by Sara Davison
“How did Maddie react?”
“She had a few choice words for me about interfering in her life. Not as many as I expected though. She’s not stupid. I think she knew he wasn’t remotely good enough for her, only she wasn’t sure how to end it.”
Jude ran the platter under the running water and set it in the dish rack. “What about Mom? She’s still young. Does she ever date?”
“No. She has a lot of friends that she does stuff with, and she goes to a book club once a month. Volunteers at the hospital a few hours every week. And she works part-time at the library. She keeps busy.” Cash lifted the platter and shook water off of it. “You could ask them these questions yourself, you know.”
Jude sighed. “I know. But…”
“What?”
“It’s all stuff I should know about them. If I ask them, it drives home the fact that I missed out on so much of their lives, which I don’t know how I’ll ever make up to them.”
Cash leaned a hip on the counter and contemplated him. “Something you’re going to have to figure out sooner or later, little brother, is that you can’t.”
The words hit him like a palm thrust to the solar plexus. Since the day he’d screwed up the courage to knock on the door of this house, he’d been focused on how to make it up to his family for taking off on them for so long. He swung around, his hands dripping soapy water on the floor. “What do you mean, I can’t?”
“You lost five years with us, Jude. That’s time none of us can get back. What has been done in the past can’t be undone, no matter how much we’ve changed or what we do in the future.”
“So there’s nothing I can do to make up for it.”
“Nope. That’s what forgiveness is for.”
Jude stared at him. Everything that had happened since the night Tessa died, every single thing he had said or done, flashed through his mind like a movie montage. An intense cold crept through him. All of it had either been to forget what had happened or to try to somehow compensate for Tessa’s death and his cowardice. And it had all been for nothing. Cash was right. Nothing he said or did could ever make up for what had happened in the past.
“You’re white as a sheet.” Cash tossed the towel over his shoulder and gripped Jude’s elbow. “Do you need to sit down?”
“No.” Jude shook his head. “Give me a minute.” It was almost too much for him to wrap his mind around. If he couldn’t do anything to make it right, then he was free to stop trying. He didn’t consider himself stupid either, but he’d been acting that way. As though he’d owed someone a million dollars, and even after they’d forgiven the debt he kept trying to pay it back, a few measly pennies at a time.
What Cash had said to him that day at Tessa’s grave had impacted him, but it had clearly not fully sunk in until this moment. Now he got it. The only thing real option he had was to stop striving to make things right and simply accept the forgiveness that God and his family had offered him. Jude slumped against the counter. He really could stop carrying this load around. The burden he’d carried for so long it felt like a part of him.
God, help me to let go. I don’t even know how. The sensation that slowly filled him, like mist rolling across the surface of the water, was so unfamiliar he couldn’t even name it at first. When he did, he pressed a damp palm to his denim shirt, overwhelmed. Lightness. The load that had lifted slightly in the cemetery was gone.
He still owed it to his family to be here, to avoid repeating the mistakes he’d made in the past, and with the help of God do better in the future, but that was all. He needed to move forward. They needed him to move forward. And now he could, free and clear. All those songs they sang in church about chains being gone suddenly meant more to him than they ever had.
His brother watched him warily. Jude met his gaze. “Anyone ever tell you you’d make a great preacher?”
Cash let out a short laugh as he released his arm. “No, I can’t say they have.”
“Well, you would.”
“The fact that I haven’t set foot inside a church in years might be a little off-putting to whoever might be thinking of hiring me.” He picked up a glass and rubbed it with the towel.
“That could change.” Jude said the words lightly as he turned back to the sink. The last thing he wanted to do was show up at the house after five years and start pressuring his family.
“Anything’s possible.” Cash set the glass upside down on a shelf.
That wasn’t a no. Jude suppressed a grin as he scrubbed the bottom of a pot. He’d take it, anyway.
One step forward at a time.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Jude pulled open the door of Joey’s and waited until Maddie had gone in before following her. The place hadn’t changed much over the last five years. It still had the same fifties vibe, with Buddy Holly playing over the speakers and black-and-white checkered tiles covering the floor beneath red leather booths. It felt like coming home and the sensation filled him with conflicting emotions.
He wandered over to the counter and gazed at all the choices, even more here than at the bakery. Unfortunately, here he had no one to choose for him. The thought made him miss Summer, although he’d see her later that night because they’d decided to go to a movie at the small theater in town. Like she had the day he’d come home, his sister stood in front of the counter, balancing on the balls of her feet. Clearly her stance when she was trying to make a decision.
Jude walked over to drape an arm around her shoulders. “What’ll it be, Maddie?”
“You’re buying, right?”
“Of course.”
“In that case, I think I’ll have a scoop of moose tracks and a scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough in a waffle cone.”
The sheer amount of sugar in a cone like that was dizzying to Jude, although, given what he’d consumed the last few weeks at the Taste of Heaven Café, he really didn’t have the right to judge. “Go for it.”
