Sweet Laurel Falls (4 page)

“I guess I’d better head out to find a hotel. Are you sure
you’re okay now?” He couldn’t see any evidence of the tears from earlier, but a
guy never could tell.

“Yeah. I’m fine. I’m just going to throw in a load of laundry
and check my Facebook, then go to bed.”

“Okay, then. I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Okay. Good night.”

He turned to head toward the door and had almost reached it
when her voice stopped him.

“Wait!”

He paused, then was completely disconcerted when she reached up
and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m really glad we found each other, Jack.”

On the way here, they had already had the awkward conversation
about what she should call him. She didn’t feel right calling him Dad at this
point in their relationship, so he had suggested Jack.

“I am too,” he said gruffly.

He meant the words, he thought, as he walked out into the snowy
evening lit by stars and the Christmas lights of Maura’s neighbors. Despite
everything, the realization that Sage was his daughter astonished and humbled
him. And yes, delighted him—even though it meant returning to Hope’s Crossing
after all these years and facing the past he thought he had left far behind.

CHAPTER THREE

F
OR
A
LONG
TIME
AFTER
S
AGE
walked out with Jack, Maura sat in her chair with her hands folded together on
her desk, staring into space.

Jackson Lange was here in Hope’s Crossing.

She’d never thought she would have occasion to use those
particular words together in the same sentence. Stupid and shortsighted of her,
she supposed. This was his hometown, and despite his avowed hatred of the place,
she should have expected that someday he would eventually be drawn back.

One would assume some latent affection for the town where he
had lived his first eighteen years must have seeped into his bones. It was only
natural. Salmon spent their last breaths returning to their birthplace. Why
should she simply have assumed Jackson wouldn’t want to come back at least once
in twenty years?

In her own defense, she had always assumed his hatred for his
father would also serve to keep him away.

In the early years after Sage was born, she used to come up
with all these crazy, complicated scenarios in her head for what might happen if
he
did
return. She had worked it all out—what she
would say to him, how he would respond, the immense self-satisfaction she fully
expected to find from throwing back in his face that he had left her yet she had
managed to move on and survive.

In her perfect imagination, he would come back on the
proverbial hands and knees, telling her what a fool he had been, begging her to
forgive him, promising he would never be parted from her again.

Around the time she’d met Christian, she had been more than
ready to put those fantasies away as both impossible and undesirable. She had
put all her resources into thrusting Jack firmly into her past, and focusing
instead on her new relationship and the love she told herself she felt for
Chris.

She could never completely assign him to the past, of course,
not when her beautiful, smart, clever child bore half his DNA. Sage was always a
reminder of Jack. She would turn her head a certain angle, and Maura would
remember Jack looking at her the same way. Sage would come up with a
particularly persuasive argument for something, twist logic and sense in a way
that never would have occurred to Maura, and she would remember how brilliantly
Jack could do the same.

In all those early fantasies and all the years to come later,
it had never once occurred to her that someday Sage might find him on her own
and bring him back to the town he couldn’t wait to leave.

Her sigh sounded pathetic in her small office, and she shook
her head. Nothing she could do about this now. Against all odds, he and Sage
had
found each other, and now she would have to
deal with the consequences of him in their lives. A smart woman would find a way
to make the best of it—but right now she didn’t, for the life of her, know how
she was supposed to do that.

“Having a rough night?”

She turned at the voice and found her mother in the doorway,
still lovely at sixty with her ageless skin and Maura’s own auburn hair, the
color now carefully maintained at To Dye For. Emotions crowded her chest at the
sight of the sympathy in her mother’s green eyes behind her little glasses, and
she suddenly wanted to rest her head on Mary Ella’s shoulder, as Sage had done
with
her
earlier, and weep and weep.

Her mother and her sisters were her best friends, and she
didn’t think she would have survived the past eight months without them. Or what
she would have done twenty years ago, when she was seventeen and terrified and
pregnant in a small town that could still be closed-minded and mean about those
sorts of things.

She fought back the tears and mustered a smile. “Rough night?
Yeah. You could say that.”

“Oh, honey. Why did you keep this to yourself all these
years?”

“I didn’t think it mattered. He was gone and insisted he wasn’t
ever coming back. Why did I need to flit around town badmouthing him for
knocking me up and then taking off?”

