parked. “Maybe I picked that argument,” she said. “I’m scared about my dad.”
    “I don’t blame you,” he said. “But it doesn’t change what I said.”
    The nurses watched them as they passed. It was such a small hospital there was hardly ever a rush, even in the E.R. Cassie recognized several of her high school classmates. Her chemistry lab partner, in a white coat, looked at her twice as he stepped onto the elevator when they got off on her father’s floor.
    “Cassie?” the guy said, surprised as the door began to close.
    She smiled at him, but her mouth felt numb, and she was glad the doors shut before she had to speak. “Van, let’s go straight to Dad’s room. I don’t think I can talk to anyone.”
    Nodding, he led the way, turning at a door on the right. He stood back for her, and she looked up, selfishly searching his eyes for comfort as she walked inside.
    With unnecessary kindness, Van took her hand. She didn’t want to find strength in his fingers twined with hers, but she squeezed back. At the last minute, she thought she might have been wrong to abandon her father.
    Beyond a bathroom that jutted out into the rest of the room, she saw a small man, lying limp beneath ultra white sheets. Without Van, she might not have known him. He was ghostly, peering out of hollow, dark eyes. The bed swallowed him whole.
    “You never told me…” She turned to Van. Was her father about to die?
    “Mama,” Leo said.
    Horror washed over her, but her father’s voice, rich with terror, seemed to belong to the child out of whose frightened eyes he stared.
    Cassie made herself breathe. She half turned toward Van, her legs threatening to give.
    “Mom?” Her father sounded less sure.
    Gathering everything left of her fleeing strength, she stood on her own two feet and faced the truth about her father.
    This was not going to be a fly-by-get-everything-organized trip.
    He’d either have to come back to Washington with her and Hope, or they’d have to stay in Honesty with him.
    She made it to the side of his bed and took his hand between both of hers. “It’s me, Dad. I’m your daughter, Cassie.”
    His eyes slowly closed and then opened again as he scoured his faulty memory. “No,” he said. “You won’t come home. You hate me.”
    “I never hated you.” She’d only craved the medicine of his unconditional love to heal the wounds that monster had opened in her soul.
    Images fluttered through her mind, snapshots of a childhood she seemed to have borrowed. She saw her father kissing a Scooby-Doo Band-Aid on her elbow. She saw him climbing the knobby oak tree beside her window to coax her orange tabby back to the ground, while she and her mother, hand in hand, tried to talk them both down to safety.
    Suited up like Andrew Carnegie, he’d talked to her third-grade class about being a bank teller when he’d been the bank’s president, because Cassie had said his job was boring. He’d waited up for her the first nights she’d gone out with Van, despite the fact he’d loved her date as if he were a son.
    Love refused to be predictable or reasonable.
    Staying to help him because he was ill meant people would ask about Hope, but what else could she do? She couldn’t even invite him to Washington until his health improved.
    She hooked a chair with her foot and pulled it to his bedside so she didn’t have to let go of his hand.
    She settled next to him on one curled foot. “I love you, Dad. Tell me what’s the matter and maybe you’ll feel better.”
     
    V AN LEANED into a corner beside the