His sister ordered while he contemplated the brown barrels filled with ice cream of every color, combination, and design. He finally settled on a dish of black cherry, kind of boring but about all the sweet he could handle at the moment. The young kid in a white top and pants, white cap on his head, handed Jude his dish, almost dropping it because he couldn’t take his eyes off Maddie long enough to pay attention to him. When he did glance up, Jude gave him a look that had him scrambling to find a cloth and get busy wiping up the drops of ice cream around the containers.
Jude followed his sister to a booth on the far side of the ice cream parlour. The song playing over the speakers set in the ceiling switched to “Great Balls of Fire” as they settled onto the red benches across from each other.
“You know that guy?”
“What guy?”
“The one that served us the ice cream. He couldn’t take his eyes off you.” The protectiveness that rose up in him was a few years late, but he couldn’t have kept it at bay if he’d tried. Which he didn’t.
She frowned. “He was doing his job.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Look,” she pointed her cone in Jude’s direction. “I already have Cash scaring off every guy who has the audacity to look at me or say hi, I don’t need you doing it too. Got it?”
“Sorry, no promises.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
“So tell me about school.” Jude stuck the pink plastic spoon into his ice cream. “What are you studying?”
Maddie licked one side of her cone. “Pre-health sciences.”
“Really.” How could Jude not have known that? He clearly hadn’t spent enough time with his sister since coming back to town. “What are you planning to do with that?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ve been thinking about either nursing or becoming a paramedic.”
“Like Cash.”
“Yeah, I guess. He loves to inform everyone that I’m considering it because I idolize him and want to be like him. I tell him he’s full of it, but maybe there’s
something to it. Don’t tell him this or I will deny ever saying it, but I do admire him, a lot. And I think what he does is pretty cool.”
“Tough job, though.” The thought of Maddie seeing everything his brother had to see all the time made his stomach churn. He hadn’t earned the right to say much about her choices, though. Not yet.
“I know. That’s why I haven’t completely decided yet.” She turned the cone and caught a drip sliding down the far side with her tongue. “What do you do?”
“I’m a counselor.”
“Like a shrink?”
“Kind of, although I’m not a doctor. I work with people who are struggling with addictions.”
“Wow.” She cocked her head and studied him. “That’s pretty cool, too.”
“It can be. Tough sometimes as well. I hear lots of heart-wrenching stories.” And lived a few of them. Not that he particularly wanted to get into any of that with her. Unless she asked. He’d tell her anything she wanted to know about the five years he’d been missing from their lives. A lot of it wasn’t for the ears of kids. But, as Cash had pointed out, she wasn’t a kid anymore. Which was going to require a major mind shift on his part.
“So where did you go when you left?”
“Toronto.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “It was the easiest place I could think of to get lost.”
“Why did you want to get lost?”
Jude sighed. “I was a mess after Tessa died, Maddie. I blamed myself for what happened, and I believed that everyone else blamed me too. And I couldn’t take that. It was easier to leave and find a place where no one knew me, where I could blend into the crowd and become just another street person no one gave a second glance to.”
Her blue eyes widened. “You lived on the streets?”
“For a while, yeah.”
“Did you ever get beat up or robbed or anything?”
Not a time of his life he particularly wanted to re-live, but Jude wasn’t going to keep anything from her. Not anymore. “I did, a few times. It’s a rough way to live. Everyone’s in survival mode, and when that’s where you’re at, you’ll do pretty much anything to get what you have to have.”
“Like drugs?”
His stomach clenched. They were going to go there. “Yeah, like drugs. Or alcohol, or food, or a warm place to sleep. Whatever the need of the moment is.” Would she fall for the redirection?
The eyes that studied him confirmed Cash’s assertion. His sister wasn’t stupid. “So you did drugs.”
He expelled a breath. “I did, actually. Not a lot, and not for long, but enough to know it’s not a path I ever want to be on again. And enough to give me the desire to help anyone I can to get off of it.”
Ice cream dripped from her cone onto the table, but Maddie didn’t seem to notice. She leaned forward slightly. “Obviously you’ve done some stuff that wasn’t the brightest, but I want you to know that I admire you, too. For getting your life together and for having the guts to come back here. I’m sure none of that was easy.”
Jude’s throat tightened. When had his baby sister become such an incredible woman? He’d been pretty sure that, when he told her the truth, he’d drop even further in her eyes. Why did he always have to underestimate the people who cared about him? “Thanks, Maddie. That means a lot to me.”
She nodded and lifted her cone to lick all around the edges, catching the drips. “So what now?”
“What do you mean?”
“How long are you going to be in Elora?”
“I don’t know, actually.”
She cocked her head. “Don’t you have to go back to work?”
“I’m kind of on a leave of absence at the moment.”
“To see us?”
“Partly. Also because I have a friend in town who may be in trouble.”
“What’s her name?”
