Free Delaney's Shadow by Ingrid Weaver Page A

option.”

     
    THE HOUSE HAD SETTLED IN FOR THE NIGHT. NO VOICES sounded through the walls; no pipes clanged. The last guest room toilet had been flushed more than an hour ago. All was silent, apart from the occasional whisper of rustling leaves in the maples and the monotonous croak of bullfrogs in the pond. The familiar chorus used to lull Delaney to sleep when she’d been a child. It wasn’t working tonight.
    Shrugging on her robe, she padded through the darkness to her bedroom window and drew the curtain aside. Mosquitoes hummed as they bumped against the screen, another sound from her childhood. The view had changed, though. The glow from the trailer park that used to brighten the sky beyond the woods was gone. Only a single light twinkled through the trees now. She looked down on the moonlit yard, then at the oak that had held her swing, and her thoughts drifted to her mother.
    She didn’t have many memories of Annalee Wainright, so what she did have were precious. Besides the rare occasions her mother had played outside or pushed her on the swing, Delaney remembered her mother’s voice as she’d read to her. Annalee had loved books and had seldom been without one. Her fingers had been long and delicate as she’d smoothed her hand over the pages. Because she’d spent so much time indoors, her skin had been pale, nearly translucent. It had been her mother’s face that Delaney had pictured whenever she’d listened to a story about a fairy princess.
    Annalee had been in her freshman year at college, younger than Phoebe, when she’d become pregnant. Neither she nor Delaney’s father had been in a financial position to support a child, and neither had planned on getting married at such an early age. They’d had a one-night stand, which wasn’t enough to base a lifetime commitment on, so Annalee had continued to live at home. She arranged to leave the child-care duties to her parents while she went back to school to finish her degree, dreaming of eventually becoming a teacher. She’d planned to build an independent life for herself and her daughter, but she never got the chance. Less than a year after Delaney was born, Annalee was diagnosed with leukemia.
    Delaney’s grandparents had done a good job sheltering her from the situation. Rather than remembering her mother’s illness, she remembered her love. It had been unconditional, always there, as much a part of her as her blonde hair or her laughter or her delicate hands. Even now, when Helen spoke of her daughter it was usually with a smile. Loss hadn’t turned her bitter. It had made her cherish the living even more.
    Delaney sighed. She and Elizabeth had both lost their mothers when they’d been children, and as a result they had both drawn closer to their fathers. She hadn’t been entirely honest with Leo. It wasn’t only her loyalty to Stanford that caused her to go easy on his daughter. She understood where Elizabeth was coming from. Delaney might not have behaved any better than her stepdaughter if she’d had to share her father’s love with a stepmother, particularly if she’d believed the match was wrong for him.
    The issue had never come up, though. Charles Cowan, Delaney’s father, had never married. That hadn’t stopped him from gaining custody of his natural daughter. At first Delaney had hated being wrenched from her grandparents and the only home she’d known, but once she got older she understood what an exceptional man her father had been. Many men in his position would have turned their back on an unplanned child. Not Charles. He’d tailored his life to make room for her. Though he hadn’t been as emotionally demonstrative as Delaney’s mother or grandparents, she’d been just as sure of his love.
    That was important to a child, regardless of age. No matter how annoyed Stanford had been with Elizabeth, he shouldn’t have changed his will to cut her out. She would have interpreted that as a rejection. Perhaps if Stanford had