by Maisey Yates
“I got pregnant, Ben. But by the time I found out you were already back together with Keira. I didn’t want you to leave her because I was pregnant. Or not leave her when I begged you too. And I just felt like I couldn’t win.”
“Lark, what the hell?”
“Let me finish.” She held her hand up. “Please. Please let me finish. There’s not a kid out there. I didn’t keep a kid from you. I thought that I would have time to tell you. And figure out ways to do it. And it was one of those things that seemed inevitable. And definitely part of me was tempted to keep it from you. Just forever. Give the baby up for adoption or something. But... I stayed at school, and I hid from everybody. And I went into labor.” Her face crumpled. “She died, Ben. The baby.”
He stumbled back, his face stone. “She?”
“A girl. She would have been a year older than Taylor. At that point I just... What was the point? I was never going to tell you. I was never going to tell anyone. But here we are, and here you are. And I didn’t mean to get in this deep with you and not tell you.”
He looked at her. Like he’d never seen her before. And she realized that this was so much more complicated than she would like it to be. It was huge for her, this confessional. But he was having to stand there and rewrite his own personal history. Because what he knew about his own story had just changed.
Because what she had just told him would have changed everything at the time. Or maybe nothing. But the potential for change remained, and it couldn’t be denied.
If he had known...
How would things have been different?
And she could see him trying to do that math.
“You can’t,” she said softly.
“I can’t what?”
“You can’t rework it in your head and figure out where we would be if it had been different. I know, because I’ve tried. A hundred times. To figure out what it would be like if I had gone back and made different choices. If she would have lived. If I would have told you. If not having her would’ve been my choice, rather than something that just... Happened to me. I have tried over and over again to figure out how I would feel. Where I would be. And there are just too many things I don’t know. Too many things I’ll never know. If I had told you that I loved you, even before I found out I was pregnant...”
And there was something a lot like regret in his eyes, because they both knew that they couldn’t go back and unpick the stitches.
How could they?
Because their own personal quilt square might be unfinished, but he had one of his own. And it included Taylor.
There was a whole human being that existed because of the choices he’d made. And she knew that he loved his daughter. And that he didn’t regret her.
That there was no possible way for him to regret the last sixteen years of his life, and he shouldn’t.
And she didn’t regret hers.
Because it wasn’t as if she hadn’t done a great many wonderful things with all these years.
She had lived so many places and met so many people. She had grown, as an artist, and as a woman.
She had in many ways found the center of who she was, and that was what had propelled her here. She was strong. Artistic. She loved her grandmother, her mom and dad. Her sisters. This place she’d left behind because it hurt too much to be there.
“It hasn’t been perfect,” he said. “But...”
“You had a life. And so did I. We can’t wish we were in a different one.” She cleared her throat. “I realized that I was illustrating all these books for other parents to read to their children, but part of me would imagine it was for her. That the drawing was hers. That the story was hers. And that I was sending it out into the world. But I would never read it to her.”
She gulped air into her lungs, and it burned. “I won’t say that the grief is as sharp now as it always was. But I felt like as long as I was doing that, as long as I was going into that space, I was never going to find a way to heal. I feel like in so many ways it doesn’t make sense to mourn a person you didn’t know. But it’s the loss of all that could have been. That’s what keeps me up. It’s all that what if.”
He took a step toward her. “Above anything else, you were my friend. I would never have wanted you to go through that by yourself.”
“It was my choice. I chose to go through it by myself.”
“But you didn’t give me a choice, Lark,” he said, his voice hard, anger burning through.
“I know. I thought... I thought I handled it. But what I really didn’t think about was that I wasn’t just going to go through it by myself in that moment. But for all the years after.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” he said. “I had another daughter, and she died.”
His words were broken, and he had bent slightly, as if the weight of the news had broken something inside him.
“I know that you didn’t ask to be part of my journey to healing.”
“I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t just your journey. That baby was part of me too. And you... I cared about you.”
“You didn’t come after me.” She lashed out then, because how dare he? He went back to another woman and he thought she should have done something else? “Should I have come to your wedding with my baby bump, Ben? What should I have done?”
He stared at her, his expression stone. “I don’t know, Lark. I don’t know. But you’ve had sixteen years to decide how you feel about this, can I have more than five minutes?”
It was reasonable. What he was asking for. But she felt desperate. For understanding she didn’t know if she deserved. To be held and comforted by a man who needed some comfort of his own.
“Ben, please don’t be mad at me.”
“I am furious at you,” he said, his eyes blazing. “Furious at life. At...at not even being able to regret this properly because I can never regret the choices that led to Taylor, not ever. But this... We had a baby.”
