Megan caught up with Connor as he was trying to start his car. She slid into the passenger side of the expensive two-seater sports car and closed the door, then gave him a defiant look.

      “Wherever you’re headed, you’re stuck with me,” she told him.

      He scowled at her, but when she didn’t budge, he shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

      He threw the car into gear and shot out of the driveway and along the coastal road at a pace Megan knew was designed to terrify her. She clung to the door and kept silent until they reached town, where he was forced to slow down. He pulled to a stop in a parking space on Shore Road facing the bay, his jaw set, his scowl firmly in place.

      “Feel better?” she inquired. “You do know that getting us killed probably won’t solve anything.”

      “At least you wouldn’t get to marry Dad and ruin his life again,” he said, his tone petulant.

      “Does your father seem as if his life’s ruined?”

      “Maybe not, but only because he’s living in a dreamworld right now. Just wait till you take off again.”

      “Maybe what we really need to talk about is how I ruined your life,” she suggested. “That’s what this is actually about.”

      “You’re irrelevant to my life. You have been for years.”

      Megan blinked back tears at the deliberately cruel words. “If I truly meant nothing to you, you wouldn’t sound so bitter,” she said quietly. She tilted her head and studied him. “You’ve fooled us all, you know. You have this easy, lighthearted way about you, but I think hurts run even more deeply. You’re like your father that way.”

      “Don’t try analyzing me, Mother. You don’t know anything about me.”

      “Is that so?” she countered. “Let’s see. I know you graduated at the top of your class from college, that you could have played pro baseball, but chose to go to law school. I know that you won a highly coveted job as a law clerk with a top Baltimore firm. I know when one of the senior partners was getting a divorce, he chose you to represent him and bragged that he’d never seen anyone fight harder for a client.” She gave Connor an assessing look. “I assume that was because you saw me in his wife and your father in him. Obviously my divorce from your father was good for something.”

      Connor looked faintly surprised by her recitation. “What, did you hire a private detective to dig up all that information when you started seeing Dad again? You must have figured you’d need a way to worm your way back into all our lives.”

      Megan sighed. “I didn’t need to hire anybody, Connor. I’ve kept tabs on each of you. Abby and I grew close again after she moved to New York. I went to Chicago to see Bree’s plays. I even came to a few of your college ball games.”

      He snorted with disbelief.

      “Remember the game against Carolina?” she said. “You hit an inside-the-park home run, and when you slid into home base, you broke your wrist.” She shuddered at the memory of his face contorted with pain. “It took everything in me not to run to you on the field.”

      “You could have read about that in the paper,” he said.

      “I could have,” she agreed. “Or someone in the family could have mentioned it to me. But if I’d found out either of those ways, would I have known that a pretty blonde cheerleader left with you in the ambulance?”

      He sighed and closed his eyes. “Okay, fine. You were there. Big deal.”

      “It was for me,” she said quietly. “Knowing that I had no right to come to you even when you were hurt tore me apart, Connor.”

      “So it was all about you, as usual.”

      “No, it was about you, and knowing that you wouldn’t have appreciated me showing up out of the blue at the hospital. It’s always been about you and your sisters and Kevin. Everything I did, I did because I thought it was for the best for you. Even leaving your father.”

      “Oh, no,” he said. “You can’t spin that now. Leaving was all about you, Mother. You can’t deny that. You didn’t give a second thought to what it would be like for us after you ran off to make an exciting new life for yourself.”

      “Okay, I’ll admit that I needed to leave and build a new life for myself, but I thought that would be better for all of you, too. You wouldn’t have a mother who resented your father the way I did. You’d have one who was strong and sure of herself again.”

      “That sounds to me as if it was all about you.”

      “Well, it wasn’t,” she said defensively. “Surely you know by now that I planned for all of you to come to New York with me. I had rooms ready, schools picked out. I even had your father’s blessing.”

      “Funny, but I don’t recall spending even a day in New York.”

      “Because you and Kevin took your father’s side and refused to consider moving. You didn’t want to leave your friends. You wouldn’t even spend time with me when I visited you here. Abby said she wasn’t going anywhere without Jess and Bree, and they threw fits at the thought of leaving Chesapeake Shores. Your father and I finally agreed to give it more time, to start with visits.”

      “How’d that work out? I’ve been to New York a dozen times, and never once did I see you,” Connor retorted.

      “Because you turned down every invitation,” she reminded him quietly. “And I don’t recall you phoning on any of those visits you made, either. Relationships work both ways, Connor, even between parents and their nearly grown children. Every time I knew you were coming—and I did know about most of those trips—I sat by the phone, hoping against hope that this would be the time you’d reach out to me.”

      “So now you’re the neglected saint of a mother and I’m the terrible son?”

      She gave him a pitying look. “Oh, Connor, no. I’m just trying to make you see that there are two sides to every story. You have your perspective, and I have mine. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Don’t you think it would be worth it to try