Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,86
Rachel said. “I mean it.”
“I think I’ve told you everything.”
“I want you to go to the school that you want to go to,” Rachel said.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I got asked on a date,” she said, not sure what had spurred that except that she was asking for honesty, so she supposed she better give it.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I don’t... I don’t know how I feel about it. Like I said, I don’t want to move on. I don’t want to replace Dad with anyone else... But...sometimes I think it would be nice to go to dinner.”
“Just dinner?”
“Just dinner,” she said.
“I don’t see why you can’t do that.”
“Really?”
“Mom, I don’t want to stop doing things because—because Dad died. I don’t know why you shouldn’t have a life. It’s not like you’re going to marry him.”
Rachel forced a laugh. “No! No. I’m not going to do that. I’m not... I don’t have feelings for him or anything.” She blinked back tears. “This wasn’t my dream. But, Emma, you always were. You always will be. And you realizing your dreams matters to me.”
“Your happiness matters to me, Mom.”
Happiness.
They could both have that. They both deserved it.
Rachel was determined.
She sank onto the bed and pulled Emma into her arms. Emma pulled her into a hug, and the two of them tipped sideways onto the mattress. Emma laughed, and her smile looked so much like Jacob’s it took her breath away.
Rachel couldn’t help but smile back.
Jacob was in her heart. In her daughter’s smile. In the young woman she was becoming. Strength and certainty—a gift he’d given her with his steady, loving parenting that had continued after his death. That most perfect gift.
He was in the very walls of the house. The sound of the ocean against the rocks. Because this life they’d built, and the sounds, sights and smells of it, was forever linked to him. To twenty years of love, laughter, struggle, pain, loss and joy.
Nothing could replace him.
And dinner date or not, no one ever would.
24
I’m in trouble. If Mom and Dad find out they will never speak to me again. And he’s gone. I don’t even have an address for him. I don’t feel eighteen right now. I feel all of eight years old, and I’m terrified.
—FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY SUSAN BRIGHT TO HER SISTER, SEPTEMBER 1961
WENDY
Wendy had seen John Hansen’s name appear on the books a few days earlier, but she’d been so lost in her own personal haze that she hadn’t been able to process it.
Anna still wasn’t speaking to her.
Rachel was frosty. Only Emma seemed to have taken it all in stride.
But when John appeared in the entryway of the inn on the day of check-in, she couldn’t ignore him. And she didn’t feel like she was in a daze at all.
“Hello,” she said, grabbing hold of her necklace chain, and then immediately releasing it.
She was acting like an insecure girl.
“Good to see you again,” he said, nodding once. His voice was pleasantly deep, and his manner would have been reassuring if she didn’t find him so...unnerving. He had the slow, steady demeanor of a rancher, and she wondered if she had the right read on him. And then she wondered why she cared.
He was the only guest in the house. Which was strange.
“It’s...the wine-and-cheese hour,” she said. “Of course, you’re the only one. And you had the historical tour already.”
“I’ll take a beer,” he said. “Is there a beer-and-pretzel hour if you’re the only guest?”
“Sure,” she said.
“And is there a chance that the innkeeper can join me? Since I’m the only guest?”
She didn’t see why not, and part of her just wanted to sink into the moment. To quit...guarding herself quite so closely. Because of what it’d gotten her? Sure, she had managed to keep her walls up all these years, and she had maintained a facade for the town.
She had never engaged in liaisons with guests, or anyone else for that matter. She had... She had shut down that part of herself a long time ago.
And just for a moment, she wanted to let it go.
She wanted to feel beautiful again.
She felt like a failure right now. As if everything she’d worked for had come to nothing. Because Anna was so hurt, and her hurt was linked so tightly to Wendy’s lie. And Wendy had to wonder—for all Rachel would never say it because her love for Jacob would prevent it—if Rachel was hurt in many ways because of Wendy, too.