A Measure of Happiness

“
What's Left Behind
is an emotionally satisfying blend of heartache, hope, and happiness.”

—Amy Sue Nathan, author of
The Glass Wives

 

“A beautifully written tale of love, loss, and healing . . . that will fuel lively book club discussion!”

—Barbara Claypole White, award-winning author of
The In-Between Hour

 

“A phenomenal testament of motherhood at its rawest, most beautiful core.
What's Left Behind
is a tale of love, sacrifice, and family that stayed with me long after the last page was turned.”

—Sharla Lovelace, award-winning author of
The Reason Is You

 

“Empowering and inspiring.”

—
RT Book Reviews

 

“Thomson's first novel treats issues of loss, mental illness, adolescence, and sexuality with great openness and sensitivity. Fans of Kristin Hannah and Holly Chamberlin will similarly appreciate this hopeful, uplifting story about family, friendships, and a second chance at love.”

—
Booklist

 

“A emotional, complex, and deeply satisfying novel about the power of hope, love, and family. I couldn't put it down!”

—Lisa Verge Higgins

 

“Riveting . . . Very uplifting . . . Romantic, yet heartbreaking all the way through, this novel is a beautiful take on starting over in life.”

—
RT Book Reviews

 

“Tender, heartbreaking, and beautifully realistic. Fans of Anita Shreve will be riveted by this intense and compassionate story.”

—Hank Phillippi Ryan

 

“One beautifully written novel . . . A lovely, heartfelt read that I plan on revisiting soon.”—Heroes and Heartbreakers

Books by Lorrie Thomson

 

 

 

 

 

Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.

A Measure of Happiness

LORRIE THOMSON

KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

C
HAPTER
1

T
he end of the world came with a sound track.

At four o'clock in the morning, Katherine Lamontagne drove through the darkened streets of Hidden Harbor, Maine, and angled into her spot in front of Lamontagne's Bakery, her pride and joy. She filled her lungs with the familiar sweet brine of the ocean, the scent of hard-earned serenity.

The first smoky hint of changing leaves singed the air. Along Ocean Boulevard, the summer's maple leaves gave way to reveal underlying bursts of warm gold and orange, evidencing the vacation town's reluctant slide into autumn. On the radio, the DJ's voice droned on about the upcoming Y2K and the associated crash of every single computer in the country, as though no one had thought to prepare for a future beyond 1999. In case anyone missed the DJ's dire hyperbole, REM's “It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” intoned in the background, driving home the point.

Katherine cut the engine, but the song still hummed through her brain like an auditory afterimage of doom. She leaned across the passenger seat and rolled up the window, savoring the stretch, the elongation of her spine. She flexed her fingers. Then she fashioned her long, dark hair into a work-ready chignon, slid her purse onto her shoulder, and stepped into the darkness.

When she passed beneath the streetlight's soft umbrella of light, an involuntary shiver contracted her shoulders, raising tiny hairs on the back of her neck. She furrowed her brow and glanced in either direction down the empty sidewalk. Silly-me grin on her face, she gave her head a clearing shake and turned her key in the lock. Above Lamontagne's door, the bell jingled its welcome. One hand clasping the door handle, she angled inside the bakery and switched on the lights.

She blinked once, twice. But her sight refused to clear.

Her pinewood tables and chairs lay on their sides, as though an early autumn storm had gathered strength at sea and unleashed its torrent across her café. Beneath the unforgiving lights, shards of jagged glass and hills of sugar glistened and glowed—all that remained of her sugar dispensers. Scattered napkins ringed the floor in front of the coffee station. Gray sneaker tread footprints stomped across their white perfection. Swirls and jabs of spray paint blackened her pale-blue walls and snaked across one of her canary-yellow booth seats, the design as chaotic as her childhood. Trick of memory, in her smoke-free bread- and pastry-redolent café, her father's stale cigarette smoke narrowed her breathing passages. The corners of her eyes stung.

Who would do this to her? Why? What had she done wrong?

Katherine's hand shook the door. The jingle bell dinged, like the wail of a burglar alarm. She pried her fingers from the door handle and wrestled the key from the lock.

For twenty-five years, she'd awoken the citizens of Hidden Harbor with their first cups of freshly brewed coffee. She'd nourished them with daily breads. She'd sweetened their birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and graduations with made-to-order cakes. Golden yellow or French vanilla? German chocolate or devil's food? Their preferences she knew by heart. Their life events marked her calendar. Their voices she recognized on the phone. Everything in her adult life, good and bad, had started at this bakery. Everything she'd loved and lost. Everything she still hoped to recover.

