“What are you going to do, now that she’s in school?” Ellie asked, leaning back. “Next year it’ll be all day.”
Lately, the question had arisen in Julia’s mind, too. She’d had to ask herself who she was now, what she wanted. The answers had surprised her. For almost half of her life she’d been driven by her career. It had meant everything to her. Yet, she’d lost it in a heartbeat. Perhaps she’d had some blame in that—she didn’t know, would never know if she could have changed Amber’s future—but the blame wasn’t what mattered; that was the lesson she’d learned. Life was impossibly fragile. If you were lucky enough to have a loving family, you had to hold onto them with infinite care. Never again would she be afraid of love. She turned to her sister. “Max asked me to marry him.”
Ellie shrieked and pulled Julia into her arms, holding her tightly.
“I thought I’d open an office here, too. Work part-time. There are kids who need me.”
Ellie drew back. “Mom and Dad would be so proud of you, Jules.”
That made Julia smile. “Yeah.” She closed her eyes for just a moment, a breath, and remembered all of it—the woman she’d been less than a year ago, afraid of her own spirit and the danger of sharp emotions . . . the little girl named Alice she’d taken into her heart . . . and the man who’d dared to push past his own darkness, toward the light they’d found deep in this old-growth forest. For years to come she knew that the people of Rain Valley would talk about this special time, when a child unlike any other had walked out of the woods and into their lives and changed them all, and how it had begun in mid-October, when the trees were dressed in tangerine leaves and danced in the chilly, rain-scented breeze, and the sun was a brilliant shade of gold that illuminated everything.
Magic hour.
For the rest of her life she’d remember it as the time she finally came home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KRISTIN HANNAH is the bestselling author of many acclaimed novels, including On Mystic Lake, Between Sisters, Comfort & Joy, and The Things We Do for Love. She lives in the Pacific Northwest and on Kauai with her husband and son.
BY KRISTIN HANNAH
Published by Ballantine Books
A Handful of Heaven
The Enchantment
Once in Every Life
If You Believe
When Lightning Strikes
Waiting for the Moon
Home Again
On Mystic Lake
Angel Falls
Summer Island
Distant Shores
Between Sisters
The Things We Do for Love
Comfort & Joy
Magic Hour is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Kristin Hannah
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hannah, Kristin.
Magic hour / Kristin Hannah.
p. cm.
eISBN 0-345-49093-2
1. Child psychologists—Fiction. 2. Northwest, Pacific—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A4763M34 2006
813'.54—dc22
2005048342
www.ballantinebooks.com
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Magic hour: a novel Page 39