RaeAnne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer\Woodrose Mountain\Sweet Laurel Falls (79 page)

It was tea, not Alex's cider, a Ceylon black with cinnamon,
clove and orange peels, but Maura figured she could build to the cider.

They were just getting ready to start the annual gift-exchange
game, she realized, where everybody picked a wrapped gift and passed it either
left or right while someone—in this case, Janie Hamilton—said certain words when
she read a passage from a holiday book.

“We saved a spot for you,” Claire told her. “Pass left when you
hear the word
the
and right when you hear
and
. What are we reading, Janie?”

Janie held up a familiar Dr. Seuss book. “Sorry. My kids have
all the Christmas books in their rooms, which are a total mess until I shovel
them out. All I could find was
How the Grinch Stole
Christmas.
”

“My fave,” Alex said, stretching her feet out on a cushioned
ottoman.

Maura took the empty seat and spent the next few minutes giving
an Oscar-worthy performance of someone enjoying herself as, with much laughter,
they passed the gifts back and forth, until Janie finished with the Grinch
carving the roast beast and everybody ended up with their final gift.

To her delight, her prize was Charlotte Caine's gift, a
beautifully presented bag of almond brickle from Charlotte's store down the
street, Sugar Rush.

“Thanks, Charley. Just what I needed!” She smiled, thinking how
pretty the other woman looked tonight in her white silk blouse and ruby
earrings, despite the extra pounds she carried.

The distraction of opening presents gave her a much-needed
chance to gather her composure, so she was almost ready when Ruth finally
brought up what she knew was on everyone's mind.

“So it's true,” she said in her abrupt way. “Harry Lange's son
is Sage's father.”

She would like to deny it, but what would be the point?
Everybody knew now, and she couldn't stopper that particular bottle. Trust Ruth
not to shy away from the topic everybody else had been avoiding.

“Yes,” she said, with as much calm as she could muster.

“I always knew that boy was a troublemaker,” Ruth said
promptly.

“He wasn't. Not really.” Jack might have been on fire with
grief for his mother and with anger and bitterness toward his father, but it had
consumed him quietly. To everyone else, he had been hardworking and reliable. An
excellent student, a diligent employee at his summer construction job.

“A decent man stays around to take care of his
responsibilities,” Ruth said stubbornly.

“He didn't know he had responsibilities here, Ruth,” she said,
wondering if her voice sounded as tired to everyone else as it did to her. “I
never told him I was pregnant.”

“Well, that was a pretty stupid thing to do, wasn't it?”

A bubble of laughter with a slight hysterical edge welled up
inside her. “Yes. Yes, it was. Very stupid,” she answered.

“What was stupid?” Angie asked, on Ruth's other side.

“Not telling the Lange boy she was pregnant so he could step up
and do the right thing.” Ruth said.

Like marry her? Oh, that would have been a complete nightmare.
She had believed it then, and nothing had changed her mind in the intervening
years. She had loved Jackson Lange with a desperate passion, and he obviously
hadn't loved her back nearly as intensely. If he had, he never would have
left.

Only after he took off did she realize the twisted way she had
subconsciously reenacted her own childhood in their relationship. Her father had
walked away from their family in order to pursue his own professional and
academic dreams. By falling hard for Jack just months later—an angry young man
who already had one foot through the crack in the door on his way out of Hope's
Crossing—hadn't she perhaps been trying to replicate and repair her family life
by trying to keep him with her, as she couldn't keep her father?

Her love hadn't been enough to keep Jack in Hope's Crossing any
more than she had been able to keep her father from walking away from their
family.

“Look, you're all my dearest friends,” she said now, realizing
everyone's eyes were on her, though they made a pretense of carrying on
conversation. She supposed it was better to confront the weird turn her life had
just taken head-on rather than dance around it. “I don't want to put a damper on
the party, but I know everyone is wondering. You're all just too kind to
pry.”

Except Ruth, anyway, but she didn't need to point out the
obvious to anyone there.

