Chapter 1 : Part 1

The You I Never Knew
by Susan Wiggs

For every woman who has ever loved... and never forgotten.

At last, Michelle Turner is going back to the Montana town where she grew up too fast, fell in love too hard, and wound up pregnant and alone. Because the now-successful advertising executive has just learned that only she can save the father she barely knew, an aging Hollywood star. What Michelle cannot know is that this journey home will be her last chance to save herself as well.

For her sick father, she must bridge the gulf that distance and time have widened. For her troubled teenage son, she must find the miracle that will pull him away from the abyss that threatens his future. And for Sam McPhee, the man who left her years ago, she must take the most frightening-and most exhilarating-step of all: Face the truth that hurts...and the love that heals.

Chapter 1

After seventeen years, Michelle Turner was going back. Back to a past she didn't want to remember, to the father she barely knew, to the town where she grew up too fast, fell in love too hard, and wound up pregnant and alone.

During the long drive from Seattle to Montana, she rehearsed - under her breath so Cody wouldn't hear - what she would say when she got there.

"Hello, Daddy." Funny how she still thought of him as Daddy, even though he'd never been much more than a picture on the wall or sometimes a face on the TV screen late at night when his old movies played. "Sorry I didn't come sooner..." Sorry ...sorry ...sorry. All those regrets. So many of them.

Sorry wouldn't do. Gavin Slade - her father had kept.his professional name after retiring - knew damned well what had kept her away so long.

She flexed her hands on the steering wheel of the Range Rover and glanced over her shoulder at her son in the backseat. Cody was lost in the space between the headphones of his Discman. Maybe I'm the one who's lost, she thought. Here she was, thirty-five years old and the mother of a teenager, and the thought of facing her father made her feel like a kid again. Defensive. Powerless. Inadequate.

The Washington landscape roared by as she drove eastward, heading toward a place where she'd find no welcome. She and Cody had left their waterfront town house before dawn. The lights had still been shining in the steel skeleton of Seattle's Space Needle. By sunup, the Cascade Range had given way to rounded hills and scrubby flatland, then finally to high plateaus, a bare and colorless midwinter moonscape, a neutral zone.

She saw nothing out her window to interest the eye, nor to offend it.

Long ago, she used to be an artist, painting in savage color with emotions that spilled unrestrained over the canvas, dripping off the sides, because her feelings could not be confined to a finite space. But somewhere along the way she had reined in those mad and glorious impulses, as if a thief had come in the night and stolen the dreams inside her and she hadn't noticed they were gone until too late.

All that remained of the wild soul of her younger days was a cold, mechanical talent and a photographic eye. Airbrush and mousepad had replaced paint and canvas.

Her subjects had changed, too. She used to create art with passion and purity, whether it be a horse on her father's ranch or an abstract scramble of feelings. Inspiration used to govern her hand, and something far more powerful ignited her spirit. Once seen or imagined, the work rushed from her, generated by a force as strong as the need to breathe.

Now subjects came assigned to her by memo from the ad agency where she was up for full partner. She used a computer to design and animate dancing toilet brushes, talking dentures, or an army of weed-killer bags marching toward a forest of weeds.

Tugging her mind away from thoughts of work, she clicked on the wipers to bat away a few stray snow flurries. The day wore on. Spokane passed in a whisk of warehouses and industrial smokestacks. The interstate arrowed cleanly across the panhandle of Idaho. Between empty stretches of highway lay glaring commercial strip centers, tractor barns and silos, wood-frame houses huddled shoulder to shoulder against the elements. Deeper accumulations of snow formed crusty heaps on the side of the road. East of Coeur d'Alene, the landscape yielded to endless stretches of nothingness.

The monotony of the drive, and her purpose for racing across three states, caused an almost painful tectonic shift in her thoughts. Memories drifted toward dangerous places. Against her will, images from the past turned the barren snowscape to brilliant summer.

She saw herself as she was at eighteen. A little breathless at everything life had to offer. A little scared, but mostly happy and secure in her world. She finished high school with honors she didn't care about, a raw talent she didn't appreciate yet, and no sense of impending disaster. Her mother's cosmetic surgery was supposed to be routine. No one even considered the possibility that Sharon Turner would die from the complications.

In a shockingly short span of time, Michelle had found herself alone and motherless - suddenly in need of the father she barely knew. She had expected him to hustle her off to college and breathe a sigh of relief when she was gone, but instead he'd surprised her. He had invited her to take a year off before college and spend the time with him in Montana. A year to grieve for her mother and to learn who her father was.

In that one brief season she experienced the events that were to shape her life: She learned what it was to be a motherless daughter. She fell in love. She became a painter. Not necessarily in that order. Everything sort of happened simultaneously. Even now, the years-old bittersweet ache rose as fresh as yesterday. It shouldn't still hurt, but it did, even though he was gone, long gone, from her life. Except for the daily reminder he had left her.

She glanced into the rearview mirror again. Cody, who was sixteen and impossible, hadn't moved from his long-bodied position in the backseat. A tinny beat of heavy-metal music escaped from his headphones. He stared out at the endless swags of electrical lines strung along poles that bordered the highway. When a green-and-white sign welcomed them to Montana, his only reaction was to blink and shift position.

Copyright © 2001 Susan Wiggs

About the Author

Susan Wiggs is the author of the bestselling historical romance novels The Mistress, The Hostage, and The Horsemaster's Daughter. She won the Romantic Times career achievement award and the Romance Writers of America's RITA Award for best historical romance. A dramatic departure from her critically acclaimed and highly popular previous novels, THE YOU I NEVER KNEW is her first full-length work of contemporary fiction. A Harvard graduate and former schoolteacher, she lives on an island in Puget Sound with her husband and daughter.