Love Finds You in Hershey, Pennsylvania (33 page)

“Have you ever noticed them around before?”

Sadie shifted from one foot to the other, embarrassed to admit how little she’d been paying attention to her surroundings these days. And she hadn’t even devoted any decent amount of attention to the restaurant in weeks. If not for her skilled and dedicated staff, who knew where she might be at this moment, after all her carelessness?

“No,” she confessed, “but that’s not really saying much. I don’t always notice things like I should, in case you hadn’t realized.”

Belva didn’t comment on this remark but continued to assess the two men.

“Okay, you’re starting to freak me out, Belva. What’s going on?”

Finally, the other woman turned and focused her attention on Sadie. “You don’t remember seeing them before, sugar?” she questioned carefully. “Because I can promise you that as long as I’ve been here, they’ve been around.”

Sadie straightened a few mugs behind the counter, feeling rather uncomfortable. “What do you mean—around?”

Belva watched her carefully. “Around your house, Sadie. Here at the restaurant. They followed us to church this past Sunday, although I didn’t see them inside,” she admitted. “I’ve even seen them around your neighborhood.”

Sadie shrugged, relieved. For a moment she had feared they were restaurant critics and had gotten wind of Jimmy’s mishap. “They’re probably just tourists. Or maybe they just moved here. We’ve had all sorts of newcomers in the past few years,” she remarked, thinking of Dmitri. “I wouldn’t worry about it—I’ve seen all sorts of types come through this town.”

Belva shook her head. “No, Sadie, that’s not what I mean. I’ve seen them parked on your street. Watching your house.”

Sadie felt a ripple of unease. Her house? Where she and Kylie lived?

“Maybe they’re in real estate.”

Belva’s stare drilled into her. “They were at that table when I sat down here, Sadie, and they haven’t touched a menu yet. Willow said they’ve been coming in quite a bit recently.”

Sadie shrugged again. It was no different than Dmitri Velichko. “They’re probably just trying to see how a restaurant is run.”

Belva clearly didn’t think so. “By coming to your house? By following you to work?”

She could not deal with this now. On top of everything else, she was being stalked by—she took a glance at the two men in the booth— two burly guys wearing dark sunglasses and Italian suits?

She bit her lip. Okay, so maybe that
was
a little odd…. Or maybe Belva’s imagination was running away with her.

“You’re not going senile on me here, are you, Mama Belva?”

Belva’s expression could have withered a magnolia. “I can assure you, sugar, my mental faculties are as alert as ever.”

Sadie couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease. It was such a rare thing to actually ruffle Belva’s feathers. “Of course they are,” she soothed with an impish smile.

Belva’s lips thinned to a straight line. She did not appear amused. Before she could muster a perfectly scornful Southern retort, Sadie noted Jasper’s return from the corner of her eyes.

Unable to bear the thought of facing him once more, especially after knowing that he was letting Mac move into his house while he flew off to Colorado, she muttered something utterly nonsensical to her mother-in-law and disappeared into the back, momentarily forgetting the two men who watched sharply from their corner booth.

That night, Sadie dreamed of Ned. He was with her in the herb garden behind Suncatchers, a place he had never lived to see in real life. She was leading him by the hand, pulling up clumps of herbs as she went, for him to sniff and taste.

Parsley. Basil. Mint. Thyme.

The textures and aroma were startlingly real for a dream. They walked in the moonlight, its watery glow washing the plants with a silver cast. Ned followed behind her, his fingers warm in the palm of her hand. She felt rushed—as though the minutes were slipping through the cracks and she must show Ned everything before he had to leave again.

“This is my life,” she gestured around her. She remembered a verse from the Bible, from the Psalms:
“These things I remember as I pour out my soul.”

Ned was shaking his head at her, his eyes sad. They seemed to echo her deepest thoughts—
This is
not
your life.

She looked at him for a moment, still feeling an urgency as she sought to capture approval in his loving green eyes.

“I keep pushing,” she whispered to him. “I keep pushing to have it all until I can’t hold anything.”

Ned nodded in encouragement.

Family.
Her
family. Jasper. Kylie. Mac. They were her life. The thought was both warm and chilling at the same time. Such fragile threads that wove the tapestry of time. So fragile…

Her hand gripped Ned’s until she felt the blood drain from her fingers. She could not let him go. Not again.

She suddenly felt overcome with the weight of loss. Her mother. Her husband. What would Ned think of her now? What would he think of the mess she had made of her life?

“I think you’re too hard on yourself.”

She was startled by his words. She hadn’t expected him to speak. Deep in her conscious, she knew she was dreaming. But his voice sounded so startling real—so much like the voice she remembered— that her flesh tingled in response.

“There’s not enough time,” she desperately explained. “There’s never enough.”

“All life is fleeting,” he answered. “Isn’t that what the Bible says? Meaningless—a chasing after the wind.”

Her eyes pierced deeply into his as she asked, “Then what’s the point?”

