Sweet Laurel Falls

“Oh, look. Presents.” Sage’s eyes were as wide as a little kid’s as she looked at the prettily dressed packages under the tree. What had she been like as a big-eyed preschooler waiting for Santa to arrive? He would never know that. He’d missed all those Christmas Eves of putting out plates of cookies and tucking his little girl into bed.

“I guess I’d better head out to find a hotel. Are you sure you’re okay now?” He couldn’t see any evidence of the tears from earlier, but a guy never could tell.

“Yeah. I’m fine. I’m just going to throw in a load of laundry and check my Facebook, then go to bed.”

“Okay, then. I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Okay. Good night.”

He turned to head toward the door and had almost reached it when her voice stopped him.

“Wait!”

He paused, then was completely disconcerted when she reached up and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m really glad we found each other, Jack.”

On the way here, they had already had the awkward conversation about what she should call him. She didn’t feel right calling him Dad at this point in their relationship, so he had suggested Jack.

“I am too,” he said gruffly.

He meant the words, he thought, as he walked out into the snowy evening lit by stars and the Christmas lights of Maura’s neighbors. Despite everything, the realization that Sage was his daughter astonished and humbled him. And yes, delighted him—even though it meant returning to Hope’s Crossing after all these years and facing the past he thought he had left far behind.

CHAPTER THREE

FOR A LONG TIME AFTER SAGE walked out with Jack, Maura sat in her chair with her hands folded together on her desk, staring into space.

Jackson Lange was here in Hope’s Crossing.

She’d never thought she would have occasion to use those particular words together in the same sentence. Stupid and shortsighted of her, she supposed. This was his hometown, and despite his avowed hatred of the place, she should have expected that someday he would eventually be drawn back.

One would assume some latent affection for the town where he had lived his first eighteen years must have seeped into his bones. It was only natural. Salmon spent their last breaths returning to their birthplace. Why should she simply have assumed Jackson wouldn’t want to come back at least once in twenty years?

In her own defense, she had always assumed his hatred for his father would also serve to keep him away.

In the early years after Sage was born, she used to come up with all these crazy, complicated scenarios in her head for what might happen if he did return. She had worked it all out—what she would say to him, how he would respond, the immense self-satisfaction she fully expected to find from throwing back in his face that he had left her yet she had managed to move on and survive.

In her perfect imagination, he would come back on the proverbial hands and knees, telling her what a fool he had been, begging her to forgive him, promising he would never be parted from her again.

Around the time she’d met Christian, she had been more than ready to put those fantasies away as both impossible and undesirable. She had put all her resources into thrusting Jack firmly into her past, and focusing instead on her new relationship and the love she told herself she felt for Chris.

She could never completely assign him to the past, of course, not when her beautiful, smart, clever child bore half his DNA. Sage was always a reminder of Jack. She would turn her head a certain angle, and Maura would remember Jack looking at her the same way. Sage would come up with a particularly persuasive argument for something, twist logic and sense in a way that never would have occurred to Maura, and she would remember how brilliantly Jack could do the same.

In all those early fantasies and all the years to come later, it had never once occurred to her that someday Sage might find him on her own and bring him back to the town he couldn’t wait to leave.

Her sigh sounded pathetic in her small office, and she shook her head. Nothing she could do about this now. Against all odds, he and Sage had found each other, and now she would have to deal with the consequences of him in their lives. A smart woman would find a way to make the best of it—but right now she didn’t, for the life of her, know how she was supposed to do that.

“Having a rough night?”

She turned at the voice and found her mother in the doorway, still lovely at sixty with her ageless skin and Maura’s own auburn hair, the color now carefully maintained at To Dye For. Emotions crowded her chest at the sight of the sympathy in her mother’s green eyes behind her little glasses, and she suddenly wanted to rest her head on Mary Ella’s shoulder, as Sage had done with her earlier, and weep and weep.

Her mother and her sisters were her best friends, and she didn’t think she would have survived the past eight months without them. Or what she would have done twenty years ago, when she was seventeen and terrified and pregnant in a small town that could still be closed-minded and mean about those sorts of things.

She fought back the tears and mustered a smile. “Rough night? Yeah. You could say that.”

“Oh, honey. Why did you keep this to yourself all these years?”

“I didn’t think it mattered. He was gone and insisted he wasn’t ever coming back. Why did I need to flit around town badmouthing him for knocking me up and then taking off?”

Mary Ella stepped forward and pulled her into a hug, and those blasted tears threatened again. “I have to admit, I suspected. I knew you had become friendly with him. People told me about seeing you together. I also suspected you had a little crush on him. I just hadn’t realized things had…progressed. I don’t know how I missed it now. Sage looks a little like him, doesn’t she?”

“Do you think so?”

“The mouth and her chin.”

“She might look a little like him, but she’s very much her own person.”

“Absolutely.” Her mother leaned back a little and smoothed a stray lock of hair away from Maura’s forehead. “Everyone will understand if you need to leave. Go home to Sage. We can carry on without you.”

She was tremendously tempted to do just that—the going home part, anyway. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to sneak into her house, crawl into her bed and pull the Storm at Sea quilt—the one she and her sisters had made after her divorce—over her head and not crawl out again until the holidays were over.

Nothing new there, she supposed. She couldn’t remember a moment in the past eight months when she hadn’t wanted to climb into bed and block out the world. But she was a McKnight, and the women in her family soldiered on, no matter what.

She had managed to keep herself going all these months. She could make it through this too.

“I’m not about to let Jackson Lange ruin the book club Christmas party for me.” She rose on legs that felt a little unsteady. Low blood sugar, she told herself. All she needed was a truffle or something. “Let’s go party. I think this evening calls for some of Alex’s famous spiked cider. I hope she brought some.”

“If I know your baby sister, I have no doubts of that.” Mary Ella slipped an arm through hers and walked by her side through the bookstore and back to the gathering.

She might have predicted the reactions of her friends and family exactly. Angie, her oldest sister and the second mother to the six McKnight siblings, looked at her with deep compassion and concern. Alex, younger than her by only a few years, gave her a look that clearly conveyed solidarity against all males of the species. Claire—Alex’s best friend, who had always seemed like part of the family and had made it official only a few weeks ago by marrying Maura’s younger brother—acted typically solicitous, handing her a mug of something, fragrant steam curling into the air.

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.”