by Ashley Clark
The problem was not that keeping both her daughters safe and loved was too heavy a load to carry on her own trembling shoulders.
The problem—the real fear—was the deep-seated, buried knowledge that despite her best efforts, she was incapable.
Her gaze moved across the room toward the sweater hanging from the door of Juliet’s closet.
She had made the sweater weeks ago from a Simplicity pattern, but Juliet had come home disappointed when the sweater snagged. Millie had a hunch her daughter faulted the craftsmanship, though snagged and flawed was the furthest thing from Millie’s design. She meant, of course, for her daughter to have a covering. Meant for the fabric to last as long as Juliet had need. But something happened in between.
A sharp corner here. A stumble there. A rip and a tear, that sort of thing.
So Millie held together each torn piece, and stitch by stitch she reinforced the garment’s seams.
Let me mend you. Let me take the load you were never meant to carry.
The words came unexpectedly. Not in writing or an audible voice, but in a place within Millie’s heart so very deep one might call it her soul. And she could’ve wept for the truth of it, echoing through her being.
Because the truth was, somewhere along the way, somewhere hidden deep inside of her, she had ceased believing God is good. Begun instead to trust her own ability to keep her daughters safe and happy. And every time she read a news story or thought about the harm the world might bring, it seemed to confirm her worst fear that God was far less capable than she. And the fear only worsened and worsened, until some nights she could hardly sleep, and when she awoke she’d had terrible dreams.
But now, faced with news of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, the trauma had come a little too close. The fear, a little too real. A little too strong for Millie to pretend she was in control any longer.
She needed saving. For years, she’d run away for security instead of running toward Jesus. To peace. And she didn’t want to do that any longer.
Sweet Jesus, she prayed, opening her palms toward the heavens. I can’t do this any longer. I choose to trust You have a plan for me. Be my Savior. Be their peace.
She might not know what tomorrow would bring, but she did know the One who made the morning. And no matter what happened next, she was sure deep in her soul that was all she would need.
FORTY-THREE
Charleston, Modern Day
Harper tapped her fingernails along the railing of the stairwell. She still couldn’t believe Peter owned and lived in Millie’s childhood home. She’d been so sure yesterday that he was about to say he knew Millie was his grandmother, that he’d put the pieces together and she didn’t have to keep the secret anymore. But Millie had interrupted them.
Lost in thought, Harper hesitated at the turn of the stairs.
What was that sound? Almost like a whoosh.
She frowned.
Her skirt spun as she turned the corner. And then she saw the flood. A good six inches of water floating through the store, pushing through a soppy hole in the wall by the door.
She hitched up her skirt and ran. Clouded water splashed around her legs as she rushed toward the inventory. Racks of delicate dresses that now dangled in the murky water, their hemlines sinking down.
Ruined.
All of them.
No. No, no, no . . .
The sound of a gasp behind her arrested her before she could do more.
Harper turned.
Millie stood at the end of the stairwell, one hand gripping the railing and the other hand covering her mouth as tears ran down her face and her shoulders trembled.
Millie didn’t seem to notice the destruction to the building. Or the inventory. Instead, she stared off in the distance, toward the window.
The window!
Harper splashed through the water as quickly as her feet would take her.
“Child, be careful!”
Harper could hardly make sense of the words. She had to get there in case the water rose further. If that leaking pipe burst . . .
She scrambled up into the window display. Several people were walking down the sidewalk and turned to watch her. She didn’t care.
Harper fumbled to unfasten Millie’s gown, then gently lifted it up over the mannequin.
The walls of this space might crumble and the floor might flood, but she would not let anything happen to Millie’s dress.
“It’s okay!” Harper folded the dress and covered it with her own cardigan so a rogue splash of water wouldn’t stain the silk.
If only she could get her own words to sink in.
It’s okay, Harper. It will be okay.
But would it?
Wasn’t this—this store, this dream, Peter, and Millie—already her second chance at okay? She couldn’t bear to lose her dream all over again.
She splashed toward the stairs and carefully handed the dress to Millie.
“Take it upstairs.” Harper breathed the words. “Call Peter.”
Millie clutched the gown and swallowed visibly. She nodded. Harper worried for how shaken Millie seemed.
Harper set to work. Though truthfully, she turned in circles, trying to figure out where to begin.
She splashed her way over to the front door and opened it so the water had someplace to flow. Then she opened each one of the front windows to let the heat in.
The water tunneled its way toward King Street. Her initial panic subsided into an aching realization of the damages.
“Harper.”
She turned, and he was there at the door as though her thoughts had summoned him.
Peter was going to be shocked.
Peter was going to be horrified.
But Peter didn’t look all that surprised.
He stepped into the water as it flowed out the door, and he came to stand beside her. He rubbed his forehead with his hand, his silence deafening.
“I should have done something sooner.” He all but whispered the words.
Even the tiny tide of the water came to a standstill.