What if she'd come in early again, determined to wow Katherine with a new recipe? What if Celeste had interrupted the vandal? What if the intruder had found her first? Katherine tried taking a breath, but the inhalation caught in her throat. And an off-beat pulse hammered from within her gut.

“Celeste!” Katherine's voice echoed in her ears half a second before rational thought returned. Dear, sweet, infuriating Celeste had left her employ weeks ago, gone to culinary school in New York to rid herself of Hidden Harbor, Lamontagne's, and Katherine.

Thank God Celeste wasn't here to witness this disaster. Then why did Katherine wish she were?

Exactly what you told yourself when you were clearly panicking.

Katherine chewed the inside of her cheek. Her ragged breath sounded in her ears. She tiptoed through the debris. Glass crunched beneath her clogs and ground into the treads. Balled-up napkins covered the coffee station counter, as though a child had pitched a cookie tantrum. Strawberry goo smeared across her checkout counter. A handful of PB&J cookies lay in a crumpled heap, sans the jelly. The trays of leftover black-and-white, M&M, and sugar cookies were empty.

She didn't give a damn about the pastries.

The register sat open and empty, exactly as she'd left it at closing time. Every night, she counted out $150 for her register bag. Profits too late for a bank run went into a larger zipped pouch. She secured both bags in the back in her combination safe.

She didn't give a damn about the money.

In the kitchen, Katherine hit the light switch. The overhead fluorescents flickered to life, illuminating her clean worktables, her shining stainless steel sinks. Katherine nodded at her ancient Blodgett oven, the kitchen's workhorse. While waiting for her bread dough to rise, she could bake forty-eight pies in the faithful machine, a dozen per rack. Oven trouble meant bakery trouble.

At the moment, Katherine didn't give a damn about the Blodgett.

Katherine tiptoed across her clean floor and into her stockroom. Proof boxes. Rolling ladder and wheeled bins of flour, oats, nuts, and dried fruit. The top shelf displayed a row of mason jars filled with specialty flours. The chest freezer hummed against the left-hand wall. On the right, a paisley skirt hung beneath a narrow marble work counter.

Katherine dropped to her knees and lifted the skirt.

The combination safe was locked. Crazy, irrational, but she had to know for sure. Her palms pulsed with perspiration, and her fingers slid on the wheel. She spun the lock to the right, missed the first number, took a steadying breath, and began anew. Three tries later, the dead bolts gave and she swung the door on its hinges. She pushed aside the register bag, heavy with change. Her earnings pouch? Okay, she cared a little. She checked the bills against the tally sheet. All there. The stack of singles she kept separate from the two bags would've done little to tip a scale, but they weighed heavy on her heart.

At the far end of the safe, a plain white dishcloth secreted her prized possessions. She held the cloth to her nose, inhaled. Her fingers twitched, her cheeks heated, her heart hurt. Time hadn't dulled the power of memory.

“I'm sorry,” she said, the same apology she'd offered her ex-husband when she'd failed to provide him with a good-enough reason for wanting a divorce. The empty words that failed to salve Celeste's rage. The brokenhearted send-off for the one person incapable of questioning Katherine's motives.

She unfolded the dishcloth and ran her fingers across the hospital bracelets she kept as reminders, touchstones of all she'd lost.

 

Not for the first time, Celeste Barnes's mind-body connection failed, a betrayal she took personally.

Celeste sneaked back to her own dorm, washed up in the bathroom, peeled off last night's jeans, and changed into her chef whites. She race-walked across the New York campus of Culinary America, hoping against hope that movement and the nip of autumn air would revive her fogged-in memory. Tuesday's first class, Fillings and Icing, didn't start for another half hour, but Matt had headed out from his dorm room while she was still in his bed, and she was determined to chase him down. She didn't want to make a big deal about last night. But they needed to talk.

High-noon glare highlighted the maple and oak leaves' past peak colors. Last week's gold had turned to brown mustard. Tangerine-orange had, seemingly overnight, darkened to rust. Sun slanted off the redbrick buildings and jabbed a finger into the headache pulsing behind her left brow bone. When she'd first arrived on campus two months ago, she'd worried she'd stand out, starting a degree at twenty-two instead of eighteen. But in the world of baking and pastry arts, she needn't have worried about her age.