Jude grinned. “Why do you assume it’s a woman?”
“Because if you’re being this knight in shining armor, swooping in to save someone, it’s most likely a woman.”
“Well, you’re partly right. Her name is Summer. But I’m not sure she needs—or wants—me to swoop in and save her. She’s pretty capable of taking care of herself.”
“But you’re here anyway.”
“Yep.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
Jude leaned against the back of the padded seat. No discussing the weather or sports or anything nice and superficial like that with his sister. “I don’t know. It’s complicated. Like I said, she’s in trouble at the moment. Until that gets resolved, neither of us can think about the future.”
“What kind of trouble?”
She was severely testing his determination to be completely honest and transparent with her. Jude stabbed the spoon into his ice cream a couple of times without taking a bite. How much should he tell her? He let go of the spoon. “All right, here it is. She was attacked in her home a couple of months ago and the guy may still be after her. She came here to get away from him, and I followed her to keep an eye on her until the police can figure out who he is and arrest him. Which will hopefully be soon.”
“Wow. She must appreciate you looking out for her like that.”
“She likely wouldn’t, actually, if she knew that was what I was doing.”
“She doesn’t know?”
“No. The truth is, she doesn’t even know me. When she was attacked, she suffered a brain injury. She doesn’t remember the last few years of her life.”
Maddie sagged against the back of the seat. “Are you making this up?”
He let out a short laugh. “I wish I was, but no.”
“Is her memory loss permanent?”
“No one knows. Her memories could come back any time, or it’s possible they never will. All we can do is wait and see.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“Yes. We’ve actually gone out a few times. We’re seeing a movie tonight.”
“So you’re trying to get her to fall in love with you again.”
“I guess I am, yeah.”
“Do you have a picture of her?”
Jude pulled out his phone and scrolled through the photos before turning the screen toward her.
Maddie stared at it for a minute. “Oh, well. Good luck with that.”
He laughed as he stuck the phone back into his pocket. “Thanks a lot.”
She grinned. “I’m kidding. You guys would have some pretty cute babies together.”
Ouch. That sent a piercing dart right through to his core. Jude rubbed a hand over his chest.
Maddie took another lick of her ice cream. When she looked at him, she wrinkled her nose. “Sorry. That was insensitive.”
He shook his head. “It’s okay. But the thought of bringing Summer home to meet you guys, marrying her, having kids with her… it’s all stuff I haven’t let myself think about for a long time. At the moment, I don’t even know if we can get back anything close to what we had.”
“You will.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re a great guy. You’re smart and sweet and funny and, according to all my friends in high school, you’re not exactly ugly. Plus, she fell in love with you once, right? That love still has to be there, somewhere. So it’s only a matter of time before she realizes it.”
Jude contemplated her. “How can you say all that about me after what I did, abandoning you and Cash and Mom when you needed me the most?”
Maddie set her cone on a napkin and focused all of her attention on him. “Jude, you were in survival mode. You were doing what you had to do to get through this horrible thing that had happened to you. That isn’t who you are.” She reached over and gripped his hands with her sticky fingers. “This guy, the one who had the courage to come home and face everyone, and who’s risking his life now for a woman who doesn’t even know who he is, that’s the real you. And if this
Summer can’t see that and fall for you all over again, then she doesn’t deserve you.” She pulled back her hands.
His throat had tightened to the point where he could barely swallow. “I hate to tell you, Maddie, but you just made your life a whole lot more difficult.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I can’t begin to conceive of the guy who could possibly be good enough for you now, so between Cash and me, it may be a long time before any of them get close enough to even say hi to you again.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The movie theater was small and quaint, like the rest of the town. Summer crossed her legs and balanced the bag of popcorn on the armrest between her and Ryan. She had no idea whether the movie was any good. Several times they reached for popcorn at the same moment. Every time the touch of his fingers against her skin sent shivers of electricity racing through her.
What was she doing? With everything that was going on in her life at the moment, the last thing she needed was to get caught up in any kind of romantic entanglement. Somehow though, no matter how many times she told herself that, she couldn’t stay away from this man. Something she didn’t fully understand drew her to him. Had her looking up every time bells jangled in the café, hoping to see him walking in. True, her life was complicated. And true, it wasn’t exactly the perfect time for her to fall for Ryan Taylor. Yet, she had.
And there it was. The thing she couldn’t keep denying to herself. She was falling for him and she was falling hard. Good thing Nancy had given her that talk about the foolishness of waiting until life became nice and smooth and simple before taking a leap like this, because those words were all that were keeping her from complete, hyperventilation-level panic.
Ryan set the nearly empty bag of popcorn on the floor and reached for her hand in the near darkness of theater. When his warm fingers closed around hers, Summer swallowed. Well, maybe Nancy’s words weren’t the only thing helping her through this. The truth was, not only could she not fight against her desire to get involved with Ryan anymore, she didn’t want to. The thought was as freeing as it was terrifying.