Kendall backed up a step, but she squared her shoulders. “Yes. I want to know.”
“That witch ruined my family. She killed my brother.”
Kendall blinked at him, in shock. “I thought your brother was killed in a car accident. And he left my mother, not the other way around.”
“I see you’re not surprised by the family connection.” He gave a harsh laugh. “I’m not talking about your mother, though she was another piece of work. I’m talking about your grandmother.”
Kendall swallowed hard. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t. Because if there was one thing Connie Green was good at, it was hiding the truth. She hid the truth about her husband for a decade though she had to know he batted for the other team. No, my brother was in love with your mother. For reasons I still can’t understand, he was willing to give up everything for that little tramp. He just wanted to finish college first. Be able to provide for her and his brat.” He smiled slightly, as if only now realizing that he was talking about Kendall. “He had a football scholarship waiting for him. But no, Connie Green pushed and pushed. Demanded that his baby not be born out of wedlock, because God forbid that anyone think the daughter she raised was less than perfect.”
Kendall stared at him, shell-shocked. This was not the story she’d heard, not even the story she’d imagined. “He was going to marry her?”
“He left school for her. Abandoned his responsibilities to his family, got the only job that would hire a stupid nineteen-year-old college dropout, the gas and oil fields in southern Colorado. It was on his way back to work after visiting her that he got into the car wreck that killed him.”
The revelation took Kendall’s knees out from under her, and she looked around for somewhere to sit, but there was nowhere. Not unless she wanted to plummet to the bottom of a snowbank. “I thought he was drunk driving.”
“That’s what the coroner said, but he was wrong. Did you know that blood alcohol level can rise after death and cause a false positive? Look it up. He didn’t drink, never did. He had a reputation for being a partier, but that was only because he was on the football team.” Burton’s expression shifted far away, and she realized he had momentarily forgotten about her. “He was the good one out of the two of us. He was going to be a doctor. The football player who wanted to be a doctor. My parents were counting on him taking care of them in their old age.” Burton laughed harshly. “Guess who that fell to after he died?”
Kendall could barely breathe at all the revelations. She hadn’t been abandoned by her mother, and her mother hadn’t been abandoned by her boyfriend. Somehow, Connie Green had a small part in the whole situation because of her rigidity.
One bad decision that had snowballed and destroyed an entire family.
No, two. Because now as she looked at Phil Burton, she didn’t see evil. She saw bitterness and sorrow and a deep thread of unforgiveness that was eating him alive. He held her family responsible for everything that had happened to his, even though it was nearly thirty years ago and his brother had been an equal participant in the act that had brought her into the world.
And even more unsettling, she saw a small bit of that in herself.
“You have to let it go,” she said softly.
It was clearly the last thing he’d expected her to say. She continued, “I’ve spent my whole life hating my mother for abandoning me, my father for being absent, and now, my grandmother for not coming to find me even though she knew I was alive. I intended on selling these houses as quickly as possible, because like you, I wanted to erase all memory of the family I should have had.”
She took a deep breath and fixed her gaze on him. “But you know what I’ve realized? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. I wasn’t hurting them with my hate. I was only hurting myself.” She gave him a sad smile. “You can raze these houses to the ground, but long after they’re gone, your hate will still be here, eating you alive.”
They locked eyes, and Kendall held her breath, waiting for his response. For a second, she thought she’d gotten through to him. Then he sneered, “Enjoy your last thirty days with the houses and with your forgiveness. I’ll take my retribution.”
He spun on his heel, marched across the street, and climbed into his vehicle, slamming the door so hard the window rattled. But he shot one last searching look at her as he pulled a U-turn in the street and headed back toward the highway.
Kendall managed to remain standing until his taillights disappeared, and then her knees gave out. She stumbled up the walkway and collapsed on the icy front steps of Connie Green’s house. And for reasons she couldn’t exactly understand, the tears she’d been holding back overflowed their gates and spilled down her face.
No, she did understand.
Her mother had wanted her. Her father had apparently loved her mother enough to give up his future plans for her. And her grandmother had made so many mistakes, but she had tried to rectify them. It had just been too late. Chance, bad luck, whatever you wanted to call it, had intervened and set Kendall on a path that no child should have to walk.
She didn’t know how long she sat on the front steps of the house, weeping for the life she should have had, weeping for the life she’d actually lived, feeling the sorrow that she would never know the people who had unintentionally set her down this path. She held every single one of them responsible for their choices.
Then she forgave them.
And when she finally pushed herself to her feet—her face tear-streaked, her insides hollowed out, and her butt numb from the cold concrete—she felt like a different person.
A person ready to face whatever life had for her.
Chapter Thirty-Two
GABE TURNED OFF THE HIGHWAY onto the road to Jasper Lake after dark that night, his head spinning but his heart hopeful for the first time in months. The meeting with the attorney had taken a good part of the afternoon. He was glad he’d brought snapshots of the blueprints to the lawyer, because once she’d seen those, she was 100 percent in agreement with his father.
