Kissed a Sad Goodbye

of it, too, but he can’t push my buttons in the same way. There’s something about your own child....” Hazel picked up her spade again and thrust it beneath the spiky leaves of a dandelion.
    “Doesn’t your training as a psychologist help?”
    “Much to my dismay, I’m discovering that understanding children’s behavior intellectually doesn’t always make dealing with it easier.” The dandelion came up with a spray of dirt and she shook what remained from the roots before tossing it into a pail.
    “I don’t even have that small advantage.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.
    Hazel glanced up at him. “What’s going on? Did you and Kit not have a good weekend?”
    “That’s an understatement,” he said with a derisive snort.
    Hazel pushed herself up from the flagstones, dusted off her bare knees, and came to sit beside him. “What happened?”
    Kincaid looked away. The white lilies in Hazel’s border had begun to glow in the dusk. “I blew it. He was being stubborn and unreasonable, and I just lost it—blurted out that I was his dad, without thinking of the consequences.”
    “And?” Hazel prompted.
    “He—” Kincaid shook his head. “He was furious. Accused me of lying to him, and told me to bugger off, more or less.”
    Hazel nodded. “That’s not surprising. Remember how shocked you were at first? And you’ve turned Kit’s world on end without warning. Not even his mother’s death will have made him doubt his perception of things in the same way.”
    Frowning, Kincaid said, “I don’t understand.”
    “You’ve made a lie of his life, his image of who he is and how he came to be. Especially now, with Vic gone, that image is all he’s had to sustain him.”
    “You’re saying I shouldn’t have told him at all?”
    “No.” She touched his arm for emphasis. “Only that you need to understand the depth of the charge you’ve planted. What started the argument?”
    “Work. A case came up this weekend—Gemma will have told you—and I couldn’t do what I’d promised. Kit felt I’d let him down. And I had.” He moved restlessly in his chair. “I’d thought that having him live with me was the obvious solution, once he’d had a bit of time to adjust. Now I’m beginning to wonder if my seeing him at all is doing more harm than good.”
    “I’m sure that’s not true. But I don’t think you realized the extent of the commitment you made,” Hazel added, sighing. She reached for a box of matches and lit the cit-ronella candle in the center of the table. “You haven’t any experience with that sort of responsibility, and your job makes it doubly difficult.”
    “I know. But I still can’t see any alternative to having Kit with me. He can’t stay with the Millers indefinitely, as kind as they’ve been to have him through the school term.”
    “No word from Ian McClellan?”
    Vic’s ex-husband had returned to Cambridge just long enough to agree to Kincaid’s arrangements for Kit, then he had hightailed it back to his lover. “Not a peep. I assume he’s still enjoying the south of France with his nubile graduate student. But Kit hasn’t given up hoping Ian will send for him.” Kincaid shook his head. “I thought that if Kit learned I was his father, not Ian, it might make Ian’s desertion a bit more bearable.”
    “It may, in time. But you’re asking Kit for belief based on nothing but your word. You have no proof.”
    He thought of the day of Vic’s funeral, when his mother had taken him aside and told him he was blind not to have seen the resemblance the boy bore to him, or to have calculated the number of months between the time Vic left him and Kit’s birth. His first reaction had been denial; his second, panic; it was only the fear of losing Kit altogether that had made him realize how much he wanted it to be true.
    Inside the house the kitchen light flicked on, and he heard the rattle of crockery clearly through the open window. “Kit has more to accept than the fact that he’s my son,” he said slowly. “He blames me for Vic’s death.”
    “Duncan, Kit’s a child. He has no other way of resolving what’s happened to him, unless the trial—”
    “That’s no help. It may be two years before Vic’s murder comes before the courts. And what if Kit’s right—and I did fail her?”
    Leaning forward so that the light shining from the kitchen window illuminated her face, Hazel said forcefully, “You know that’s not