Southern Lights by Danielle Steel

saw each other now, and it wasn’t too awful, maybe her mother would let him come to graduation in June. She didn’t want to seem like a traitor to her mother, after all she did for her, but secretly Savannah wanted him there. And he had already said he would come, if it was okay with her mom, but not otherwise. He was respectful of his ex-wife’s feelings about him, and knew all the reasons why she felt that way. He couldn’t say she was wrong. He had been a total cad.
    “I am nice,” Alexa said tartly, putting their dishes in the machine. “That doesn’t mean I have to see your father. Not tonight.” Or anytime soon. Or maybe in this lifetime.
    “All you have to say is hi and bye.” Alexa didn’t say it to her daughter, but she was still thinking more along the lines of “fuck you.”
    “I don’t think so, sweetheart. I want you to have a nice time with him. We both love you. But we don’t have to be friends.”
    “No, but you could at least be polite. You won’t even talk to him on the phone. He says he would, but he understands why you won’t.”
    “That’s big of him. At least we know his memory is still intact,” Alexa said, and walked out of the room. Savannah knew that her father had gone back to his first wife after leaving her mother, and they had had another child, whom Savannah had never met. She had never met his wife either, or seen her half-brothers in ten years, although she still remembered things about them. She knew none of the details of the divorce or why it had happened, and her mother refused to discuss it with her. Alexa didn’t think it right to explain it to her. Even if she hated Tom, he was Savannah’s father after all. Savannah remembered her paternal grandmother vaguely, and being slightly scared of her. She had never heard from her in all these years either, not even a birthday card. There was a rift a mile wide between the two sides of her family, and her only contact with her father was when he appeared. He rarely called her and had told her years before that she could never call him at home, only in the office, but she never did. She had correctly sensed that it was okay for him to visit her, but not for her to go anywhere near his Charleston life. It was a silent pact between them, and the kind of thing a child knew, without ever having it spelled out.
    Alexa and Savannah sat and watched TV together, and the doorbell rang at nine-fifteen. Alexa leaped to her feet when she heard it and headed for the bedroom and was telling Savannah to come and say goodbye to her when she left, when Savannah pulled open the door, and there he was, and Alexa felt like a deer in the headlights as they stared at each other and said nothing. Ten years melted instantly like snow on their tongues. She had no idea what to say, and neither did he. He hadn’t expected her to be there. She never was. And he looked exactly the same. He was wearing jeans, a black ski parka, and hiking boots, and he was as handsome as he’d ever been. His hair was just a touch too long, his eyes were just as blue, the gray in his hair didn’t show among the blond, he had the same athletic body, and the same cleft in his chin. Tom Beaumont hadn’t changed one bit.
    “Hello, Alexa,” he said quietly, as though afraid to approach her. She looked on the edge of panic and as though she were about to run from the room, and from him. And when he spoke, he had the same deep, husky voice, and the same southern drawl. What was different was that she wasn’t his wife anymore, and hadn’t been in years.
    “Hello, Tom,” she said politely, looking stiff. She was still wearing her work clothes, a quiet navy suit, and she had kicked off her shoes, and had on navy stockings and a lawyerly white blouse, and her hair in a bun. Unlike him, she looked like a different person than the carefree, happy woman she had been ten years before. Now she looked serious, professional, and extremely uncomfortable to be facing him. But