Mary Ella stepped forward and pulled her into a hug, and those
blasted tears threatened again. “I have to admit, I suspected. I knew you had
become friendly with him. People told me about seeing you together. I also
suspected you had a little crush on him. I just hadn’t realized things
had…progressed. I don’t know how I missed it now. Sage looks a little like him,
doesn’t she?”

“Do you think so?”

“The mouth and her chin.”

“She might look a little like him, but she’s very much her own
person.”

“Absolutely.” Her mother leaned back a little and smoothed a
stray lock of hair away from Maura’s forehead. “Everyone will understand if you
need to leave. Go home to Sage. We can carry on without you.”

She was tremendously tempted to do just that—the going home
part, anyway. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to sneak into her house,
crawl into her bed and pull the Storm at Sea quilt—the one she and her sisters
had made after her divorce—over her head and not crawl out again until the
holidays were over.

Nothing new there, she supposed. She couldn’t remember a moment
in the past eight months when she
hadn’t
wanted to
climb into bed and block out the world. But she was a McKnight, and the women in
her family soldiered on, no matter what.

She had managed to keep herself going all these months. She
could make it through this too.

“I’m not about to let Jackson Lange ruin the book club
Christmas party for me.” She rose on legs that felt a little unsteady. Low blood
sugar, she told herself. All she needed was a truffle or something. “Let’s go
party. I think this evening calls for some of Alex’s famous spiked cider. I hope
she brought some.”

“If I know your baby sister, I have no doubts of that.” Mary
Ella slipped an arm through hers and walked by her side through the bookstore
and back to the gathering.

She might have predicted the reactions of her friends and
family exactly. Angie, her oldest sister and the second mother to the six
McKnight siblings, looked at her with deep compassion and concern. Alex, younger
than her by only a few years, gave her a look that clearly conveyed solidarity
against all males of the species. Claire—Alex’s best friend, who had always
seemed like part of the family and had made it official only a few weeks ago by
marrying Maura’s younger brother—acted typically solicitous, handing her a mug
of something, fragrant steam curling into the air.

It was tea, not Alex’s cider, a Ceylon black with cinnamon,
clove and orange peels, but Maura figured she could build to the cider.

They were just getting ready to start the annual gift-exchange
game, she realized, where everybody picked a wrapped gift and passed it either
left or right while someone—in this case, Janie Hamilton—said certain words when
she read a passage from a holiday book.

“We saved a spot for you,” Claire told her. “Pass left when you
hear the word
the
and right when you hear
and
. What are we reading, Janie?”

Janie held up a familiar Dr. Seuss book. “Sorry. My kids have
all the Christmas books in their rooms, which are a total mess until I shovel
them out. All I could find was
How the Grinch Stole
Christmas.
”

“My fave,” Alex said, stretching her feet out on a cushioned
ottoman.

Maura took the empty seat and spent the next few minutes giving
an Oscar-worthy performance of someone enjoying herself as, with much laughter,
they passed the gifts back and forth, until Janie finished with the Grinch
carving the roast beast and everybody ended up with their final gift.

To her delight, her prize was Charlotte Caine’s gift, a
beautifully presented bag of almond brickle from Charlotte’s store down the
street, Sugar Rush.

“Thanks, Charley. Just what I needed!” She smiled, thinking how
pretty the other woman looked tonight in her white silk blouse and ruby
earrings, despite the extra pounds she carried.

The distraction of opening presents gave her a much-needed
chance to gather her composure, so she was almost ready when Ruth finally
brought up what she knew was on everyone’s mind.

“So it’s true,” she said in her abrupt way. “Harry Lange’s son
is Sage’s father.”

She would like to deny it, but what would be the point?
Everybody knew now, and she couldn’t stopper that particular bottle. Trust Ruth
not to shy away from the topic everybody else had been avoiding.

“Yes,” she said, with as much calm as she could muster.

“I always knew that boy was a troublemaker,” Ruth said
promptly.

“He wasn’t. Not really.” Jack might have been on fire with
grief for his mother and with anger and bitterness toward his father, but it had
consumed him quietly. To everyone else, he had been hardworking and reliable. An
excellent student, a diligent employee at his summer construction job.

“A decent man stays around to take care of his
responsibilities,” Ruth said stubbornly.

