The Long Road Home (These Valley Days, #1)

by Bethany-Kris

  These Valley Days, 1

  Bethany-Kris

  For the hometown love.

  CONTENTS

  THE LONG ROAD HOME

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Books

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  “I’m going.”

  “You’re absolutely not,” Gracen returned just as strongly as her friend.

  Delaney scoffed over her shoulder at the reply as she walked through the front door with a fresh coat of candy apple red paint. “I will, and I am.”

  “You’re seriously considering it? Delaney, the last time we ran into your mother at the supermarket, she turned around and immediately raced down the adjacent aisle. Doesn’t your brother still call you “that one” whenever someone asks about you at the hardware store? What are you talking about? Your cousins don’t treat you much better!”

  “That’s enough. Bexley has always—”

  “As long as nobody’s around to see her talk to you, yeah, your cousin isn’t so bad. I guess.”

  Gracen let the screen door between the porch and foyer slam shut, and left the main one open, when she darted in after her typically bubbly friend. A ray of damn sunshine on her worst days, Delaney Reed wouldn’t be caught in public behaving in any other way.

  Her proudly conservative, Pentecostal upbringing taught Delaney to smile even in the face of critics, and all the time in between, but especially when doing her duty; serving a godly man. She might have escaped from her family’s control and demands after high school by going out on her own and accepting their shunning, but some habits were hard to break.

  Delaney kept the sweet personality for the most part. Very little else.

  Right then, Delaney did her best to ignore the way Gracen stalked down the foyer’s short hallway behind her before the back of her friend’s shiny pin-straight mane of jet-black hair swerved for the kitchen. By the time Gracen’s white runners squeaked to a stop on the linoleum floor, Delaney faced her with fists—one still clutching tight to the entire reason for their current conversation—dug into her hips, and a familiar gleam in her narrowed hazel eyes that needed to look up to stare Gracen in the face.

  All five-foot-one inches of her friend acted like a wall Gracen couldn’t pass to enter the kitchen. The opposite of Gracen not only in appearance but also personality, that was the thing about Delaney which often brought the friends to a head. She proclaimed to never liked a challenge; she couldn’t stop herself from answering one, though. Sometimes, the sweetness meant nothing when Delaney couldn’t keep her mouth or temper under control.

  “What, are we going back to high school, or something?” Delaney asked with an arched brow that dared Gracen to try it.

  The comment made Gracen bristle in all the wrong ways, but Delaney likely knew it, too. After all, there was a reason she hit out with that barb, and the start of their friendship had begun in the halls of their shared high school while they sat side by side with matching bruised faces outside the principle’s office.

  Maybe Gracen had been a bit of a bully. On that day, though? Delaney showed she had something to prove even in a baggy hoodie and a jean skirt that swept the floor with the slit in the back hemmed to below the knees for modesty.

  “What does high school have anything to do with the engagement dinner invitation I found shoved in the mailbox, Delaney?”

  Waving her hands high, and the invitation in question, Delaney mockingly hissed, “Oh, you know—we both do. If Gracen Briggs doesn’t like you, nobody does. What, are you going to tell me I can’t go to a party with my cousin? Really?”

  “First of all, you need to get off that.”

  “First of all, nothing,” Delaney cut in before Gracen could attempt to defend herself. Not that she planned to, really. She didn’t have any good excuse for the crown she chose to wear so that high school was survivable, but that also wasn’t the point.

  Just as cutting as before, Delaney started, “Listen—”

  They would get nowhere like this.

  “It’s not about your cousin, or her friend,” Gracen said fast. “And you’re blatantly ignoring what I said about how your family still treats you despite living in the same town.”

  A town with a population of one thousand five hundred and three people stretched over what was appropriately named The Valley—they were bound to see Delaney’s family especially considering they owned the hardware store at the top of town.

  A portion of the Acadian Peninsula where the Trans-Canada Highway cut through the upper section of the right side of town coming down the Saint John River, a bridge connected both sides of The Valley. The two main streets of town stretched on for less than a kilometer, connected to backstreets filled with everything from children’s schools to dental offices. One didn’t need to go on any more than a fifteen-to-twenty-minute walk within the town to be where they needed to be whether it was the grocery store or the post office. Twice daily they could watch a familiar black sedan—owned by Delaney’s father—go past the tall windows at the front of their salon as he drove to and from work.

  Not once did the man turn his head to act as if the business, or his child who worked inside, existed.

  “Don’t turn my valid concern for a situation that’s been happening since we were barely eighteen around on me because it still makes you uncomfortable,” Gracen said. She needed to get that fact in before Delaney’s already sky-high walls of defense shot impossibly higher. “We both know I was a bitch in high school until you came around to knock me down.”

