Homeport

was upstairs. She’d seen him come in, and like a child avoiding a lecture, had slipped behind a doorway until he’d passed by.
    When her mother came in, she let her hands fall into her lap.
    “I thought I might find you here.”
    “Oh yes.” Miranda rose and picked up one of the champagne flutes from a huddle of them on a table. “Reliving past glories. Where else would I be? Where else would I go?”
    “I haven’t been able to find your brother.”
    “I hope he’s sleeping. It was a difficult night.” She didn’t add that he hadn’t been sleeping, at least not in his own bed, when she left the house that morning.
    “Yes, for all of us. I’m going to the hospital. Your father’s meeting me there. Hopefully Elise is up to visitors, and she’d hoped they would release her by this afternoon.”
    “Give her my best. I’ll try to stop by later this evening, either the hospital, or the hotel if they’ve let her go. Please tell her she’s welcome to stay at the house for as long as she likes.”

    “It would be awkward.”
    “Yes, but I’ll make the offer nonetheless.”
    “It’s generous of you. She—It was fortunate she wasn’t hurt more seriously. It could have been . . . We might have found her like Richard.”
    “I know you’re very fond of her.” Miranda set down the glass in the precise spot where it had been. She was careful to make certain the stem of the glass fit exactly on the outline it had left on the cloth. “Fonder, I think, than you ever were of your own children.”
    “This is hardly the occasion for pettiness, Miranda.”
    She looked up then. “Do you hate me?”
    “What a ridiculous thing to say, and what an inappropriate time to say it.”
    “When would be an appropriate time for me to ask my mother if she hates me?”
    “If this stems from the business in Florence—”
    “Oh, it goes back much farther, in much deeper than what happened in Florence, but that’ll do for now. You didn’t stand by me. You never have. All of my life I’ve waited for it, that moment when you’d finally be there. Why the hell weren’t you ever there for me?”
    “I refuse to indulge you in this behavior.” With an icy stare, Elizabeth turned and started out.
    She’d never know what prompted her to ignore a lifetime of training, but Miranda was across the room, grabbing Elizabeth’s arm, whirling her around with a violence that stunned both of them. “You will not walk out on me until I have an answer. I’m sick to death of having you walk literally and figuratively away from me. Why couldn’t you ever be a mother to me?”
    “Because you’re not my daughter.” Elizabeth snapped it out, her eyes flaring to a blue burn. “You were never mine.” She wrenched her arm free, her breath coming fast and hard as control frayed. “Don’t you dare stand there and demand from me after all I’ve sacrificed, all I’ve endured because your father elected to pass his bastard off as mine.”
    “Bastard?” Her world, already shaky, tilted away under her feet. “I’m not your daughter?”

    “No, you are not. I gave my word that I would never tell you.” Infuriated that she’d allowed temper and fatigue to undermine her control, Elizabeth strode to the window, stared out. “Well, you’re a grown woman, and perhaps you have a right to know.”
    “I—” Miranda pressed a hand to her heart because she wasn’t sure it continued to beat. She could only stare at the rigid back of the woman who’d so suddenly become a stranger. “Who is my mother? Where is she?”
    “She died several years ago. She was no one,” Elizabeth added, turning back. The sun wasn’t kind to women of a certain age. In its glare Miranda saw that Elizabeth looked haggard, almost ill. Then a cloud rolled over the sun and the moment was gone. “One of your father’s . . . short-term interests.”
    “He had an affair.”
    “His name is Jones, isn’t it?” Elizabeth said bitterly, then waved a hand as if annoyed. “In this case, he was careless and the woman became pregnant. She was not, apparently, as easily shaken off as most. Charles had no intention of marrying her, of course, and when she realized that, she insisted he deal with the child. It was a difficult situation.”
    A quick, nasty stab of pain lanced through the shock. “She didn’t want me either.”
    With the faintest of shrugs, Elizabeth walked back and sat. “I have no idea what the woman wanted. But what she chose to do