“He didn’t know he had responsibilities here, Ruth,” she said,
wondering if her voice sounded as tired to everyone else as it did to her. “I
never told him I was pregnant.”

“Well, that was a pretty stupid thing to do, wasn’t it?”

A bubble of laughter with a slight hysterical edge welled up
inside her. “Yes. Yes, it was. Very stupid,” she answered.

“What was stupid?” Angie asked, on Ruth’s other side.

“Not telling the Lange boy she was pregnant so he could step up
and do the right thing.” Ruth said.

Like marry her? Oh, that would have been a complete nightmare.
She had believed it then, and nothing had changed her mind in the intervening
years. She had loved Jackson Lange with a desperate passion, and he obviously
hadn’t loved her back nearly as intensely. If he had, he never would have
left.

Only after he took off did she realize the twisted way she had
subconsciously reenacted her own childhood in their relationship. Her father had
walked away from their family in order to pursue his own professional and
academic dreams. By falling hard for Jack just months later—an angry young man
who already had one foot through the crack in the door on his way out of Hope’s
Crossing—hadn’t she perhaps been trying to replicate and repair her family life
by trying to keep him with her, as she couldn’t keep her father?

Her love hadn’t been enough to keep Jack in Hope’s Crossing any
more than she had been able to keep her father from walking away from their
family.

“Look, you’re all my dearest friends,” she said now, realizing
everyone’s eyes were on her, though they made a pretense of carrying on
conversation. She supposed it was better to confront the weird turn her life had
just taken head-on rather than dance around it. “I don’t want to put a damper on
the party, but I know everyone is wondering. You’re all just too kind to
pry.”

Except Ruth, anyway, but she didn’t need to point out the
obvious to anyone there.

“I might as well get this out in the open, then we can go back
to enjoying the rest of the party. Jack and I dated in high school. We kept it
secret because…well, because of a lot of things going on in our respective
families. The timing didn’t seem right.”

Her mother’s lips tightened, and Angie reached out and rubbed a
hand on Mary Ella’s arm. She wanted to assure her mother that James McKnight’s
defection of his family and the emotional fallout from that hadn’t been the only
reason for their secrecy.

After years of mental illness, Jack’s mother had committed
suicide herself just a few months earlier. Sometimes Maura wondered if Jack had
only turned to her out of a desperate effort to push away the pain.

“After Jack left town, I discovered I was pregnant. For a lot
of reasons that seemed very good at the time, I decided not to tell him I was
pregnant and to raise Sage by myself.” She lifted her chin. “Personally, I don’t
think she’s suffered for my decisions. She’s bright and beautiful and
well-adjusted. Chris has been a great stepfather to her, and she loves him. If
our marriage had lasted, I’m sure he would have adopted her.”

Okay, she was spilling way too much here. She caught herself
and wanted to change the subject, but on the other hand, these were her dearest
friends. She would rather be open with them from the outset about Jack and Sage,
rather than have them all shake their heads and worry about her behind her back.
Hadn’t she endured enough of that since Layla’s death?

“How did they find each other?” Alex asked.

“As you all must know, Jack is an architect. Apparently Sage
attended a lecture he gave a few days ago on campus. She knew he was from Hope’s
Crossing and they struck up a conversation. In the course of the conversation,
they both connected the dots. And here we are.”

Silence descended on the group as everyone mulled the
information. Claire was the first to break it. “How are you doing with all
this?”

“Peachy. Why wouldn’t I be? It’s all very civil.” Except for
that moment when she had wanted to smack him and tell him how he had shattered
her heart. “It will be interesting to see what happens. My hope is that Jack and
Sage can develop a friendship. They have a shared interest in architecture,
after all. Perhaps Jack can, I don’t know, mentor her. Help her with her
studies, maybe.”

“That would be great,” Angie said. “Does that mean you think
he’s sticking around Hope’s Crossing?”

Oh, she hoped not. The very idea made her stomach cramp. “I
doubt it. Jack isn’t a big fan of our little neck of the woods. Not to mention
that he also hates his father.”

“Not a big shocker there,” Mary Ella muttered. She had a
long-standing feud with Harry Lange, the wealthiest man in town, who seemed to
think he owned everyone and everything in town—not just the ski resort he had
developed, but everybody in Hope’s Crossing who owed a living to the tourists he
had brought in to enjoy it.