”You thought I ran out on Sarah van Wyyck? Because she stood in the way of my plans?”
She flushed, but her silence answered the question.
”I loved your grandmother very much, Margo. But sometimes even when people love one another, they have different dreams, different goals. Your grandmother’s life and mine…it didn’t work. Probably never would have worked. But I still loved her, even when she left me.”
Margo’s eyes widened. “She left you?”
Kit cleared his throat. “At the risk of sounding like my granddaughter, mind if we talk about something else?”
Margo blinked. Then she said, “I guess we all have stuff it hurts too much to talk about, huh?”
”Yeah. I guess we do.”
She gave him a funny little smile. “Did you ever go back to Georgia?”
”No. I didn’t really see much point. You plan on going back someday? To Minnesota?”
Her face hardened. “Yeah. I do. But not for very long.”
”Unfinished business?”
She sniffed. “Something like that.” She shook herself slightly. “Anyway, that’s about it for my life’s history. I had a twin brother, but he was killed in the big quakes caused by The Accident. That’s when my folks left California and moved to Minnesota. I don’t really remember it. I was just a baby.” She shrugged. “I grew up, left home, came here. The rest isn’t worth telling.”
Kit thought it would have been, but didn’t want to press the issue. He’d already learned more than he’d dared hope. A daughter, a grandson both lost to him and a granddaughter who didn’t like snow and thought tabloids were stupid and was the kind of person who’d go back and settle old scores. Or maybe debts. Just what sort of unfinished business did she have and with whom? She was hardly old enough to have made the kind of enemies Kit had occasionally made. An affair of the heart, maybe, despite her protestations that she hadn’t been jilted. A man didn’t have to jilt a girl to make her want to come back and settle affairs. Sometimes all he had to do was fail to notice. Or fail to act. Or maybe it was simply that she needed to repay someone who’d helped her buy that ticket to New York. Or…