“Yes,” she said, helpless anger fueling her now. At everything. That she had to do this. That Keira was back. “We did. I carried her, Ben. I lost her. I have lived with that every day and I... You just went on and had your life. You got to have a life. And I know Keira hurt you and left you, but I...lost you. And I lost Mara. And I have never been the same. I have carried this...” She took a sharp, jagged breath. “And I love you, Ben. I do. But I don’t know. This is too hard. It’s too hard.”
“Lark...”
“I just... I love you and I’m mad at you. And I’m mad at her. And I’m mad at me. For indulging in this fantasy.”
“It’s not a fantasy,” he said, his voice filled with grit. “I’m here.” He grabbed her hand and put it on his chest. “I’m right here. And no, it’s not simple. But we don’t have to run.”
She shook her head. “I have so much... I just don’t think we can make this work.”
“I do.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
Lark waited for the truth to make her feel free. But instead she just felt broken.
And she was so very tired of broken.
34
I will beg him if I have to. I will get on my knees, like he got onto his. It became clear to me on the train home. I turned down something real for a fantasy. The stars in the sky for beads sewn onto a gown. I want the stars again.
Ava Moore’s diary, 1924
Mary
It was quilting night, and Mary was holding not only her quilt square, but Dot’s diary.
She’d read some of it to Joe last night, who’d listened while he’d worked on his projects in the shop. She was trying to share more. And it started with this.
Mary had been casually reading the diary for a while, an entry every time she sat down to work on the wedding dress. She was... It was heartbreaking to read the story of the young woma
n who had lost the love of her life. This wedding dress... Mary was beginning to understand that it had never been worn. That it had been a symbol of love, and the promise of a union that had never occurred.
And it made her feel a sense of purpose with the quilting that she hadn’t before.
To turn the stress into something. Because Dot had loved the man she’d lost in World War II very much.
And she had suffered. Having to give up her baby as she had.
And the stress... Turning it into something more felt like Mary was honoring that sacrifice. That loss.
There was something beautiful about the diary. Even though it was tragic.
Because it made her think. About all the things that people before her had survived.
And her family would survive all these things too.
They’d uncovered a lot of secret sadness in these past weeks, but revealing it hadn’t created it. It was just forcing them all to deal with the hidden things, brought to light now.
It was hard, but good in so many ways. And it was changing Mary.
Making her face some things she’d shoved down deep years ago.
When she walked into the Craft Café, Avery was there already. And Hannah followed right behind her.
Hannah was also holding a diary. That red one they’d found among her mother’s things.
“Have you been reading?”
“Yeah,” she said. “A little bit. It sounds like she was kind of a movie star. Ava Moore. I wonder if that’s why Gram got her dress? She was definitely in some silent films back in the twenties.”
“That sounds like a nicer story than the one I’m reading.”
“Really?”
“The wedding dress was never worn,” Mary said. “The young man that she was supposed to marry... He died.”
Hannah frowned. “That’s awful.”
They all sat in the circle, and Lark put a tray of cheese out on the tables, along with some wine.
“Anabeth lost her husband,” Avery said. “The woman who had the curtains. And she had to go make a whole new life. Reading about her journey I realized that I’ve had this...sense of dread now for a really long time. It was so much a part of me that I didn’t even realize I had it. And now I feel like I can make something completely... Completely new if I want.” A smile touched her lips. “It’s the most incredible thing. Because I started this quilt, and I felt so connected to this fabric. And it’s this woman’s journey. From grief to something new. I feel like her, arriving at that new place.”
Silently, Mary picked up Dot’s diary, a marker where she had left off. The discussion about all the different fabrics, the different women, made her feel compelled to look at it now.
“I think I ruined things with Josh,” Hannah said. “But I wasn’t going to stay anyway.” She looked up.
“Are you all right?” Mary asked.
Hannah shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe my square’s telling me I’m destined for greatness and to run away from home. Because as far as I can see that’s basically the point of it.”
But she sounded sad.
Lark looked around, and then she stood, and Mary’s heart squeezed because she could see, in the tremble in her daughter’s hands, the pale color of her face, just what she was about to say. “I have something to tell you all.”
Her story, the one that Mary already knew came spilling out, along with the fact that she’d told Ben today, and then sent him away. “Gram knew,” she said. “The whole time. And she understood. But we didn’t talk. We didn’t talk ever. I could have told her. She could’ve told me. We could have helped each other heal. We were so busy trying to protect each other. But I think we’re all a whole lot stronger than we’ve given each other credit for.”
Hannah was stoic, Avery was wiping tears away from her cheeks.
“I just think we need to... I think we need to stop trying to be the version of ourselves we think each other wants us to be. Or even just the version you think you have to be.” She directed that last part at Hannah.
