Author's Note: "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with." ― The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
Disclaimer: I don't own any of this, except in the sense that love is ownership.
'What can you give her?' Don Alfredo had asked him. 'A name that is only half yours, and only through the kindness of Senora Barkley?'
Heath could have given her, would gladly have given her, everything a man can give a woman, would have done for her everything a husband could do for a wife, but he couldn't ever be what her father needed his daughter's husband to be: the child of married parents.
He thought Maria had truly loved him, but she had loved her father as well. And Heath was the last person on earth to ask someone to give up her father.
Even now, he thought, given the choice to make a life with any of the women with whom he'd ever fallen in love (Libby, Lupe, the two Sarahs, Maria herself) and the choice to make a life however briefly with his own father, he would choose Tom Barkley, hands down.
He loved Maria, and he flattered himself that she loved him, but her father was her father. The two of them could each fall in love a dozen times, but she could never have another father.
In his mind's eye rose the vision of the tombstone in the woods near the house, surrounded by its picket fence and Audra's flowers. 'Thomas Barkley,' it read, '1813-1870.' That was his father: all the father he would ever have.
He could not fault Maria's choice. He would choose the same.
At least she had run back down the road to say goodbye.
The morning light, he noticed as she drove away, was very strong.
When he was sixteen, Heath returned home. Strawberry was the same, still bustling with miners, but Leah thought Heath himself was different.
"Did you find what you were looking for, out there in the world?" she asked her son that night, as she sat with her neglected sewing in her hands, and he sat on the floor at her feet staring into the embers in her cabin's little cat-and-clay fireplace. Her voice was as warm as the heat still coming off the red-hot coals.
Heath shook his head. "I think maybe it was here all the time I was out there looking." He sighed. "Family can be just mother and son, can't it?" The deep voice was wistful.
He leaned his head against her leg as he'd done as a child, and her hand reached down of its own volition to stroke the golden hair, darkened now with its winter browning. "Of course it can, sweetheart."
She wondered what had happened, but didn't ask. Heath had a right to his secrets, just as she kept hers. She'd missed him, so she was glad he'd finally made peace with his lack of a father, because… because he could never have one. Others had a prior, better claim.
It was her fault, all hers, not Tom's. She'd taken advantage of him at a time when he was vulnerable. But she couldn't be sorry, not really. She stroked her son's golden hair lovingly. She'd do it again. As hard as it had been, as hard as it still was, she'd do nothing differently. "I love you, Heath," she said quietly.
His response was muffled against her long skirt, but she heard it: "I love you, too."
