Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,112

few days, and it was a blessed relief.

It was well into May, and it was finally starting to look like spring. It may have been late, but it was welcome all the same.

“Though, if you like, I can bring lemonade out onto the porch. It’s pretty out.”

“I’d like that,” Emma said. “Can I help you with anything?”

“No,” Wendy said. “I’ve got it.”

It was a funny thing, she mused as she went into the kitchen and collected lemonade in a cut-crystal pitcher, and a platter with shortbread cookies on it. Of course, Emma was offering to fetch things for her because she was older. But Wendy wanted to bring them to her, like she’d done when Emma was a girl.

But it was strange. How those roles began to shift. It had happened with her daughters a while ago. They tried to take care of her, while she tried to take care of them, and now even Emma was trying to take care of her.

It was just funny how people grew, and things changed. And no matter how much you might like to, you couldn’t change them back. You could only move forward and find the beauty in the brand-new shape of things.

She opened the door again, shut it quietly behind her and took a seat in the wooden chair next to Emma’s. There was a small round table between the two of them, and she set the tray with glasses, the pitcher and platter there. She let Emma pour lemonade for the two of them.

The roar of the ocean wasn’t quite as pronounced today, the water a bit more placid than it sometimes was. But that sound—that sound that had rolled right through her body every day for the past three decades—was there. A steady constant. One that she barely thought about. A presence all the same. Like the hand of God, or a sense of love. Something that she would miss profoundly if it was gone, but often didn’t think about.

“I have a question about...the dorms,” Emma said. “Have you had any luck chasing down any information about them?”

“No,” Wendy said. “The school won’t release names. I’ve posted on an online group for alumnae asking if anyone who was here during the time had letters or stories or memories to share beyond what we have, but I haven’t had any responses.”

“I’m curious about Lazy Susan. The one who carved on my ceiling. You know, where she was from. If she was far from home when she was here. On an adventure.” Emma took a breath. “Grandma... I’m not sure now. I’m not sure about going to Boston.”

The words surprised Wendy. Emma had been so certain. It had been a dream of hers for the last two years, and something that she had clung to, even after Jacob had died. She couldn’t understand why she was second-guessing herself now.

“We’ll be fine,” Wendy said. “We’ll be fine here. And we’ll be here waiting when you get back.”

“I know,” Emma said. “I mean, I know you’ll wait for me, and that you will be here. But... I don’t know. What if I leave, and I can’t come back. I’m worried about Luke. My boyfriend. And I feel bad about that, too. Because I should be more worried about Mom. But I’m just worried that he could fall in love with someone else. Because I don’t know if he loves me the way that I love him. And I...”

Wendy looked at her granddaughter’s face, so pale and drawn, and distressed. And Wendy didn’t need to know the whole story to understand that Emma was in deeper than Wendy would’ve hoped she’d be at her age, with so much left to do.

She also knew that...sometimes there was nothing for it.

She’d fallen in love at Emma’s age, and she made terrible mistakes with it. Rachel had fallen in love at that age and paid a terrible price.

Anna had fallen in love, and it had been wrong.

But whatever the outcome had been in the end, she knew that nothing could’ve stopped them from falling.

It was a road you had to walk on your own. A mistake you had to make, or a wonderful, difficult truth you had to take on, like in Rachel’s case.

Because her love for Jacob could never be called a mistake, and if they’d fallen in love any later, then they would have had even less than the lifetime cut short that they’d had.

She couldn’t tell Emma she wasn’t in love. She couldn’t tell