“I might as well get this out in the open, then we can go back
to enjoying the rest of the party. Jack and I dated in high school. We kept it
secret because…well, because of a lot of things going on in our respective
families. The timing didn't seem right.”

Her mother's lips tightened, and Angie reached out and rubbed a
hand on Mary Ella's arm. She wanted to assure her mother that James McKnight's
defection of his family and the emotional fallout from that hadn't been the only
reason for their secrecy.

After years of mental illness, Jack's mother had committed
suicide herself just a few months earlier. Sometimes Maura wondered if Jack had
only turned to her out of a desperate effort to push away the pain.

“After Jack left town, I discovered I was pregnant. For a lot
of reasons that seemed very good at the time, I decided not to tell him I was
pregnant and to raise Sage by myself.” She lifted her chin. “Personally, I don't
think she's suffered for my decisions. She's bright and beautiful and
well-adjusted. Chris has been a great stepfather to her, and she loves him. If
our marriage had lasted, I'm sure he would have adopted her.”

Okay, she was spilling way too much here. She caught herself
and wanted to change the subject, but on the other hand, these were her dearest
friends. She would rather be open with them from the outset about Jack and Sage,
rather than have them all shake their heads and worry about her behind her back.
Hadn't she endured enough of that since Layla's death?

“How did they find each other?” Alex asked.

“As you all must know, Jack is an architect. Apparently Sage
attended a lecture he gave a few days ago on campus. She knew he was from Hope's
Crossing and they struck up a conversation. In the course of the conversation,
they both connected the dots. And here we are.”

Silence descended on the group as everyone mulled the
information. Claire was the first to break it. “How are you doing with all
this?”

“Peachy. Why wouldn't I be? It's all very civil.” Except for
that moment when she had wanted to smack him and tell him how he had shattered
her heart. “It will be interesting to see what happens. My hope is that Jack and
Sage can develop a friendship. They have a shared interest in architecture,
after all. Perhaps Jack can, I don't know, mentor her. Help her with her
studies, maybe.”

“That would be great,” Angie said. “Does that mean you think
he's sticking around Hope's Crossing?”

Oh, she hoped not. The very idea made her stomach cramp. “I
doubt it. Jack isn't a big fan of our little neck of the woods. Not to mention
that he also hates his father.”

“Not a big shocker there,” Mary Ella muttered. She had a
long-standing feud with Harry Lange, the wealthiest man in town, who seemed to
think he owned everyone and everything in town—not just the ski resort he had
developed, but everybody in Hope's Crossing who owed a living to the tourists he
had brought in to enjoy it.

“Is there anything you need from us?” Claire asked.

A little spiked cider would be a good start. “I'd like to get
back to the party. You have all found time in your holiday-crazed lives for
this, and I don't want to ruin everything with more drama. Can we just forget
about Jackson Lange for now?”

Everybody seemed to agree, to her great relief. Katherine
Thorne asked Janie a question about one of her children who had broken an arm
sledding off the hill at Miner's Park, and the conversation turned.

She loved these women. Sometimes their idiosyncrasies and their
smothering concern drove her crazy, but she didn't know how she would have
survived these past months without them. She had a feeling she would be leaning
on them more than ever with this new twist on her life's journey.

* * *

H
ER
HOUSE
WAS
QUIET
when she returned after the
party finally wrapped up. She'd become used to it over the past few months since
Sage had returned to Boulder and school. After she opened the door and found
only the whoosh of the furnace, she finally admitted to herself that some part
of her had been looking forward to Sage's return to fill the empty space with
sound—her endless chatter about grades and her classes and current events, the
television set she always had on, usually to HGTV, her local friends who went to
other schools or had stuck around town to work and who always seemed to find
excuses to drop in when Sage was in town.

She was destined for another quiet night, she realized.