  Delaney didn’t relax at Gracen’s piss poor excuse for a joke, but she lost the extra attitude in her expression. Something was something, after all. Better than nothing. Gracen couldn’t work with nothing.

  “You’re right about one thing. It’s not about Alora. I know that,” Delaney said, sighing. Flipping the invitation around for a better view at the names on the front where Gracen had ripped open the envelope, another gusty breath left her friend. “I should have told you about her and ... him. Apparently, they got together last summer. I told Bexley you wouldn’t care when she mentioned it to me because she gave me the impression it wasn’t anything serious, so I didn’t bother to mention it.”

  Wow.

  “They waited a whole year, huh?”

  Delaney only shrugged like she didn’t have much to say on the topic. Frankly, what could she? Gracen’s statement spoke for itself, and so did her history. A history her friend knew all too well.

  “Did you ever think that maybe you and Sonny just weren’t meant to work out, and someday you might see it like that instead of the way you do?” Delaney eventually asked. “You know it’ll hurt less, too, right?�
�

  Ouch.

  Right to the point.

  The name shot through Gracen’s brain like a close-range shot from a high calibre bullet. A second of immeasurable pain followed by total numbness that every cell in her body tried to fight off what it no longer wanted to acknowledge. She barely let the name pass her own lips, never mind her thoughts, because unlike Delaney, Gracen couldn’t say it without the consequences that always followed.

  Despite the way it felt like her body was splitting in two—one side internally screaming as she tried to convince herself to escape from this conversation—Gracen didn’t show the discomfort or pain on the outside. Well, not much.

  The fold of her arms across her sweaty sports bra hid the way her heart thumped so loudly in her chest that it ached with every beat. Wasn’t heartbreak supposed to get better with time? Wasn’t that the lie?

  It’d been two years.

  Two goddamn years.

  How many more times did she need to tell herself to get over it?

  “I just don’t understand how he can—”

  “Tell you he loved you from the time you were fourteen and break up with you on your twenty-first birthday,” Delaney said dryly as she rubbed her fingers over her closed eyes as if she’d found pressure there. “Me, either.”

  He’d been sixteen.

  That time felt like a different world to Gracen.

  “You don’t have to make a joke out of it.”

  At that statement, Delaney’s hazel eyes popped open to meet Gracen’s. All the defensiveness from earlier bled away as the shorter woman shrugged in her running attire made up of an oversized hoodie, stretch leggings, and runners. Every item of clothing, like all the rest of the wardrobe that made up Delaney’s closet, were black.

  Something else to set off the sweetness.

  Or so her friend said.

  “I wasn’t making a—” Delaney pressed her lips together, then let out a nervous breath of air chased by a weak laugh. “I know what happened with you and Sonny wasn’t that simple. It was more than how he left you.”

  “Putting it mildly.”

  “But,” her friend added quickly, “it did happen, Gracen. Two years ago, actually.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The look Delaney offered back in response said more than any words ever could. Gracen didn’t hide her bitterness as well as she thought she did when she tried. At least her friend had enough sense not to rub more salt in the raw wound that was Gracen’s bleeding, broken heart on her proverbial sleeve.

  “It’s basically done, okay?” Delaney said, shrugging one shoulder. “History. Let it stay there. Look at you—you look great, still don’t have any kids, own your own business, and at least half of the population of this town idolizes the ground you walk on.”

  Gracen rolled her eyes. “Teenagers don’t count.”

  Even if she loved how the group could keep their schedules at Haus of Hair booked solid six days a week.

  “My point is,” Delaney replied with another roll of her annoyed eyes, “is that on every level, you’ve done better. Upgraded. Don’t prove that different by feeling some type of way just because he’s getting married now.”

  Right. Succeeded, she had. Even as her ex-fiancé seemed to do the same from afar while he finished his business degrees at a university in the city. Sure, Gracen wanted to say to appease her friend and possibly end the conversation now that it had gone beyond where she was comfortable.

  Along with a million other lies.

  Not one of them passed her lips.

  She couldn’t muster the energy or care to say she would be okay with her best friend and business partner mingling with her ex and his fiancée—at their engagement party, no less. Not when it wasn’t true.

  “You don’t even like Sonny,” Gracen pointed out.

  Delaney’s nose scrunched up in the same way it always did when a person mention someone she didn’t particularly care for. “It’s not that I don’t like him, really, I just—”

  “Don’t like him. Say it.”

  Not that Delaney did.

  It shouldn’t be an issue. After all, Delaney had no problem doing it all throughout high school, and the year of beauty school that followed. Which the girls also attended together before opening their first small salon right after graduation thanks to the small insurance payout from Gracen’s parents’ untimely accidental deaths just before her thirteenth birthday. In trust, the money had gained interest until it was released to Gracen in portions over a period of a couple of years at a critical point in her life when she needed to make big decisions. The right ones.

