LITMIR.BIZ

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her face. “I’m begging you. I love you. You say you love me. Love me more than them, this once.”

      “I do love you more than anyone. I just can’t walk away from the war zone at home.”

      “It’s not your home anymore.”

      “But I’m the one the others come to when they can’t stay in that house with him.”

      “You’re supposed to be my place.”

      “Understand, Emma.” He pressed his palms to either side of her head, his fingers tangling painfully in her hair. “I want to kill him for what he did to you, for what he’s done to all of us, but I have to find a way to help my family survive.”

      “I’m leaving Bliss, Noah.”

      “Stay. We can live it down.”

      “If you don’t come with me, nothing will ever be right for us. Our plans will die. We’ll never be married. We won’t have children who know they’re loved. I can’t wait any longer for you to finally choose me.”

      “Emma, come on. You’re not the only person who needs me. Give me a chance.”

      “We don’t have a chance if we stay here. I’m getting out, with or without you, because if I don’t, I’ll be broken.”

CHAPTER ONE

      Four Years Later

      “JUST CHECK ON him.” Suzannah Gage followed Noah from the back of her SUV as he carried a sack of goat feed into the garden shed. “Owen’s failed at rehab twice already. If he’s drinking again, he could fall off Louisa Candler’s termite-ridden roof.”

      “It’s Emma’s roof now, Mom, and that’s your point. You think if you can send me over there, I’ll forget she left me and beg her to start over.”

      “If I’d been strong enough to throw your father down our stairs, she never would have left.”

      Noah shoved the feed into a shelf tall enough to keep it out of the goats’ reach. “She didn’t push him, Mom, and you shouldn’t joke about it. Most of the people in town think she ran away out of guilt.”

      “She did me a favor,” Suzannah said. He glared at her, and she waved her hands as if trying to erase her words in midair. “I mean, watching her life fall apart made me realize I needed to fix my own. I do feel responsible for your breakup, and I wouldn’t mind helping you forgive each other.”

      Noah grabbed the last bag of goat feed. “You live in a dream. Emma’s been traveling the world without a word to me, and you think we can get over our split with a little chat on her collapsing porch?”

      “Don’t you want her back?”

      He stood there, leaves blowing around his head, hardly feeling the weight of the bag in his hands. “No.” He’d tried to stop managing his family’s emergencies, and he had a full life, running his medical practice in town. He’d even begun to organize a committee to open a clinic that would provide more extensive care than he could in a one-man office. “I have my life. I want to be here. Emma made her life elsewhere. She never believed in me anyway.”

      “Never believed in you?”

      “Forget it.” He put the last bag of feed on the shelf and ushered his mother back into the crisp sunlight. “I’ll go see Owen, but don’t dream up any more ideas about Emma and me. Deal?”

      “Deal.” She pulled the hatch down on her vehicle. “For now, anyway. You’ll go while he’s working? Not to see Emma, honest, son, but to make sure your brother’s sober when he’s working.”

      “All right, Mom, but Owen is old enough to take care of himself, and I’ve had it with being my family’s keeper.”

      “I know.” Her face wrinkled with worry. “Owen thinks I have no right to worry about him because I spent so many years letting your father treat us badly.”

      Noah glanced from her to the inn she’d created out of their old farmhouse. Pale yellow, surrounded with white porches and landscaping that was his mother’s pride and joy, it bore little resemblance to the tumbledown wreck of a family home it had been.

      “This place is like you,” he said. “Bright and shiny and new.”

      “And it’ll last, as long as I don’t let a man like your father into my life.”

      So she was capable of understanding his position. He wouldn’t go back to a woman who’d made him feel like he was never enough. He’d been torn between his family’s real need and Emma’s emotional insecurity about their relationship. He’d loved her, but never enough to suit her hunger.

      Besides, everyone knew she was only staying long enough to repair termite damage to her grandmother’s house.

      Bliss had never made Emma Candler happy either.

      * * *

      THE SCENT OF sawdust and new wood treated to discourage termites filled the house. Emma leaned her forehead into the screen on one of the wide, open windows, to watch her contractor, Owen Gage, on the lawn sawing lengths of wood to repair her wraparound porch. Down below, in town, the courthouse bell tower spiked above wispy clouds.

      The clock bonged out three echoing chimes, and Emma turned back to her work. The house her grandmother left her had been empty for thirteen months. Dust that would have upset Nan covered everything. Emma had spent her first two weeks back home digging into the grime and neglect, eradicating loneliness that made her ache for Nan’s comforting, sensible company.

      With every dish and each neatly folded linen, slightly musty from disuse, she heard her grandmother whisper, “Come home. Take your place. Grow up, girl.”

      And every time she felt tempted, she remembered that Bliss had always felt like a suit of clothes that didn’t fit. She had no place here, and she’d finally grown enough to know her life was elsewhere.

      Besides, Noah lived here. Each time she left the house, she risked running into him. She didn’t want to renew their unhappy relationship, but she still wondered why she’d never been enough for him. Why he’d never chosen her first.

      It couldn’t matter anymore. She wouldn’t allow it. When a woman couldn’t find answers to such a simple question, her only peace would come from burying the question forever.

      She carried the last tray of china cups from one of the cherry cabinets to the kitchen island. She surveyed stacks of Limoges Haviland China, and the jewel tones of Nan’s everyday Fiestaware.

      Which stack to wash first? The last time she’d emptied the kitchen cupboards to clean the shelves, she’d been eight years old, and she’d stood on a red stepstool to pass crockery and china to Nan. The memory filled her with longing so keen she closed her eyes and felt the metal stool’s steps cutting into her bare feet.

      Lift your face and look to the sky to keep from crying.

      That was what Nan had always said.

      Emma looked up at the plaster ceiling. An iron chandelier hung from a rose medallion in the center. Both were blurred by her tears. She hadn’t yet come to terms with the death of the one person who’d made her believe unconditional love existed.

      She could almost see Louisa Dane, in a pale green housedress, her hair in tight, black curls, her movements swift and economical.

      “Careful,” she’d said that long-ago afternoon when thunder had rumbled on the mountain, and wind had blown gusts of raindrops through the open windows. “I’ll be leaving these dishes to you, and you’ll pass them on to your daughter. You don’t know it now, but one day you’ll have some chicken or ham, a sweet potato or some coleslaw from these plates, and you’ll remember helping me with my spring cleaning.”

      “But will I be glad?”

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