LITMIR.BIZ

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the first time when she was six, and had gone into her first foster home because her aunt Ella was ill. Terrified and so alone, she had been so happy when she had found the puppy.

      She had secretly hidden him under the porch, stealing scraps from the garbage to feed him. And she had loved him, nursed him, played with him.

      Then she had been discovered. The rules: No puppies—never, ever no matter how much you cried and pleaded. The tears flowing freely then, as she tried to make her foster parents understand how much it meant to her.

      The truth: no one cared.

      A truth underscored over the years: as her hand cramped from writing out “Thou shalt not steal” when she had not stolen anything.

      When a foster mother’s real daughter wore Corrine’s red jacket, without even asking. That jacket had been the only nice thing she owned. You should be glad to let her wear it, after all we’ve done for you.

      From age six to seventeen, she’d been in foster care on and off many times. Seven different foster homes had taken Corrine Parsons’s tears and turned them to ice, cold hard ice that she saw in her eyes every time she looked at her own reflection in a mirror, even today, ten years after she had left her last foster home behind her.

      Now, here she sat in a posh law office, with rich furnishings and thick carpets, surrounded by strangers, and the ice felt like the hot blue flame of a blowtorch was being aimed at it. Tears, hot and shaming, pressed behind her eyes. She had the terrifying feeling she might not be able to control whether they fell or not for very much longer.

      And all because two of the strangers in this room looked exactly like her.

      Were not strangers at all, though she had not met them before, at least not in her memory.

      Sisters.

      Mirror-image sisters. Triplets.

      Back when she had still dreamed, as a lonely child—with her few clothes in a plastic garbage bag at the end of yet another unfamiliar bed, had she not dreamed of such things? Had she not lain awake in the darkness and tried to soothe her own fears with dreams?

      There had been detailed dreams of an imaginary family: A Christmas tree with gifts piled high beneath, gifts with her name on them. A bed with no crinkly rubber protecting the mattress. Sheets that felt soft instead of scratchy, and smelled of a mother’s love. A strong, handsome father who threw back his head and laughed and picked up his little girl and swung her in the air. Sisters who shared Barbie dolls and hair ribbons and giggles and secrets.

      Dreams…of someone to love her.

      Corrie, she told herself firmly, as the tears pushed harder at the back of her eyes, these two women look like you, and they’re your sisters. But that doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean they will love you, or care about you, as if blood could automatically guarantee those things.

      Still, when she dared to glance at them, at Abby and Brittany, she could see something in their eyes when they looked back at her. It was as if they hadn’t even noticed she was not dressed appropriately. That she had purposely worn her oldest clothes in defiant answer to the summons that had arrived from the law office on creamy linen paper.

      Her sisters’ eyes held tenderness.

      Welcome.

      She wanted so badly to believe. And was terrified to believe at the same time. Her faded jeans had a hole in the knee, and she worked the frayed threads with her fingers, trying desperately to keep control of her world.

      Far away she could hear the lawyer’s voice going on and on. About a stranger giving them gifts. Huge gifts. Abby got a house. Brittany a business. Another man came in and went out again, but she hardly noticed.

      She heard her own name. And her gift. Five acres of land. And a cabin. Her sisters looked naively happy, but she could feel herself bracing, waiting for the catch.

      There was always a catch.

      Sure enough, there it was. There were conditions attached to the gifts. If they wanted to keep them they had to stay here, in this little ocean-bound town she had never seen before, for one year.

      And they had to get married within that year.

      Married. Yeah, right. She, who had mastered the art of freezing a man where he stood with just one glance from her ice-cold eyes.

      But if she came and lived here, even for that year, she could be with them. Her sisters.

      See? It was happening already. She was nearly weak with wanting what she saw in their eyes.

      What if she came, rearranged her whole life to be with them, and they didn’t like her?

      The fear was so intense it was like falling off a cliff, falling and falling and falling.

      But suddenly, she wasn’t falling anymore.

      Her sister Abby slid her hand across the small space between their chairs, and intertwined their fingers. It was as if she knew the terror Corrie was feeling, and knew, too, how to make it go away.

      Abby’s hand was warm and soft and strong. She squeezed, and when Corrie looked up at her, what she saw in her sister’s eyes made her realize she would be moving to Miracle Harbor, no matter how scared she was now. Not right away, of course. Corrie had obligations that had to be looked after first. But as soon as it was possible, she would come.

      Frightened and excited at the very same time, Corrine admitted the hardest thing of all. That she was powerless to stay away from these gifts that had been offered to her…the hope and the tenderness she saw shining in her sisters’ eyes.

      Chapter One

      Three months later…

      Hers.

      Corrine shoved her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, and rocked back on her heels, studying the cabin. It stood, small and solid, under the spreading wings of a giant red maple.

      Hers.

      It didn’t matter to her that the porch sagged, that the shingles on the roof had grown a thick layer of moss, that the windows were grimy and needed to be cleaned. It didn’t matter to her that the second step was broken, or that the caulking was crumbling and rocks had fallen away from the top of the stone chimney.

      She sighed, and allowed herself to feel a little finger of happiness. Nothing had ever really been hers before.

      Of course she had owned clothing, and her beloved, if ancient Jeep that still had patches of its original green color in a few places.

      But she had always rented an apartment in Minneapolis, even long after her moderate success with the Brandy picture book, Brandy being a young orphan girl of her creation who took on the world with spunk and fire and who always won.

      Why hadn’t she bought a house?

      Maybe because it would be tempting fate to believe in good things, to commit to anything at all beyond a deadline.

      Even feeling so good about this ramshackle cabin concerned her.

      Nothing in her history allowed her to believe good things lasted.

      “Well,” she said out loud, and smiled, “according to sister Brit, this place doesn’t qualify as a good thing. Not even close.”

      Brit had been appalled by the tiny cabin, the tumbledown barn, the falling-down fences that surrounded pastures gone wild, grass and weeds and wildflowers much higher than the fences.

      “You can come live with me and Mitch,” Brit had announced shortly after Corrie had finally arrived.

      “You’re newlyweds!” Corrie had said. Her sister had been married for only a week. She and her husband, Mitch, had hardly been able to keep their hands off each other long enough to say their vows. Corrie didn’t want to live with that—evidence, cold hard evidence, that dreams came true, that miracles happened

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