“You don’t have to be anything except for you,” Mary said. “And it’s up to you what that is.” She looked around. “That goes for all of you. I’m so sorry that we didn’t talk. Not before all of this. Maybe things would’ve been easier.”
“Gram wasn’t good at it either,” Lark said softly. “I don’t think it’s a magic gift you have, talking about things that are hard. You just have to choose it.”
Mary nodded. “Like doing any hard thing. You have to be willing to stumble around in the darkness, and make wrong turns.” She took a breath. “I was so hurt by your grandmother. By the things she didn’t teach me, and I tried to pretend I didn’t need any of it. I tried to pretend I was fine. To take on my father’s lessons so I wouldn’t miss hers. It’s why sewing was so hard. It’s not just that I don’t know how, but that I was angry she didn’t teach me. That she taught you. Like a secret language she kept from me.”
“Oh, Mom...” Avery said.
“But I can’t blame her, not forever. It’s up to me to make the relationship I want with the three of you.”
She looked down at the book that she was holding in her hands, and then she turned the page. And that entry stopped her cold.
I’ve received a proposal from another man. He’s kind. He’s offering me something more than what I have. I like him. Perhaps that will be enough. But I can’t allow him to call me Dot. Dot is who I was to George. And it will always be his name. Our secrets will always be ours. Our love will always be ours. I asked him to call me Addie, for my middle name. Maybe I can simply be someone new.
Dot’s diary, July 1946
“It’s Mom’s,” she said, looking up around the room. “This is my mother’s.”
“What?”
She felt light-headed, the full realization of what she was reading echoing inside of her.
Dorothy Adaline Dowell.
“We always called her Addie, and never... And I never knew... I never knew.”
“What?”
“She was in love before my dad. And he died. She had a... She had a baby.” She found Lark’s eyes and met them. “She had to give her up. She was forced to give that baby up. She was raised here in town.”
“Oh my gosh,” Avery said. “Mom, do you have a half sister?”
There were so many unanswered questions, and Mary didn’t know how to go about getting the answers. Because her mother was gone. Because they had never talked. Because this was what happened when you didn’t talk. Secrets touched everyone. What if they had known? What if they had always known that her mother was forced to give up a child?
What if never telling was why she had never healed. If it was why she had run away.
And she had known about Lark. About Lark’s baby. What kind of comfort could she had offered her granddaughter. She could see that very same question reflected in Lark’s eyes.
It was grief, fresh and bright and new. And it burned like a flame.
“Poor Gram,” Lark said. “Poor Gram going through that not being able to tell anyone.”
Of course Lark would have nothing but sympathy.
“But if she had told,” Mary said. “Maybe it would’ve changed things.”
“But she can’t now,” Hannah said. “Gram can’t make it different now.”
“We can,” Lark said. “We can find out who it is. We can find out who the man was. Who the baby was.”
And Mary’s first feeling was resistance. A desire to keep things from changing, because they’d already changed so much.
But there were so many wrongs, so many things that had happened that couldn’t be changed.
She couldn’t go back and raise her girls so that they would feel like they could talk to her. She could only talk to them now.
She couldn’t go back and know her mother
better. She could only try to understand her now. Just like she couldn’t bring Lark’s baby back, or go back in time and sit with her in that hospital and hold her through her grief. No, she couldn’t do any of that.
She could make the life she wanted now though. Learn what she wanted. Forget being so afraid to fail.
She turned to the next page in the diary, then the next, and shifted it, and when she did, a photograph fell out.
Lark crossed the room and picked it up. “George Johnstone,” she said, looking at the picture. “That was his name. I bet this was him.” She held it up, the photograph of a handsome young man in a military uniform.
“Maybe we can find the family. Maybe they’re here. Maybe they can give us a name.”
“What if she doesn’t know?”
She looked around the room at her daughters, and it was Avery who spoke.
“Well, it’s been my experience that the secret itself is really the problem. So much as what happened to make you keep it. And in the long run, secrets don’t really do anyone any favors. So maybe she won’t want to know. And maybe it will cause problems. But what if... What if she could really use some family? What if she has questions too? None of you could help me until you knew the truth.”
“All right,” Lark said. “Let’s find her. At the very least... At the very least she can know that Gram loved her.”
And it wasn’t so neat for Mary, because this had given her an entire new way to see her mother. A dimension of who she was, as a woman. As a person who was broken and flawed. But it didn’t answer the question of whether or not she had loved Mary. Or if she had just loved that beautiful young soldier, and the daughter she had with him.
But eventually, that had to stop mattering. She had to stop being angry. She had to choose how she wanted to live.
She took a deep breath. “We’ll see what we can find out.”
Avery
It was late, and Avery was reeling from the revelations of the night.
Lark’s baby.
Her grandmother, the loss of the love of her life and her child.