by Melissa Tagg
He peered down at her, this woman who’d embedded herself in his brother’s and niece’s lives. How long had they been married now? Two months? He’d had only a handful of conversations with her. “Thank me? For what?”
“Logan told me you went out to see him in LA. Earlier this year, I mean. Everything sort of fell apart between us at the end of spring, and he went back to LA and I got the job offer in Chicago.” Her hands were still in her pockets, but they moved as she spoke. “Apparently you went out to see him and I don’t know what you said, but it must have been good. Because next thing I know, he’s following me to Chicago.”
And then eloping with her only a few weeks later.
Feathery clouds shifted and separated long enough to release a shaft of moonlight. It highlighted the faraway glint in Amelia’s eyes. Dreamy, that was the word for her expression. Head over heels and all that.
It was true he’d gone out to LA a few months ago—mostly because his sisters had called him and asked him to. No way he could’ve said no to that. Other than Kit, it was rare he was the one anyone turned to for help. He so often felt on the fringes of his family. “I don’t think I said anything so brilliant.”
She pulled her gaze away from whatever romantic memory it’d settled on a moment ago and instead peered at him. He heard a window sliding shut—probably Logan, making sure Charlie would stay warm tonight—and the distant hoo of an owl in the ravine that curved around the back of Dad’s property and up along the side. Some nights, if he squinted just right, he could see the lights of Kit’s grandparents’ house blinking through the knot of trees.
“He hated not telling you, you know.”
His attention snapped back to Amelia.
“I was there when Case called a few days ago. Logan hasn’t taken the news well. He’s had trouble sleeping. I think it’s bringing back lots of memories of your mom. And I know it killed him not to be able to talk to you about it.”
He loosened his hold on the basketball, let it dribble to the cement. “But Dad asked him not to say anything and he’s Logan, so of course he did the right thing and didn’t.” He loathed how harsh it came out, the undercurrent of something long-standing and far too familiar layering his words.
Bitterness. Or maybe something even uglier.
Jealousy?
He loved Logan, of course he did. Looked up to him almost as much as Dad. It was just hard sometimes not to compare himself. Logan did the calm, even-keeled thing so well, whereas Beckett was the hothead with the tendency to fight or run away or too often both.
Amelia bent over to pick up the basketball, skirted past Beckett, and eyed the hoop. “I’m so un-sporty, it’s not even funny.”
“Par for the course around here. I’m the only Walker who ever did the athletic thing. Kate tried a throw a Frisbee once when we were kids—knocked out one of my front teeth.” Funny, considering she was now dating a former quarterback. Hadn’t been so funny when he was a five-year-old with a bleeding mouth.
Amelia tossed the ball toward the hoop. Missed by a mile. Okay, so she wasn’t joking. She laughed and turned back to him. “Told ya.”
He shrugged. “Everybody’s shot an air ball once or twice.”
“Yep. Everybody.” She studied him again. “If I tell you something, can you promise not to tell Logan I told you?” He lifted his eyebrows, and she apparently took it as a promise. “Last spring when Logan was home, he had some problems with Emma’s folks.”
His first wife’s parents? Hadn’t the O’Hares adored him? Acted like Emma was marrying a prince? “What kind of problems?”
Amelia glanced upward, toward the bedroom window that had belonged to Logan as a kid. The one he and Amelia and Charlie were sharing during their stay. “Had to do with Charlie. Logan was a wreck over it. And this is the part he’d kill me for telling you. He and Rick O’Hare got into it right in the middle of the town square.”
“As in, an argument?”
“As in, Logan punched the guy. I wasn’t there, but believe me, I heard about it.”
“You’re telling me, my brother—calm, cool, always-do-the-right-thing Logan Walker—lost his temper and decked a dude in front of a bunch of people.” How he could even find a grin under the grime of this day was beyond him. “You’re telling me this because . . . ?”