Harper tilted her chin, trying to understand his meaning. Then she realized.
He knew.
He knew the plumbing was bad, and he hadn’t told them. She could see it in the tightened lines around his eyes and feel it in the drop of his timbre. During their last conversation, he nonchalantly mentioned the repairmen as if a ceiling fan needed replacing. But this. This was no ceiling fan situation.
Peter. Her heroic, larger-than-life Peter had let this happen to her. Let this happen to Millie. Even let this happen to the building.
“Why?” Her voice was a rasp as she searched his gentle eyes for answers.
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I was so scared she would leave me too.”
Harper grabbed him by the arms, and his eyes snapped open to lock with her frantic gaze. “Peter, what is that supposed to mean?”
The set of his jaw said it all.
He knew Millie was his grandmother.
“How long?” She didn’t let go of his arms. “How long have you known the truth about Millie and me?”
“From that night we went to Poogan’s Porch. I saw the button on her hat.” Peter kicked at the water. “Don’t tell her, okay? I promise I will say something soon, but I need to get my thoughts straight on all of this.”
Harper gaped. “Peter Perkins, what’s the matter with you? You left me in agony while I waited for Millie to tell you the truth. To think, all of this could have been avoided if you’d just been a little braver.” Harper gestured toward the rows of dresses, the hems now soaked from the flooded floor.
He winced slightly. The accusation must have stung. Harper hadn’t meant to be cruel, but it was true, wasn’t it?
“And when was that going to be, Harper? When was Millie—or you, for that matter—going to tell me the truth? What reason have you given me to trust you?” He freed his shoulders from her grip and stared at her. “You thought I could
n’t figure this out? My own flesh and blood? I’m a historian.”
Harper held up one finger and opened her mouth, but Peter wasn’t done.
“I should’ve been more up-front about the repairs. Admittedly.” He took a half step closer and looked deeper into her eyes. “But isn’t it plain, what’s in front of you? My feelings . . .”
About Millie.
His unspoken words hung in the air. The rest of the sentence was clear. For as much as she wished he might have said for you, Harper—that was not what he meant, was it? She’d caught the nuance to what he’d said before, that he was scared Millie would leave him.
Maybe things would have been different under different circumstances. If she were just Harper and not Harper, keeper-of-secrets. But now any prospect of a happily-ever-after was as soiled as the hemlines.
The hollowed-out hope within her ached as she realized something with certainty: the depth of her feelings for him. And in this blending of newly realized love and grief, the world around her spun with the vibrancy and speed of a tie-dye machine.
Peter bent down to the hole in the wall and pushed on the wet spot around its radius, determining the extent of the damage. “The real question, Harper, is why are you still sticking around?” Peter waded over to the rows of dresses and lifted them from the water so they could begin to drip-dry. “Disaster has come. That’s your usual cue to bolt, isn’t it?”
The one thing King Street lacked was a fetching secondhand store. If it had one, Harper would be there already. She would be living there. Buying all the vintage heels as they came in the door.
But as it stood, her current ranking on the pity scale was somewhere between a Target run for cheap cosmetics and ice cream, and all-out sobbing her way through old J. Lo movies.
In other words, she had lost herself. And as she climbed the external stairs to the second story of the loft—because Lord knew she wasn’t going back through the dress shop while Peter was still inside—she sighed down to the bones of her being. She sighed because she was oh so weary.
“God, I don’t understand,” she mumbled on her way up the steps. “I thought this was it. I thought the dream You gave me was finally happening.” Harper shook her head and gripped the handrail as she neared the top landing.
The whole building suddenly seemed unsteady, ready to crumble under her feet. Wasn’t that the way of things?
She took the final step and stood beside a pot full of red geraniums in bloom. Millie would be inside, resting or reading as she always needed to do midday.
Harper would not take her own pitiful attitude inside the walls of this loft. Millie deserved better. After all, the store was Millie’s. The dream was Millie’s too.
So until Harper could get a handle on herself, she would stand here. Fuming.
She had spent the last half hour at the coffee shop up the street, searching the Internet for every article she could find on flooding in historic buildings.
Sure, that might’ve been a little like searching a cough on WebMD.
But when it came to historic structures like this, she knew nothing except for her emotional attachment and Millie’s own history with the place.
The prognosis was not good.
At best, the space would have to be aerated, and the walls could take months to dry completely. There was no telling how long the old pipes had been leaking.
It could be a good thing, the Internet said, when the flood finally happened—with visible evidence of decay, repairs could be made. Even if it meant deconstructing walls and insulation.
But it didn’t seem like a good thing.
Especially considering Peter had known the building wasn’t up to code. Could he even afford to keep it? Because she and Millie certainly couldn’t.
“Peter,” she murmured to herself. His name was as sour as lemons on her lips.
How dare he suggest she ran whenever things got hard. Peter, whose dreams had been handed to him on a lucrative real-estate platter. Peter, who conveniently lived his dream job daily.
