Treasures Lost, Treasures Found

anything else.” Shrugging, she rose. It sounded so staid, she realized. So dull. She’d wanted to learn, she’d wanted to teach, but in and of itself, it sounded hollow.
    There were toys spread all over the living room, tiny pieces of childhood. A tie was tossed carelessly over the back of a chair next to a table where Linda had dropped her purse. Small pieces of a marriage. Family. She wondered, with a panic that came and went quickly, how she would ever survive the empty house back in Connecticut.
    “This past year at Yale has been fascinating and difficult.” Was she defending or explaining? Kate wondered impatiently. “Strange, even though my father taught, I didn’t realize that being a teacher is just as hard and demanding as being a student.”
    “Harder,” Linda declared after a moment. “You have to have the answers.”
    “Yes.” Kate crouched down to look at Hope’s collection of stuffed animals. “I suppose that’s part of the appeal, though. The challenge of either knowing the answer or reasoning it out, then watching it sink in.”
    “Hoping it sinks in?” Linda ventured.
    Kate laughed again. “Yes, I suppose that’s it. When it does, that’s the most rewarding aspect. Being a mother can’t be that much different. You’re teaching every day.”
    “Or trying to,” Linda said dryly.
    “The same thing.”
    “You’re happy?”
    Hope squeezed a bright pink dragon then held it out for Kate. Was she happy? Kate wondered as she obliged by cuddling the dragon in turn. She’d been aiming for achievement, she supposed, not happiness. Her father had never asked that very simple, very basic question. She’d never taken the time to ask herself. “I want to teach,” she answered at length. “I’d be unhappy if I couldn’t.”
    “That’s a roundabout way of answering without answering at all.”
    “Sometimes there isn’t any yes or no.”
    “Ky!” Hope shouted so that Kate jolted, whipping her head around to the front door.
    “No.” Linda noted the reaction, but said nothing. “She means the dragon. He gave it to her, so it’s Ky.”
    “Oh.” She wanted to swear but managed to smile as she handed the baby back her treasured dragon. It wasn’treasonable that just his name should make her hands unsteady, her pulse unsteady, her thoughts unsteady. “He wouldn’t pick the usual, would he?” she asked carelessly as she rose.
    “No.” She gave Kate a very direct, very level look. “His tastes have always run to the unique.”
    Amusement helped to relax her. Kate’s brow rose as she met the look. “You don’t give up, do you?”
    “Not on something I believe in.” A trace of stubbornness came through. The stubbornness, Kate mused, that had kept her determinedly waiting for Marsh to fall in love with her. “I believe in you and Ky,” Linda continued. “You two can make a mess of it for as long as you want, but I’ll still believe in you.”
    “You haven’t changed,” Kate said on a sigh. “I came back to find you a wife, a mother, and the owner of a restaurant, but you haven’t changed at all.”
    “Being a wife and mother only makes me more certain that what I believe is right.” She had her share of arrogance, too, and used it. “We don’t own the restaurant,” she added as an afterthought.
    “No?” Surprised, Kate looked up again. “But I thought you said the Roost was yours and Marsh’s.”
    “We run it,” Linda corrected. “And we do have a twenty percent interest.” Sitting back, she gave Kate a pleased smile. There was nothing she liked better than to drop small bombs in calm water and watch the ripples. “Ky owns the Roost.”
    “Ky?” Kate couldn’t have disguised the astonishmentif she’d tried. The Ky Silver she thought she knew hadn’t owned anything but a boat and a shaky beach cottage. He hadn’t wanted to. Buying a restaurant, even a small one on a remote island took more than capital. It took ambition.
    “Apparently he didn’t bother to mention it.”
    “No.” He’d had several opportunities, Kate recalled, the night they’d had dinner. “No, he didn’t. It doesn’t seem characteristic,” she murmured. “I can picture him buying another boat, a bigger boat or a faster boat, but I can’t imagine him buying a restaurant.”
    “I guess it surprised everyone except Marsh—but then Marsh knows Ky better than anyone. A couple of weeks before we were married, Ky told us he’d bought the place and intended to remodel.