Sweet Laurel Falls

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.

HER 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

DESPITE 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.