“There’s no judge in the county who is going to let the condemnation proceedings go forward,” she’d said definitively. “Not with the preservation efforts happening in the high country. No one wants to be responsible for destroying part of Colorado’s history, least of all if it could someday become a tourist attraction.” The motion would be filed in the county court by the end of the week, and she thought they’d have a ruling on it within a few days. The compressed nature of the process meant an extraordinary amount of work on the attorney’s part, but she hadn’t seemed to mind. Gabe suspected that was because of the personal referral. When he’d looked her up, he’d seen she’d done an extensive amount of work with his father’s company.
As Gabe’s truck slowly rolled through town, he contemplated going straight home but found himself automatically navigating to the bed-and-breakfast instead. He let himself in the front door with his key and started up the stairs before he thought better of it and texted Kendall. Can you come down to the parlor? I have news.
A minute later, he heard footsteps upstairs and the opening and closing of a door drifted to him. Moments later, Kendall appeared at the top of the stairs. “Gabe! I didn’t expect you back tonight. Did you get everything wrapped up?”
“Let’s go in the parlor and talk,” he suggested, gesturing toward the comfortable sitting room. Her face creased into a quizzical expression, but she followed his lead and settled in one of the overstuffed chairs by the fireplace.
“I talked to the lawyer this afternoon, and she’s going to file for a temporary injunction at the end of the week. It should be wrapped up by the end of next week, if not sooner. Of course, the temporary injunction will have to turn into a permanent one, but if we get the grant, we should be able to pull the permits and get the condemnation order lifted anyway. This is basically just a stopgap measure until we can figure out what to do. That means a lot of work on our part, getting plans re
ady for the permits, but I think if we work hard over the next week or two, we should be ready—”
“Gabe,” Kendall interrupted. “I’m leaving.”
His words stumbled to a stop. “Leaving? Now?”
She didn’t quite meet his eyes. “We’ve done what we set out to do. If you’re so confident this is going to go in our favor, there’s nothing that I can’t do remotely from California. I’ve been gone too long already.” She hesitated. “I accepted a new project in Pasadena that starts next week.”
Gabe felt stricken. She was leaving? Well, of course she was. There was no reason for her to stay. He’d known she would go back to California at some point, but he hadn’t really internalized what that was going to mean. What it was going to be like to work on this without her. What it was going to mean to his daily life for her not to be in it.
“Kendall, if this is because of us—”
“It’s not,” she said definitively. “I’m not running away. I’m not trying to punish either of us. I just realized it’s much too difficult to do . . . this . . . with the two of us, if there’s not going to be the two of us.” She swallowed hard. “So I’ve decided to put the houses into a trust. And I’m making you a coexecutor.”
He stared at her. “What? I thought . . . Didn’t you need . . . ?”
Kendall shook her head. “Here’s the thing, Gabe. I ran into Burton today, and he told me the reason he’s going after these properties so hard. It’s punishment because he holds the Greens responsible for his brother’s death. And I realized that there are a lot of people, me included, who have put too much importance on a house. On any house.” She gave him a wan smile. “Including my house in Pasadena. I would hate to lose it, but I’m not going to rush into anything before I’ve thought it through. I’m certainly not going to be pressured to sell something that’s been in my family for generations without giving it some serious thought.”
She took another deep breath and continued. “But I am going to have difficulty making some of the decisions and getting the permits together, so I’m giving you the decision-making authority. Assuming you’ll accept it. I know it’s a lot to ask.”
Gabe sat there, so shocked by her revelation that he didn’t know what to say. And that’s when he noticed the subtle difference about her: a peace that until this moment she’d never displayed. The tiny lines on her forehead were relaxed, the corners of her mouth tipped up so slightly that he realized he’d never noticed her faint frown. She seemed . . . settled. What had happened today to create such a change?
But she was waiting for an answer to her offer. “Of course I’ll accept it. Thank you, Kendall. It’s generous of you to hand over control of your own property for the good of the town.”
Kendall lifted a shoulder in a tiny shrug. “Not really. It’s in everyone’s best interest. You know this town better than I do, and I trust you.”
It was those three words that hit him harder than anything else she said. The pain bloomed in his chest. “Kendall—”
She rose from her chair. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, Gabe. I know we’re not meant to be. But maybe we were brought together for a reason.” She gave him a sad smile. “I’ll be done with the historic register application by the end of the week, and I’ll file it before I leave. I’ll send you a copy. And I checked with Matthew Avery. He’s going to call you to get your signature on the trust paperwork.”
“Kendall, thank you.” Gabe rose as well, not sure what he was going to say. But there wasn’t anything else to say. This was the end of something that had barely gotten started, a blip in their lives, two weeks that Kendall would forget as soon as she got back to California and dove into her new project.
Somehow Gabe didn’t think he would be able to forget her as easily.
