LITMIR.BIZ

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for the first time in her life about facing Gran.

      She’d have to tell her family about the baby soon. She glanced through the glass at the outdoor math class. She didn’t have to worry about being disowned, but no one would be pleased at her stupidity.

      Had Ian told his parents? She pushed the question out of her mind. The answer was no longer her business, and she couldn’t afford to think of him. She had to get her own life back on track.

      “Sophie, is that you?”

      Just hearing Gran’s voice made her happy. After turning the knob, she leaned around the door and smiled. Her heart swelled and her throat felt too tight to speak. She searched the shadowy room for the vigorous mainstay of her life. “Gran?”

      A white-haired woman with a desk as tidy as her pragmatic approach to life put her telephone back into its cradle and hurried through the slashes of sunlight across the thick carpet.

      With arms outstretched, Greta Calvert uttered a sound that resembled a sob. Sophie choked back tears of her own as she stepped into her grandmother’s hug. Gran would love her no matter how big a mess she’d made.

      “Honey, honey…” Greta Calvert sang and cried. Holding on to Gran’s deceptively frail body, Sophie let the tears fall for the first time since her wedding.

      Everything in the room told her she was home. Her father had built Gran’s desk more than twenty years ago. The pictures marching side by side on its glowing honey-colored surface, stacked in lines up and down the walls, slotted unsteadily in corners on the bookshelves, offered a history of Calvert family endeavors. Graduations and baptisms, weddings and rowdy conversation shared across crowded dinner tables. Sophie scanned them all, swimming in memories, hearing echoes of the stories her dad and aunts and uncles told.

      Gran kept every gift given to her in love, wildflowers, now dried, her resort guests had collected on their walks up the ridge, and paintings the Calvert grandchildren had done. She even stored pens and pencils in a clay mug Sophie had made in Girl Scouts.

      As Sophie composed her emotions, Gran leaned back. Surprisingly tall, she met Sophie eye-to-eye. Her affection eased Sophie’s second thoughts.

      Everything would be okay. She’d made a couple of dumbfounding mistakes, but Gran had heard stranger stories, and she possessed an unlimited capacity for love. Where Gran forgave, so would the rest of the Calverts.

      “Tell me your deep, dark secret, Sophie,” Gran said teasingly, as if she didn’t believe it could be anything serious.

      Just that quickly Sophie got scared. Gran had always known when she’d sneaked an extra cookie or waded in icy streams before winter left the mountains, but a baby put such trivial things as cookies and wet jeans in perspective.

      Best get to the point. “Are you still open to having me join you in practice here?”

      Happiness flashed in Gran’s eyes. Sophie pressed her fingers to her mouth as relief washed over her, but then Gran sobered with a wary question. “Why?”

      That wasn’t supposed to happen. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

      Gran urged Sophie onto the sofa and then settled beside her, smoothing a soft, printed skirt over her knees. “What’s wrong?” she asked again. “Not more than a few months ago I begged you to come home, but you said this town was too small. You knew too many faces here. You were happy in Washington among strangers.”

      Her spin made Sophie smile. “I doubt I put it like that.”

      Clearly not in the mood for a joke, the other woman waited.

      “I’m ready.” Sophie looped her hair behind her ears, trying to look as if she had nothing to hide. She hated disappointing her grandmother. “I’ve had enough big city.”

      Mysteriously, it was true the moment she said so. As her grandmother searched her face, she realized she might not have been so open to Ian if she hadn’t grown lonely. Gran folded her hands in her lap and still said nothing.

      An uncomfortable tingle darted up Sophie’s spine. “Where’s my rip-roaring welcome?”

      Gran traced her skirt’s paisley pattern with a delicate, pearl-tipped fingernail. “You’re lying. I never thought I’d see the day.”

      Sophie squelched a groan. If only she’d inherited Gran’s talent for culling truth from a lie. “Can’t you take my word for it?” A momentary twinge of sympathy for Ian troubled her as a headache began behind her forehead. She was asking her beloved grandmother to trust her—exactly what she’d refused to do for Ian.

      “You’re running from something. Or someone.” Cool, capable brown eyes pinned Sophie to her side of the sofa. “It’s that man, isn’t it? That Ian.” She screwed up her face as if his name tasted bad.

      Surprise jolted Sophie. “You don’t like Ian?”

      “He’s not right for you. Not some man who wanders the world without a mat to call his own. I saw you liked him. I should have butted in. I was afraid he’d hurt you, but I trusted your good sense.”

      Sophie remembered what had kept her out of Tennessee all these years. “Why do you all do that? Ever since the day Mom left Bardill’s Ridge, every female in our family, including the ‘marry-ins’ has tried to save me from myself. None of you believed in my ambition. You were all waiting for me to come to no good because Mom didn’t know how to be a mother.”

      “Nita may have left, but you had Beth and Eliza and me.” Beth and Eliza were Gran’s other two daughters-in-law. “We should have pretended you had a normal family and you didn’t need us?”

      Sophie gripped the trim on the sofa cushion so tightly the beads bit into her palms. She’d proved their worst fears about her. Before Ian had come along, she’d been heart-whole and content with her job and her Washington friends. She’d thought she was too smart, too careful to get hurt. But the truth was, she’d never cared enough about any other man.

      Even now, three weeks after their sham wedding, she missed Ian, and missing him felt irrational. She’d compromised her pride for him. She’d punched holes in all her best walls of defense, and he’d betrayed her trust.

      “Sophie, I can’t offer you the job unless you tell me why you want it. I need another doctor—and I want a good one like you—but I’m after someone who’ll take over, someone I can depend on.”

      “Why take over?” The family all assumed Gran would work here until they carried her out feet first. She’d promised she was quitting a million times before. Sophie felt a chill.

      “Nothing’s wrong. Don’t jump to conclusions,” Gran said, and kneaded Sophie’s hand. The same touch had comforted Sophie all her childhood. “You remember I promised your grandfather I’d retire on our anniversary?”

      “Yeah, but no one believed you.”

      “Grandpa did.” Gran laughed, a touch embarrassed. But Sophie knew she had the courage to take the necessary steps. “If I’m not working here, someone as good as I am has to take my place.”

      “You’re sure that’s all?”

      “Positive.” Gran kissed her forehead. “I’ve done good work and I want it to continue. If you take over, I could help you until you know the place the way I do.”

      Gran wasn’t arrogant. She’d trained at Vanderbilt when most Tennessean young ladies were learning how to sew a fine seam. Despite getting married and soon giving birth to her first son, she’d finished at the top of her undergraduate class and stayed there all the way through med school. Not one of the powerful men in charge of those male-dominated institutions had ever given her a break.

      She deserved an honest, long-term commitment from her granddaughter. It wouldn’t be fair to take temporary shelter in the mountains. “What if I think it over to make sure?” Sophie asked. “I don’t want to waste your time with training and then let

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