“Sage? Honey?” she called, but received no answer. Maura knew
she was home. Her purse was hanging on the hook by the door, and her cell phone
was on the console table. She walked through the house to Sage's bedroom. The
door was ajar and she rapped on it a few times softly, then pushed it open.

Sage was curled up in her bed with only her face sticking out
of the cocoon of blankets. The lights of one of the little individual Christmas
trees Maura had always set up in her girls' bedrooms twinkled and glowed,
sending brightly colored reflections over Sage's face.

She rubbed a hand over her chest at the sudden ache there. She
loved her daughter fiercely, had from the very first moment she'd realized she
was pregnant. Yes, she had been afraid. What seventeen-year-old girl wouldn't
have been? But she had also been eager for this unexpected adventure.

Those weeks and months of her pregnancy seemed so fresh and
vivid in her mind. In her head she had known that giving up the baby for
adoption to a settled, established couple who loved each other deeply would have
been the best thing for Sage, but she had been selfish, she supposed. She
couldn't even bear the idea of losing this part of Jack that she already loved
so much.

She could also admit to herself now that, at the time, she had
been so angry at her father for leaving and at Jack for repeating the pattern
that she had managed to convince herself her baby didn't need a father in her
life, except to donate half the DNA. She could certainly raise this baby by
herself without help from anyone.

Yeah, it had been immature and shortsighted—but then she had
only been seventeen. Younger than her daughter was now.

Sage had always been a restless sleeper, even as a baby, but
her exhaustion over finals must have tired her out. She didn't move when Maura
stepped forward to click off the lights on the little tree or when Maura
smoothed the blankets and tucked them more securely, then walked quietly from
the room.

She paused outside the next bedroom and almost didn't go inside
but finally forced herself to move. She switched on the little tree beside the
empty bed and watched the colors reflected on the pale lavender walls, cheerful
yellows and blues and reds and greens.

Angie, Mary Ella and Alex had insisted on coming over
Thanksgiving weekend to help her put up the rest of the decorations, but she had
placed this little tree here herself, as well as the little solar-powered tree
on the gravesite. She had decorated it with all Layla's favorite
ornaments—little beaded snowflakes Layla had made at String Fever, a glass
snowman she had received from one of her good friends, a few small, pearlescent
balls that seemed to shimmer in the glow from the lights.

She hadn't changed anything in here yet. It still looked like a
fifteen-year-old girl's room, with a couple of lava lamps, a big, plump purple
beanbag where Layla had loved to study, and huge posters of bands on the
wall—most notably, Pendragon, her father's acoustic rock band. Though he was
twice her age, Layla had had a bit of a crush on Chris's drummer.

Some day she would do something with the room. Maybe turn it
into a home office, since most of the bookstore paperwork she brought home ended
up spread out on a desk in her bedroom.

Not yet, though. She couldn't bring herself to change anything
yet, so she left it untouched and only came in occasionally to dust.

After a few minutes of watching the lights, Maura cleared her
throat and turned off the lights before she walked back into the quiet
hallway.

As much as she ached with pain for Layla and the life that had
been cut short by a whole chain of stupid decisions by a bunch of teenagers,
Maura couldn't stop living. She had another daughter who needed her, now more
than ever.

CHAPTER FOUR

D
ESPITE
THE
RADICAL
CHANGES
to the rest
of the town, the Center of Hope Café had changed very little in the twenty years
since Jack had been here.

That might be new wallpaper on the wall, something brighter to
replace the old wood paneling he remembered, but the booths were covered in the
same red vinyl and the ceiling was still the old-fashioned tin-stamped sort
favored around the turn of the century.

Even the owner, Dermot Caine, still stood behind the U-shaped
bar. He had to be in his mid-sixties, but he had the familiar shock of white
hair he'd worn as long as Jack could remember and the same piercing blue eyes
that seemed capable of ferreting out any secret.

Despite the calorie-heavy comfort food the café was famous for,
Dermot had stayed in shape and looked as if he could beat any comers in an
arm-wrestling contest, probably from years of working the grill.