And then she surprised him. She walked to him and slipped her arms around his middle, drawing herself in for a long hug, her head resting on his chest. When she pulled away, she reached up on tiptoes and brushed a light kiss across his lips. “No. Thank you. I don’t think I could have handled this all without you.”
And then before he could think of how to reply, she was gone upstairs, her door closed, not with a thud of finality, but a soft, barely perceptible click.
Kendall closed the door quietly behind her and leaned her forehead against the solid wood panel, unable to move any farther from Gabe than she already had. All this time, she’d been so good at protecting her heart from the pain of goodbye. She’d never looked back when she had to leave a foster home, never let herself think about what she was losing, what she might be walking into. She’d built the hard shell around her heart so securely that nothing could penetrate it. Not love and not loss.
And yet now she felt the cracks as if they were physical, a pain in her body, a tearing. She took a long, shuddering breath as tears slipped from her eyes. All these years, she’d been afraid of heartbreak. Afraid that it would be the sharp knife of betrayal and loss. Only to find out it felt much more like the thawing of frozen limbs after a long day in the cold. Painful, prickly . . . and yet with a sense of rightness, a sense of balance being restored.
She wiped the tears from her eyes and moved to the bed, letting herself feel the sorrow, marveling that it didn’t crush her. She was going to miss Gabe. She wished things could have turned out differently, but she couldn’t pretend to be someone—something—she wasn’t just for him. And maybe that was the biggest indication that she’d actually learned something here.
The question was, who was she?
She’d always seen herself as a foster child, unwanted by her own mother. But she hadn’t been unwanted. The title didn’t fit.
She’d seen herself as someone who could rely only on herself, even when she had people around her willing to help. But now she was willingly handing over control of her property to someone she barely knew because she trusted him.
What other titles had she assumed that would turn out to be false?
Someone who couldn’t love? The twist in her stomach when she thought about Gabe seemed to prove that one wrong.
Someone who was unloved? Both her father and mother had made huge sacrifices for her, even if they hadn’t worked out in the end.
Someone who had been forgotten by God?
It was only then that a memory surfaced, cloudy with age, so ephemeral that she couldn’t be sure it was actually a memory and not something she’d conjured. Sitting on a woman’s lap, flipping through a picture book. No, a picture Bible. Singing a song.
“Jesus Loves Me.”
Could that have been her mother?
It couldn’t be. But it had to be. She knew for sure that it wasn’t any of her first foster homes. There had been little to no physical contact with those foster parents; certainly none of them would have hauled her onto their lap. She remembered going to Sunday school a few times with the one foster family, the one she’d overheard condemning her mother.
By the time she’d gotten to the Novaks’, where she’d lived until she was eighteen, she was far too old to sit on anyone’s lap and she certainly would have remembered it.
No, it had to be her mother.
She turned the image over and over in her head as she got ready for bed, as she washed the makeup from her face and pulled on her pajamas. And the more she did, the more she was convinced it was a memory. Because there was a sense of happiness, of comfort, associated with it, something she’d rarely felt about any other part of her childhood.
Except for maybe the warmth she felt in that park when Nancy Novak had pulled her in and wept relieved tears that she’d been found.
She held those two memories close as she crawled into bed, let them fill her up as she drifted off to sleep, feeling a little less alone than she could remember in a long time.
Chapter Thirty-Three
EVEN WORKING AROUND THE CLOCK, it took Kendall nearly the entire week to finish the historical register application. Part of it was the wild-goose chase of paperwork that the v
arious web pages and applications and links sent her on, checking and double-checking everything that was required for a successful application. She reviewed the samples History Colorado provided. She retook photos when the first set didn’t adequately show the details of the architecture and edited them to show the houses in the best, most preserved light. She actually had to drive to Georgetown before she could find someone who was confident in handling the brittle blueprints so she could scan and attach them. She had the same print shop scan the passages in the pamphlet that mentioned Jasper Green.
She also did more research and was able to find a few other mentions of the architect online—one in a slideshow from an art school in Chicago and another in a catalog on eBay, which she overpaid for and then overpaid again to have FedExed to her overnight. She managed to find his name in the Royal Academy roster and a couple of photos of sculptures housed in obscure English museums. And yet, she was still only partially confident that she’d established the importance of the architect and his relationship to Colorado. It was a call to the Art Workers’ Guild in England that yielded the final piece, a photograph of his name on the fresco that lined the inside of the guild hall, right next to the most important decorative artists and architects of the age. If she couldn’t establish his importance, at least she could establish his proximity to the most influential people of the Arts and Crafts movement. Surely the rarity of his work should help emphasize that it was crucial not to destroy what little was left.
It was Friday afternoon when she finally clicked Send on the email, the application sent via blind copy to Gabe. Her bags were packed, her flight scheduled out of Denver the next day. She closed her laptop and took a deep breath. She’d head over to the attorney’s office to sign the trust into existence, and he’d assured her he would wait until she was gone to have Gabe come in.
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