“You know the point, Sadie,” he answered. “You’ve always known. And if you don’t…then it’s not something I can tell you.”

Sadie let go of his hand to rub her palms across her arms. She could not stop shivering. The garden was cold.

“Why grasp what you can’t hold onto?” she asked.

“Because what you hold in your heart is far greater than the things you hold in your hand.”

She could only look at him sadly, unable to understand what his sad eyes were trying to tell her. “That’s easy for you to say,” she accused.

He didn’t answer her this time. She turned away from him for a second, and from the corner of her eyes, she watched him begin to walk away. She turned back.

“Wait. Ned,
wait
. I want to understand!”

He kept walking, but she felt like she was the one pulling away. A cloud covered the moon, bathing the garden in shadows. She could no longer see Ned.

“Please,” she whispered to the darkness, “please help me to understand.”

“Stop holding on to what doesn’t last.” She couldn’t see Ned, but she could hear him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she faintly protested, but in her heart she did know. She grasped tightly to the very things she
knew
would fade with time—the restaurant, her career, her abilities… Why not love? Why not Jasper? Why not Mac?

“It’s too risky. I can’t love and lose again. I’m so tired of loving and losing.” She sighed with weariness and then called out to the blackened sky, “It’s
not
better to have loved and lost! It’s
not
!”

Suddenly the clouds shifted and Ned stood right in front of her. His presence was so unexpected that she gasped. He was just as she remembered him—his dark hair, his green eyes…and yet he wasn’t real. This moment wasn’t real.

“What are you afraid of, Sadie?” he asked her.

She could answer him now. “I’m afraid of what I can’t hold onto.”

She feared the time when her happiness passed. And pass it would. It always did—a lesson learned from her own loss.

Sadie swallowed.

“Why grasp what you can’t hold onto?” she asked again.

Ned shook his head, unable to give her answers she had yet to learn herself. She awoke with a struggle for breath, shivering without her covers, and the remnant of dried tears itching her face.

That was only the first of Sadie’s dreams. They continued night after night, in different scenarios and settings, but always with the same sense of urgency and the dissatisfaction of unanswered questions. The major difference was that other than that first night, Ned didn’t appear in her dreams again. He was replaced by Jasper, who spoke far less than Ned had and only looked at her out of somber blue eyes.

She began to miss Jasper dreadfully, even worse than she had before their conversation at Suncatchers. Since that time, she’d had no word from him. She supposed he was going through last-minute preparations for the move, but her pride forbade her from asking about him, picking up the phone, or swinging by his house. She didn’t trust what she might do if she saw him. And despite what her dreams might be telling her, she could not bring herself to consider asking him to stay. He clearly felt as though she had demanded enough of him. She would not ask this on top of everything else.

Belva’s visit continued, and Sadie was relieved—not only for the babysitting services, but because she couldn’t bear the thought of her and Kylie alone in the house without Jasper. He had become such an indelible fixture of their daily routine that living without him felt like leaving out an important part of the day—like forgetting to brush her teeth or eat dinner. Belva’s presence helped to mask these feelings, but on the one day she had been absent—gone to visit a friend two hours away—Sadie had been near to insanity with trying to fill all the gaps Jasper’s absence left.

She could only pray that once school started, new routines would be established and leave them to bury the past and move on with their lives. Kylie would be starting first grade, and Sadie was working out an arrangement to end her daily shifts sooner so she could be home by the time Kylie ended school.

As for Kylie, the possibility of first grade didn’t thrill her as it once had. She was a different child these days—still endearing, still loving, still Sadie’s little girl. But the spark had gone. Whatever Jasper had told her during their talk had calmed her rebellion, but it had ended her playfulness.

Sadie tried to make up for it, tried to devote more free time to Kylie’s interests, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. And Sadie soon realized that she wasn’t Kylie’s playmate. Jasper had been that, and she had lost him. Without intending to, Sadie had done the very thing to Kylie she had always accused Mac of doing to her—taking away the one man who should have been a constant in her life.

The thought ate away at her. And when Kylie returned to regular speech, no longer speaking of herself in the third person, Sadie thought nothing would ever be the same again. She had tried for such a long time to convince Kylie to refer to herself as “I” and “me,” but when she finally did, Sadie felt as though something absolutely precious had been lost forever.

She began to wish that she could rewind time, forget the Cocoa Cook-Off, and forestall Principal Roop’s conversation with her that day. But she knew it wouldn’t have changed anything.

People left. Happiness ended. She wasn’t sure she believed in anything else. Not anymore.

But she found herself wishing she could.

One night after Belva had been with them about two weeks, she and Sadie put Kylie to bed and retreated to the back porch, where they bundled up with throws from the living room against the unseason-ably cool evening air. The night was brilliant, clear and midnight blue with glittering stars pebbling the flawless backdrop. It was a sight to make one feel rich, no matter how few jewels one actually possessed.