“Because it seems like maybe you could use something to cheer you up a little tonight.” She gave him a sisterly pat on the arm. “And because I’m not sure the garage door can take much more.”
He kind of liked her, this woman his brother had brought into the family. “You know, I really do feel a little better.”
She squeezed his arm before starting for the front door. “Just don’t stay angry at him and the girls forever, okay?” She waited long enough for him to nod, then retreated into the house.
Beckett didn’t move from his spot on the cement. He tipped his head, stretching the muscles in his neck and back and shoulders as a draught of chilled air flapped his gym shorts against his legs. Stars blinked sluggishly overhead, as if trying to stay awake under the cotton cover of wispy clouds.
His gaze alighted on his own bedroom window on the side of the house, the wraparound porch roof . . .
“You’re thinking about heading up and climbing out your window, aren’t you?”
Something released in him as he turned. “Kit.” She must have walked over, crossed the ravine, and come around the house. How had he not heard her? She stood in the yard, rescued basketball in her arm.
“Don’t you ever get worried sometime you’ll fall completely asleep up there, roll over in the middle of the night, and topple right off the roof?”
“Probably wouldn’t break any bones if I did. I’d land in the rosebushes.” They met under the basketball hoop.
She dropped the ball to the grass. “Yeah, but then you’re talking thorns and your father’s wrath at the sight of your mom’s ruined flowers.”
His muddled brain didn’t know which of her words to latch onto; his tumbling emotion, which feeling to fall into. Worry at the mention of Dad. The familiar pang at the mention of Mom.
Or the talk of flowers and the scent of Kit’s lotion or perfume or something and the awareness of how close she stood and how much he’d wished her here without even realizing it.
“I tried calling.” Her voice was as soft as the gentleness in her eyes. “I went to the hospital but you were already gone, and then I came here but you weren’t home yet.”
“I went for a run.” Literally and figuratively. “Needed to blow off steam.”
“Well, you’ve got a slew of anxious texts and voicemails waiting for you.”
“I honestly don’t even know where my phone is.”
“It’s okay. I got ahold of Kate. She told me everything. I—”
He didn’t wait for whatever she was going to say next. Only reached for her like a lifeline. He felt the surprise sway through her as he wound his arms around her back.
But then she leaned into him, her arms wrapping around him just as tightly as he held her.
A minute might have passed—or five or ten, he didn’t know—before his hold loosened. But he didn’t pull away, nor did Kit step back. “Did I see Lucas at the orchard?”
She only nodded against his chest, perhaps as un-ready to talk about her own life upheaval as he was his.
“They all knew, Kit.”
She tipped her head back, meeting his eyes, and he saw the understanding there. He didn’t even have to voice it—how standing in that hospital room, realizing everyone else in the family knew about Dad’s diagnosis, had sent him back to the day of Mom’s death.
Arriving home to find out he was too late. To hear about how they’d all gathered at her bedside, one by one said their goodbyes.
A shared moment he’d never be able to claim as a memory of his own.
Why hadn’t they told him to come home? He’d called, he’d talked to Dad. He’d asked if he should skip his basketball game. Oh, some logical
piece of his brain tried to remind him there’s no way they could’ve known. The doctor had said Mom still had weeks. Dad had no idea that morning when he told Beckett there was no need to miss his game that later that day everything would change.
But logic could never quite hush the stormy force of his emotion. It’d blustered in all over again at the hospital today, an unstoppable zephyr. Half hurt, half anger. Would he never stop carrying this around?
And how could he possibly be irate toward Dad considering his current condition?
Kit reached up to smooth a windswept piece of hair over his forehead. Her fingers lingered there, sliding down his cheek until she cupped his face with one hand. “Want to play a little one-on-one?”
He nodded against her palm.
She dropped her hand and stepped away. He fought the urge to pull her back, reaching instead for the ball. Kit pulled a hair tie from her pocket and bunched up her hair. After she tightened her ponytail, he lobbed the ball to her and she moved to the crack in the cement they’d always used as a court line.