Some students had come here straight from high school. Others, like her and Matt, had taken a more circuitous path to pursue their life's dream. She'd survived six years as an assistant baker at Lamontagne's. Six years when she'd worked her ass off to try to please she who could not be pleased. Celeste was better off without her. Culinary America was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

Celeste should really call Katherine to tell her so.

Matt had come from a background in food styling, creating and photographing treats that delighted the eye but not the palate. Want to make a heavy cake into a lightweight? Create a false bottom. He taught Celeste that the secret to making no-melt ice cream was scooping a well-crafted mixture of frosting and powdered sugar. Not ice cream at all but a clever, convincing imposter. According to Matt, food photography was all about lighting, framing, and exposure.

They both fought to prove their worth. Celeste because she'd never gone to college, never ventured from her tiny hometown, the job she'd worked since high school. Matt was an even easier student target. You had to try that much harder to prove yourself real when your expertise came from faking it.

They commiserated about the other students. Their petty rivalries. Their overblown egos. Their backstabbing backroom wagers. A sidelong glance in Matt's direction or a hand signal under the table conveyed their wordless language. Matt was like a brother to her. The white cotton of her pants swished between her legs, roughing her thighs, and, shit, she was sore.

What the hell had happened?

A chill ran up Celeste's sleeves, the cotton of her chef whites lousy defense against the changing winds. She hunched her shoulders, blew out a breath, and considered taking a nap on a tree-side wrought-iron bench. She really needed a shower.

Less than an hour ago, she'd awoken in Matt's shade-darkened dorm room, the ghost of a forgotten dream slipping from her consciousness as soon as she'd opened her eyes. Matt was sitting in the chair by the window, as though waiting for her to wake up. His forearms leaned on his jostling thighs, and he waved a pencil before him, keeping time to a silent beat. Two hours before their first class, his shoulder-length brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he was a vision in chef whites.

She was completely naked.

“What happened?” she'd asked him, hastily covering herself with his thin sheet, as though she were an actress in a romantic comedy, as though she hadn't known the meaning behind the pinched ache between her legs, the strain of an inner thigh stretch. The musty mushroom smell coming from his bedside trash can.

“You're a lightweight, Celeste,” Matt had said, regret narrowing his features. “And I'm not much better.”

No, she wasn't.

She hadn't been that out of it, had she? She hadn't had that much to drink. She hadn't intended to boink Matt. Her good buddy. Her platonic friend. She'd never felt any attraction toward him, no overblown stirring of the nether regions when she'd caught his wrist to halt him from overmixing a batter, no do-me-now lust when he'd lean close to show her how to frame a stylized puff pastry within her camera's lens. But it had been a long time since she'd had sex. And even though Matt had never inspired her specific lust, she'd admit to a general persistent stirring. Even though her memory refused to surface, she understood the gist of the deed, if none of the details.

Might as well yank up her big-girl panties.

Celeste hoisted her backpack on her shoulder, ducked into the side door of Barnstead Hall, and clomped up the metal stairs leading to the shiny, bright practice kitchen. The front entrance brought you past an ornate reception area with glass and mirrors, and the largest of several demonstration kitchens. The place where they entertained famous chefs, bowed down before their superior white pant legs. But she preferred the older side of the building, the winding hallways, a smaller building within a mammoth structure. You could take the girl out of the small town—

The foreign tone of Matt's voice halted her in the shadowed hallway, seconds before the words hit her. “
Oh, yeah.
She needed it bad, and I was glad to give it to her.”

Male laugher carried into the hallway. A deep and guttural whoop echoed off the top-of-the-line stainless steel appliances. A spoon banged against a stainless steel bowl. Celeste's eyes blinked with every hollow clang. Her hairline prickled with perspiration.

“Details, brother. We need details.” Drake's voice now. Last night's party host was the Neanderthal who'd asked her out on the first day of class by telling her she needed to get laid. The joker she and
her
brother Matt had dissed in private, tolerated in class.

The Matt she knew had two sisters he adored. He respected women in general and Celeste in specific. The Matt—

“Nice body,” Matt said.

“Tell us something we don't know,” Drake said, his voice taking on an angry edge.

“Don't you worry. I'll give you proof,” Matt said.

Celeste shook her head. Her hand shook the strap of her pack. The cotton of her chef whites clung to her underarms. She flattened herself against the wall, willed herself to disappear. Hoped against hope she'd somehow misunderstood what she'd heard. The Matt she knew—

“She's got the sweetest birthmark, right about there,” Matt said, referring to a heart-shaped mole on a part of Celeste's body she wouldn't have been able to examine unless she'd been standing naked in a house of mirrors and double-jointed.