Free Forever Together by Leeanna Morgan Page A

coming back
unopened. I tried to find you, but you’d left San Diego.”
    Kate stared at her dad and realized
something. Something that changed everything she’d thought and felt
about him, about herself and about the short life of her
sister.
    He didn’t know about Lily.
     
    ***
    “Hi, mom. It’s me.”
    “Kate? Why are you calling this early in the
morning?”
    Kate glanced at her watch and did a quick
calculation. “Did I get you out of bed?”
    “Goodness, no,” her mom said. “It’s too
beautiful a day to be stuck inside. Listen to this…”
    Kate heard the sound of waves tumbling onto the shore and knew her mom
must be on the beach.
    “It’s nearly winter and sixty-eight degrees
at seven o’clock in the morning. Can you believe it? I should have
moved to Australia years ago. When are you coming to visit?”
    Her mom must have started walking. Her voice
was slightly breathless, fading in and out as her legs carried her
across the sand.
    “Mom, I need to ask you a question and I
don’t have much time.”
    “If you need money I can transfer some
straight away. I sold seven paintings at the exhibition last
week.”
    “That’s great, but I’m okay for money .”
    “How’s your dad?”
    “He’s fine.” Kate hadn’t told her mom the
real reason she’d come to Montana. She’d said she wanted to see her
father and his family. She didn’t tell her that Kaylee had HLH or
about the bone marrow transplant.
    “Mom, did you tell dad about Lily?” Her mom
didn’t say anything. The silence was deafening, more powerful than
the waves pounding on the beach. Without saying a word, her mom
gave her the answer she’d been dreading.
    Kate leaned against the counter, releasing
the tight grip she had on her cell phone. If it splintered into pieces she’d never hear the
truth.
    “Why didn’t you tell him?” Kate asked. “Did
he know you were pregnant?”
    She heard her mom sigh, then the rustle of
movement. “I don’t want to talk about it. Your dad left fifteen
years ago, Kate. Let it be.”
    “We never talk about what happened. Every
time I want to talk about dad or Lily you shut me out. I need
answers. It’s important.”
    “It won’t do any good,” her mom insisted.
“We’ve moved on, taken control of our lives.”
    Kate doubted either of them had ever been in
control of their lives. Her mom hadn’t stayed still long enough to
control anything and Lily’s death had left Kate with scars that had
never healed.
    “Please, mom. Just this once, tell me the truth.”
    Her mom was silent. If it weren’t for the sound of the ocean in the
background, Kate would have sworn her mom had ended the call.
“Before I say anything you’ve got to promise you won’t hate me for
what I did. I tried my best, Kate. I really did. I thought I was
doing the right thing.”
    Kate could only imagine what was coming next.
“I couldn’t hate you. You’re my mom.” The truth of those words rang
in Kate’s ears. She loved her mom.
    They’d tried to find common ground, but
between a mother with chronic depression and a daughter who didn’t
know how to express the anger and grief consuming her life, it
hadn’t been easy. They’d fought their battles differently and
neither of them had won.
    “What happened?” Kate waited.
    “I was nearly three months pregnant when Tom
left. If I’d told him I was going to have a baby, he wouldn’t have gone back to Montana. We were
suffocating each other. He needed to be on his family’s ranch, not
moving from one city to the next. After Lily was born, I still couldn’t tell him. He wrote to
you. He was excited and happy for the first time in years. I
couldn’t take that away from him.”
    “What about when Lily got sick?” Kate
asked.
    “I didn’t know how to tell him, and then Lily
got so sick that it didn’t seem to matter. We had each other, Kate.
We didn’t need your dad.”
    Her mom said that as if it was the most
important thing in the world. But when Lily