Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,67

not yours,” Emma, turning, shouted back. “I’m my own. I lost Dad, too. That hurt me. That was my loss, too. And I’m not your possession to sit around making you feel better. I’m my own person. With my own...pain. And I don’t have to sit in this house every night so that you still have something to take care of, because you don’t know how to go out and have a life of your own.”

She went up the stairs, shaking, feeling sick to her stomach that she’d said those things to her mother. But part of her had meant them. Maybe even most of her.

She sat down at her computer, her heart thundering in her ears. And then she saw the pink folder that was sitting on top of her desk, with her acceptance letters inside. She opened it, and she found the one from Boston.

She hadn’t confirmed with OSU. She hadn’t confirmed anywhere.

Boston.

She was going to Boston.

She wasn’t going to let anything stop her.

17

My new husband commands light that guides ships on the sea, and yet we cannot seem to find each other.

—FROM THE DIARY OF JENNY HANSEN, APRIL 8, 1900

RACHEL

Rachel was surprised when she didn’t cry. She was...angry. Absolutely enraged at her seventeen-year-old. Which seemed...silly.

Suddenly she remembered when Emma was two years old, and had torn up a beautiful, precious book that had been given to her by Jacob’s mother, one that had been hers when she was a girl. She remembered yelling, helplessly. At a tiny child who didn’t understand what she had done wrong and couldn’t fix her transgression even if she had.

And she remembered sitting in the absurdity of that. The absolute uselessness of her own anger, and the potential destructiveness of it.

Then, she had taken the pieces of the torn book and gone to her room, closing the door behind her and praying quietly that God or Emma would forgive her for losing her temper.

She felt that silly now.

Getting angry at this almost adult whom she still felt responsible for. Who had wounded her in the perfect and most precise spot.

Had managed to hone her words into a needle and stab them directly into every one of Rachel’s worst fears.

That she didn’t know how to live. That she didn’t know who she was apart from being Jacob’s wife and Emma’s mother.

“Well,” Rachel said to the empty room, “that’s because it’s all I’ve been.”

There. How was that for anger? Useless, stupid anger. Her whole life had been them, and now somehow she was supposed to just let go? She had poured herself into them, into their needs, and she did it because she loved them, but to have it turned around on her and...

Fine.

She would do something else. She would be something else.

She picked up her phone, ignoring that it was eleven o’clock at night, and called the number that Mark had given her. “Hello?”

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Rachel said.

“Rachel?”

“Yeah,” Rachel said.

“No. You didn’t wake me.” He was a nice man, which she should care about.

“Good. I... I’d love to go out. I would totally love to go out with you.” The words tasted weird. “As friends,” she added in a rush. “If you’re interested in that. Friends.”

“Uh...yes.”

“Maybe in a couple of weeks? When things calm down on the weekends here at the inn. We are doing this new dinner thing, and until we get it down, I don’t think I should be gone. But after that.”

“Sure,” he said. “Whatever works.”

“That would work. So...let’s say May 15.”

Two days after Emma’s birthday.

And after the surprise party that she was going to throw the ungrateful little brat.

Maybe she shouldn’t throw Emma a surprise party. Maybe she should make herself a cake in honor of the day that she had destroyed her body only to have it never snap back to its original state ever again, and then had taken abuse for her love in the eighteen years since.

Maybe she should commemorate that.

“Yeah. Works for me. I’d clear my schedule if it didn’t.”

“Okay. Looking forward to it.” She hung up, possibly faster than he was ready for her to hang up.

And then she dropped her phone onto the sofa and covered her mouth with her hand.

She was going on a date with a man who wasn’t Jacob. As a friend, but even so. Her daughter hated her. She was leaving. To go to college. And she was right.

She was very nearly an adult, and she wasn’t going to live here, where Rachel could keep track