Instead of moving, though, she paused after a lone dribble. “Beck, today . . . before everything, I found . . .”
“Yeah?”
But she only shook her head. “Nothing.” She seemed to force a smile, a tease. “Just don’t go letting me win.”
He found a grin of his own. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
9
“This town is so bizarre.”
Eric Hampton’s muttered assessment earned a laugh as Kit walked alongside him, along with half of Maple Valley.
The soft whirr of voices and footsteps pattering over the paved cement of Main Avenue was matched by the sound of raindrops tapping on a rainbow of umbrellas. They moved like a herd across the Archway Bridge and toward Maple Valley High School. Wan clouds draped across the sky, early-evening sun glowing around their underbellies. Shade and light tussled over the landscape and turned the Blaine River a luminous, stormy blue.
Eric held a black-and-white-striped umbrella over the both of them. “Seriously, though, who commemorates a natural disaster with a group walk?”
“Two natural disasters.” Kit sidestepped a puddle. A tornado and then a flood had wreaked havoc on the community around this time last year. She might not have been here to experience it, but she’d heard the stories. “We’re celebrating the fact that the town got through them.” First the walk, then a town meeting in the gym, and later, an outdoor movie in the square.
“With something that looks like a funeral procession?” Eric shifted the umbrella against the wind. “In the rain?”
Fine, the commemorative walk was hilarious—up there with some of Mayor Milt’s more outlandish ideas. Like the annual rubber duck race in the river. Or the year he’d insisted the town host a Regency reenactment fair. His own wife had ended up passing out due to a too-tight corset.
But this was what made Maple Valley a place like no other. Besides, she’d needed to get away from the orchard for a while. Away from Lucas. He’d been home less than a week. It hadn’t been an easy five days, not with his constant talk of selling and his dark moods, not to mention his nightmares. His first night home, she’d about barreled through his door in panic when she’d heard his yells.
“I still say it’s bizarre.” Eric ambled beside her.
“I think the locals prefer charmingly eccentric.”
“Hate to tell you, but I think we’re both considered locals.”
It’d been lucky, running into Eric, considering she hadn’t brought her own umbrella. They’d developed an easy rapport in all his weeks of transporting Hampton House residents to the orchard.
“So how’s Luke?”
And apparently he’d taken to reading her mind. “Honestly, Eric, he’s . . .” She halted, catching sight of the figure striding toward her from the opposite end of the bridge. “He’s here.”
Mindless of the rain, Lucas moved against the flow of the crowd until he stopped in front of her, his expression drawn with irritation. People jostled around them, rivulets of water tipping down umbrellas. “Hey, Luke, I didn’t think—”
“You’re building the barn?”
Oh. Drew Renwycke had said materials would be delivered today or tomorrow. Guess today was the day. She didn’t know when she’d officially made the decision—to accept Willa’s loan, spend down her own meager savings, move forward with the project. Maybe it was Saturday night when Beckett had walked her back home after their game of basketball. Or the next morning in church when the pastor had preached on stepping out in faith.
Or maybe it was earlier, back in the orchard store on opening day when she’d remembered Beckett’s story. Burn your ships.
She’d already quit her job. Moved home. Maybe this was her final act of ship-burning.
“Sorry I didn’t tell you, Luke. I hired Drew Renwycke and—”
“Where’d you get the money? Did you even talk to Dad?”
Eric coughed uncomfortably. “How about I let you two talk?” He handed Kit his umbrella, then lifted the hood of his jacket and moved on with the rest of the crowd.
She felt badly, but clearly Lucas was intent on having this discussion here and now, rain or no rain. “I get it if you think it’s a bad idea. But Dad gave me management of the place for one season. I’m going to make it count. I really do think it’s a smart business move. Look at this town and its crazy love for events. We could probably rent the barn out every other weekend, easy.”