  Besides paying for school, Gracen fronted the down payment for the first salon with a two-bedroom apartment over top the business where she and Delaney lived for two years. A popular spot for young women and teenagers in their small town, they ended up selling the salon just a stone’s throw from the Valley’s closest bank and only flower shop for the opportunity of a larger location across the bridge.

  Everybody thought they were crazy.

  One hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the old, abandoned courthouse that had been flooded once during a previous spring thaw when the peninsula saw river levels rise as snow and ice melted from the surrounding forested mountain ranges. All that snow and ice had to go somewhere, so down the hills and into the river it was while the many towns lining said river were left to fight flooding by strategically opening and closing dams for weeks and weeks until the water level went back down to a safe and manageable level.

  Nobody could tell the girls anything, though. Not with one successful salon under their belts, a dream of something more, and the means to do it. Not even the building inspector who warned Gracen and Delaney that one more flood would condemn the building could stop them from signing on the dotted line when the bank came through with the loan.

  No, they still bought it.

  Fifty thousand dollars in renovations later ...

  “We were supposed to open the Haus ten minutes ago,” Delaney told Gracen.

  “The salon is fine. Margot is always early.”

  Their one and only employee, Margot was nothing if not faithful and trustworthy.

  “But she doesn’t have a key.”

  That wasn’t the point.

  Somebody was there.

  “It’s more than just an engagement party, isn’t it?” Gracen asked. “There must be some reason why your cousin wants you there.”

  It had to be. She couldn’t think of one reason why Delaney would get an invitation that she clearly hadn’t planned on telling Gracen about until she found it unless there was more to the situation that her friend had not yet shared. Her very best friend; her roommate. They spent every day together. Nearly every waking second between the salon and the two-bedroom two-storey house they rented across the river. From the front windows, they could see the salon’s Haus of Hair sign lit up in neon when it was turned on. And yet, Delaney had not told Gracen about the invitation in the mail until she no longer had a choice.

  Or better yet, until Gracen stumbled upon it in their mailbox after the two arrived back from their morning run. It was only the name of the senders that made her open it, but Delaney hadn’t wasted time snatching the invitation out of Gracen’s hands in front of their house with a snap about minding her business.

  Too little, too late.

  Gracen had already noted the name. She didn’t need to read the entire invitation for the engagement party to get the gist from the fancy bit at the top.

  “Who around here even has formal engagement announcements?” she asked.

  More herself than her friend.

  Delaney shrugged, muttering only, “You know how the church is when a girl gets married, well, now it’s one of the pastor’s daughters. Alora is barely out of high school. Her father might as well have handpicked Sonny for her if she wasn’t so head over heels for him, anyway.”

  “According to who, exactly?”

 
Delaney pointedly stared at Gracen. “Who do you think?”

  “Let me guess, your cousin is—”

  “Bexley’s close to Alora. Best friends, she says. Sonny might not be Pentecostal like Alora’s side, but he’s Baptist, his family owns half of town, and that’s good enough for the Beau family. The church is all for anything that makes them look good.”

  Every word stabbed a little more at Gracen’s heart, but even that prick of pain wasn’t enough to scrub away the icky feeling that lingered about her twenty-five-year-old ex marrying a girl that had only graduated from her private high school—funded and supplied by the Truth and Faith Tabernacle Pentecostal church—not even a month ago.

  Had the fact that he’d been older caught Alora’s attention like it once did Gracen?

  Something that sucked about a small town like theirs? Everybody knew everything about everybody else even when you didn’t want to. Being a hair stylist, even if that had been Gracen’s dream from the time she cut her doll’s hair as young girl, meant she heard the rumors of the town twofold when someone sat in her chair. A hazard of the occupation.

  Despite the church’s large congregation, who made up a good thirty percent of the town’s population overall, refusing to send their children to the public schools in The Valley like everyone else—well, they opted into funding their own construction of a homeschooling center and the education of their youth. Their class of students started and graduated a month earlier than the others in town who turned their month of June into an extended party from a week-long Sober Grad to a three-day prom celebration. Out of all the teenagers who walked through their salon’s door, the kids from the church on the hill weren’t one of them.

  “Is there more?” Gracen questioned again the longer Delaney stayed quiet. “There is!”

  “Maybe Bex asked me—”

  “What?”

  Delaney gave Gracen that look again. The try me one that made her nostrils flare, and her eyebrows rise high on her wide forehead. Even though she had to look down at Delaney, if she were being honest, Gracen couldn’t say she wanted to go head-to-head with her friend if it came down to it.

  People had to watch the short ones.