“It’ll be good to have him back. It was too quiet here yesterday after everyone was gone. Are you and Logan—”

“No,” she stated firmly. “Just friends.”

Was that what they were, though? Last night, she had cracked open a door to something more carnal and he had refused to walk through it.

The rumble that came from Gramps’s chest was equally skeptical.

“He apologized,” she mumbled around her eggs. “Life is too short for grudges, right?”

“I can’t say holding on to one ever enriched my life. I’m glad he’s making up with you. I was disappointed in him when I realized he’d hurt you, but that family”—he shook his head—“none of them had it easy, not even Wilf, so try not to judge any of them too harshly.”

“I don’t,” she fibbed, since she absolutely had judged Logan to within an inch of his life.

She swallowed a lump of egg, but it seemed to stay lodged in her throat. The timing had never seemed right to say these words, but on the heels of what he’d just said, the opening was right there.

“Gramps, I really appreciate that you never gave me a hard time over the way I acted that summer, after Logan left. Or later, when I got pregnant and had Biyen. I am so grateful you opened your home to us. You’re a really good influence on Biyen, too. He has Nolan, but grandads are pretty special. You’ve always been really important to me, and I’m very glad he has you, too.”

“Are we starting our Saturday by crying in our eggs?”

“No. Gotta keep the salt down because of your blood pressure.”

“Hmph.” He gave her a look of disgruntled affection. “I don’t suppose your mother ever told you how I reacted when she came home pregnant?”

“No. Why? What happened?” She closed her mouth over a scoop of eggs.

“I threw her out.” He stabbed his toast crust into his ketchup, mouth tight with self-disgust.

“Gramps.”

“I look back and wonder what I thought that would accomplish. Babies don’t get unmade just because you disapprove. I regret it to this day, losing all that time with her, especially after she left us too early.” Anguish dragged even deeper lines into a face that was as wrinkled as a dried apple, leathered by years of working in winds flowing off the salt-chuck.

“Did you not like my dad or…?”

“I didn’t know him. She hardly knew him herself. She met him on a weekend in Victoria, then he went back to Ontario. When I kicked her out, she got hold of him and he flew her out there. They got married and I didn’t see her again until your grandmother’s funeral. I didn’t know what to say to her when I saw her. You were just a little thing, barely walking. They were living on the Sunshine Coast by then. He’d started logging. I didn’t even know. I was sick, absolutely sick at what I’d done. Your grandmother had never forgiven me for it, but I didn’t know how to change it so I let your mother walk away again without saying a word to her. I hate myself for that, too.”

“Oh, Gramps.” She reached across, and he turned his hand to pinch her fingers in his.

“It wasn’t until she lost your father, and I went to that funeral, that I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d never seen her so heartbroken. I couldn’t stomach her trying to carry on alone. I asked her to come live with me here and she did. I’m grateful for that because you were my second chance to get things right.”

“I really am going to cry.” She grabbed a napkin and shoved it under her wet eyes. Sniffled. “She never told me any of that.”

“No, she never threw it in my face, either. You want to hear a secret, though? When you started acting out and she didn’t know what to do with you, I thought, there. Now you know how it feels when your child no longer makes sense to you. It’s terrifying. But I sat her down and told her not to make my mistakes.”

Janine hadn’t. She had told Sophie that she loved her and urged her to, Look after yourself. Be safe. But she had never shamed Sophie for the way she was behaving, and when Sophie had told her she was pregnant, she had hugged her and asked her what she wanted to do about it.

Sophie had thought seriously about abortion, aware that school and the rest of her future would all be impacted, but there had been something very grounding in deciding to have the baby. All the things she had thought were important, like why Logan Fraser didn’t love her, had ceased to matter. She loved her baby, and when Biyen arrived, he loved her back so hard, she could barely withstand it.

“I was worried about you, same as she was, but you’re so much like her,” Gramps was saying. “I knew you’d clean yourself up and you did. Then we lost her and that was damned unfair on you. I was very worried about you, then. I could see that Nolan was nothing but dead air. I couldn’t interfere, though. Not after what I’d done to your mother. Not until you were in my house. Then I was allowed to tell him to fuck off.”

She choked slightly on her eggs, washing them down with coffee.

“It was still big of you to let me and Biyen move in. He can be a lot, bashing around here, always asking questions and eating nonstop.”

“Is that what you think?” He shook his head. “All I ever think is how easy he is. A helluva lot easier than girls.”

“Sexist! I am the son you always wanted, in case you haven’t noticed. I can replace a coupling on a transmission shaft and make you breakfast. Also keep you taking your meds. I’ll do that while I’m thinking of it.” She rose and fetched them.

When she brought the pills to him, she gave him a quick hug and kissed his cheek. “I mean it, you know. Thank you.”

“You’re a good girl, Sophie.” He patted her arm. “I like having you and the boy here. How would I know so much about myself, if he wasn’t telling me all those dinosaur facts?”

“Ha!” She sat to eat her last bites, then took her plate to the sink, coming back to top up their coffee.

“I’ll say one more thing about Logan,” Gramps said somberly. “He’s made mistakes and I don’t condone them, but I couldn’t turn my back on him, either. Even though I wanted to kick him in the ass for hurting my girl.”

“I know,” she murmured, sitting and taking up her mug, staring into her coffee. The way Logan had worked under Gramps all those years made him the son Gramps always wished he’d had.

“He was never going to get where he wanted to go by staying here, Soph.”

True. Raven’s Cove was a far cry from Genoa.

“They all have Wilf’s sense of ambition and one-track mind.” He set his hand between his eyes then knifed it forward. “They had to chase whatever it was they were chasing. They would have stagnated if they’d stayed here.”

“I know. But that’s why nothing will happen between me and Logan,” she said with a philosophical shrug. “Eventually, he’ll go off to chase more dreams and I’ll still be here.” Raising her son and looking after her grandfather. “We want different things.”

She wasn’t sure if she was clarifying it for him, or saying it aloud so she would hear it and accept it.

His mouth pursed in something that might have been disappointment, but he only said, “That’s his loss and my gain, then. Isn’t it?”

She doubted Logan would see it that way, but, “Sure is.”

*

Logan was already working when Sophie got there. Aside from a, “Morning,” mumbled around a couple of nails poking out of his mouth, he didn’t say anything about last night or the fact she had disappeared before he saw her this morning.

She got to work, trying to ignore this confused but shimmering awareness between them.

Nothing would make me happier than for you to hate-fuck me. Not because I want sex…

Did he want sex? She did.

Oh God. She did.

Between his kiss after the water rescue and the lessening of her anger and their intimate conversations and his touch on her ass yesterday, she was starting to think—fantasize, really—about sex with Logan. Not sex colored by hate, but with something else. Forgiveness?

She leapt on a callout to the wharf, even though it was so simple she could have sold the part to the skipper and hurried back upstairs. She installed it herself and waved off the labor charge, grateful for the break.

On her way back upstairs, she stopped at the pub and picked up a couple of bowls of mulligatawny, which she and Logan polished in short order, then got back to work.