They stood at the edge of the bridge now, watching the herd of people move to the school, where the rest of the town meeting would take place.
For one fleeting moment, it seemed like Lucas might actually lighten up. “I’ve spent the last two years trying to readjust to the quirks of Maple Valley, but this? A commemorative walk to celebrate last year’s bad weather? So if we get a hailstorm this year, or maybe a fluke September blizzard,” Lucas said, “we can throw a carnival or something?”
“Don’t even joke about hail. Don’t you remember that year almost an entire crop was wiped out?” It hadn’t just been the hail. It’d been the wind, the timing. The fact that the storm had come in mid-September when the fruit was soft enough to slice open under the force of thrusting ice.
Grandpa had had to take out a second mortgage on the house to get through that winter due to the loss of income.
“That’s just it, Kit.” Lucas’s overly long hair waved around his face. “The tornado last year took out half the crop.” The crowd glided toward the school entrance, Mayor Milt at the helm. “At any time, a hailstorm or early fall frost or late spring frost or drought or disease or you name it—any of it can wipe away an entire season’s hard work, not to mention a year’s income.” He tugged her back under the umbrella’s shade and handed it to her. “Is that really how you want to live and, if so, why?”
Because she loved the thrill of waking up early in anticipation of a day’s work. The feel of sun-kissed tree bark. The joy of picking a perfectly round and ripe apple.
“Because I love knowing something I’m doing today—whether it’s spraying pesticides or building a fence or pruning—it’s going to matter tomorrow. This land is going to be here long after we’re gone, Luke. Don’t you sometimes feel like we belong to it as much as it belongs to us?”
And that feeling of belonging, that sense of home—there was no trading it in for something better. She should know. She’d looked for purpose elsewhere. She’d walked away only to be coaxed back home by a longing she hadn’t even recognized for what it was until . . .
Until that second night home, working in the orchard until after twilight with Beckett.
So much had changed since that night, when Beckett had away from her, refused to talk about what had happened after her wedding. They never had talked about it. Just like she’d never told him about finding his JAG Corps paperwork last Saturday. She kept hoping he might bring it up himself, tell her he wasn’t really planning to leave. But she’d hardly seen him this week. H
e’d spent all day Tuesday in Iowa City with his dad and had been volunteering at the depot more than the orchard.
But it made a hundred kinds of sense—Beckett’s plans. He’d love the excitement of traveling to some Army base in a foreign country. He’d love the adventure of it, knowing he’d never get bored.
That was where they were different. The thrill for Kit was knowing where she’d be and what she’d be doing each day. The sense that maybe—just maybe—there’d been some kind of divine plan all along. Like God had guided her back home.
But what if she was wrong about the orchard? They hadn’t had nearly as many visitors in the days since their opening. She tried to tell herself lower numbers were to be expected on weekdays, but still. Her crop insurance bill was due in two weeks and here she was spending her and Willa’s money on a building project Dad hadn’t even approved.
And Lucas—there was a desperation behind his desire to sell and a pain he refused to let her in on. There was a whole history of hurt and hardship she couldn’t begin to comprehend. How could she when he’d never once told her what had happened in Afghanistan? In prison?
Or what filled the dreams that woke him up at night?
“I can’t just let it go, Luke.” Her whispered words were nearly drowned out by the wind. Up ahead, the mayor held the school door open as community members disappeared inside. The rain had slackened to a drizzle. “Why don’t you stay? We can run the orchard together.”
“I don’t want this life.” The tumult in his eyes stretched into his voice. “I want to start over. Selling could give me the money to do it.” He turned away from her, raked his fingers through his hair, his sigh visible in the way his shoulders sagged.
They were at an impasse, neither willing to give in. At the end of the day, it would come down to Dad, wouldn’t it? Not a comforting thought. Why had he given her a chance at running the place if he’d already given Lucas the go-ahead to find a buyer? Did he even read the weekly reports she sent?