Peter knew nothing of the silent rise and fall of dreams. A rise and fall not at all unlike breathing.
Harper shuffled her still-wet feet over several fallen flower petals and started to reach for the door handle. But then she dropped her hand. She was still too angry, too shocked, and she didn’t want to upset Millie.
The dresses were largely unsalvageable. She would try. Of course she would try. But with an array of silks and delicate lace . . . well, it was highly unlikely her efforts would make any difference.
For the dresses. For the store. For her dream.
And here she had promised herself after Savannah that she would not invest her heart this way. Not again. She’d known she could not take another failure, not when her hope was already so weak.
But this time was worse by far than before. Because this time was about more than just her dream. This time she had Peter.
Peter, who had been so irresponsible. Peter, who despite herself, she was falling in love with.
Harper sighed with frustration and looked up into the sky.
What now?
She shook her head and covered her face with her hands. None of it made sense. Why would God let this happen? Why would Peter let this happen too?
Harper clenched her hands hard into fists. Maybe Peter had a point when he mentioned her leaving. Not because she wanted to run this time, but the contrary. Because she wanted to stay so badly, a fairy tale had clouded her vision.
The time had come to move forward. She would get Millie settled and the dresses squared away and the mess cleaned. And after she had done the hard work, she would do the harder.
She would finally give up the one thing in her life that held the power to pronounce her a failure. The dress shop. The dream. The sketches she had begun as a child.
She would put them aside and find a steady, realistic, less embarrassing pursuit to follow with her life. Then people would respect her, and work would be easy. Because work came easy when you didn’t care about what you were doing.
And after she closed this chapter, she would pay a visit to the one person who had never led her the wrong direction. Her father.
Maybe Millie would even come along.
FORTY-FOUR
Charleston, Modern Day
Two weeks after the flood, the storefront that had changed so much through the decades was empty once more. The dresses were gone. And today, just as Peter predicted, Harper left—this time with calm insistence there was no place for her here any longer. She offered to take Millie back to the boardinghouse, but Millie said the inn was in good hands and for now she would like to stay in Charleston.
Peter woke in the dark that night, gasping for air and sweating.
He had the dream again.
The one where he couldn’t find his shoes.
And he walked all around the city of Charleston, into his home—Millie’s childhood home—until the dust of the place covered his feet so much they became invisible. He couldn’t feel his feet, then his legs, then his lungs.
The dust was suffocating.
When he opened his eyes, he was having a panic attack. He knew it, through clenched teeth.
The suffocation was a telltale sign.
What he didn’t know was how he would ever tell Millie the truth. That he’d known she was his grandmother. That he had played the part, helped with the dress store, as he waited for her to admit why she left his mother as a baby.
And in Charleston, bloodline was everything. Bloodline and history. Peter should know.
He gulped back the emotion in his throat. He couldn’t fight the sinking feeling he was a nobody with no history. Even with a stepfather from one of the most prominent families in Charleston, a stepfather who disowned him simply because Peter wouldn’t play along any longer.
Why hadn’t Millie claimed him as her own by now?
The dream’s echo was a lie, and he knew it. But for so long, he had studied other people’s storie
s, thinking that maybe, eventually, he would find where he fit in. He never expected to discover his own story had been there all along—that his dear Millie would be the one for whom he was looking.
Peter took several practiced deep breaths and reached for the bottle of water he’d left beside the bed. After several gulps, he pulled the sheets over his head, hoping to hide until morning.
When he awoke once more, it was from a different sort of dream. He was standing in the water beside the pier at Millie’s boardinghouse. He looked down at his hands and noticed a small cut that was bleeding. From the scrape flowed multicolored threads, all twisted up together like DNA. Peter reached for them, tried to pull one thread, then another, to see them distinctly, but the threads were so tightly woven that he couldn’t loosen any. Then a pelican flew overhead, and the cut was washed by water from the bay.
Peter blinked, trying to remember the rest of the dream as he looked down at his hands. The dream seemed surreal—all he could see now was the skin, not the blood underneath.
And in that half-awakened frame of consciousness where his breaths came quick and his heart raced and he was maybe more alert than during daylight hours, his mother’s voice came to him, singing a verse she always used to hum before he went to sleep.
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.
The clarity of her song was so striking that for a moment he wondered if she were in the room with him, even looked for her, and then he remembered she couldn’t be. He grew more and more awake as the music faded, but for the first time in his life, he realized why she always sang that song and really what it meant. That a bloodline was like a river—changing, branching, ever flowing—until grace upon grace sweeps across history and the past begins to pull with the tide of the now.
So the stories mingle together, multicolored threads woven like little streams through the Lowcountry, in all the blood we cannot see. In all the blood and all the threads that are redeemed.
By the light of day, Harper was still gone. Millie, meanwhile, was going about her usual routine, sitting at the breakfast table with a slice of cinnamon toast, when Peter entered the loft to check in on her.