Let It Be (Butler, Vermont #6) - Marie Force Page 0,60
Lucas makes furniture and other designs that are sold in the store. Everyone contributes to the business Elmer’s parents founded.”
“You had said it was a store… I had no idea it was so much more than that.”
“It’s a ten-million-dollar-a-year operation and growing thanks to the addition of a catalog earlier this year that’s exploded our revenue,” Hunter said.
“Hunter is the CFO for all our businesses,” Linc said proudly.
“You named your son Hunter.”
“I did. And my daughter Charlotte and my other sons Will and Max. I never forgot about any of you, Char, even if you forgot about me.”
She gasped. “We never forgot about you.”
“Where’ve you been all this time, Charlotte?” Molly asked, because Linc was too tongue-tied to do it. “You’ve known where to find Lincoln. What kept you away?”
“I thought… We were sure we wouldn’t be welcome.”
“You knew that wasn’t true,” Linc said.
“We should’ve stopped what happened that day,” Charlotte said. “We should’ve marched in there and told him if he was kicking you out of the family, we were going with you. But we didn’t do that. We let him do what he did, and after that…” She shrugged. “We wouldn’t want to see us, so we figured you didn’t either. Max and I always regretted that we didn’t do more that day.”
“But I wrote to you. All of you. For years. I told you I wanted to see you.”
Her expression flattened with shock. “You wrote to us? Here?”
He nodded. “Every month. For ten years.”
“I never… I didn’t get those letters. None of us did.” Her eyes filled with tears. “How could he do this to us?”
“We may never know that,” Linc said, “and frankly, it doesn’t matter now. What matters is we both know that the other always would’ve been welcome, and that’s all we need to know.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true, although I find it hard to believe it could be that simple.”
“It is that simple, Char. We’ve been denied each other’s presence for forty years. That’s long enough, isn’t it?”
“More than long enough.” With tears sliding down her cheeks, she hugged him as two other men joined them in the foyer.
Linc pulled back from his sister to greet his brothers, Will and Max, both of them sporting the same gray hair and blue eyes he had and wide smiles for their older brother.
“Is it really you?” Will asked.
“It’s me.” Linc hugged them both. “And I’m so happy to see you.”
“What’s with the baseball team you brought with you?” Will asked with a teasing grin.
“He has ten children,” Char said.
“That’s our Linc,” Max said. “Always the overachiever.”
“This is my family.” Linc went through the introductions once again. “I only brought half of the immediate family.”
His siblings’ laughter took Linc right back to a thousand memories of growing up with the three of them as well as their Hunter. “Does Father know I’m coming?”
Char shook her head. “We didn’t tell him in case you changed your mind at the last minute. None of us would’ve blamed you if you had.”
“It’s incredibly good of you to come,” Will said bluntly. “I’m not sure I would have.”
“Time has a way of dulling the edges of things that happened decades ago,” Linc said. “He asked me to come. I came.” He put his arm around Molly. “He doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. As you can see—and he will see—I’ve never once regretted the choice he forced me to make, even if I missed you all very much.”
“We never forgave him for what he did to you,” Max said fiercely. “It wasn’t the same between us and him. We refused to work for the company, and he ended up selling it about twelve years ago.”
Linc took an almost perverse satisfaction in hearing that his siblings had taken that stand, but it pained him that his father’s line in the sand had been for nothing. So many people hurt for no good reason.
“He wrote to us,” Char told their brothers. “Every month for ten years.”
Max’s mouth fell open before it snapped shut. “God damn him.”
“I would’ve liked to have gotten those letters,” Will said softly, his devastation apparent.
“Let’s put it in the past where it belongs,” Linc said. “He took us from each other for forty years. What happens next is up to us. And to start with, I want to know about you guys. Married? Kids? What’ve you done with yourselves?”
“Let’s go sit so we can talk for a minute,” Char said.
Chapter Seventeen
“Take these broken wings and learn to fly.”
—Paul