Sneak Peek of Through the Dark Night
S hannon adjusted her grip on the steering wheel, her hands sweating.
Just two miles until she was…home? It felt like she was coming home.
But she didn’t want to. She left for a reason, and she hadn’t looked back, taking her two children and leaving with her husband, heading out of the town she grew up in.
Too many painful memories.
Now, with her marriage blown to bits and her children scattered, leading new lives of their own, she felt like this was the only place for her to go.
Sure, she could have stayed in Detroit, but…who wanted to live in Detroit?
She had friends there, but they were city friends, friends from the suburbs. People she waved to, saw when she was out walking, knew by first name, and that was pretty much it.
They weren’t the kind of friends who knew the details of her life, both the good and the bad, the ugly.
Most of the time, that wasn’t what she really wanted.
But she missed the soul-deep knowledge that small towns had.
Sure, there was gossip, and nothing was off-limits, but there was a caring there, a concern, a “you’re one of our own, and we will take care of you” kind of attitude that was completely lacking in the generic Detroit suburb.
She swallowed hard and took a breath. Why was she nervous? Why was she scared?
Maybe it wasn’t nervousness or fear but more a knowledge that the memories were here, and she’d never faced them.
Everyone said time healed, and Shannon believed that to be true.
Surely allowing time to put a buffer between her and the sharpness of the pain was a coping mechanism that would someday be acceptable in the eyes of the world.
She wouldn’t change the fact that she left.
She might have changed some of the decisions that she made when she was younger, but she pushed that thought aside as well.
Her life was what it was, and there wasn’t anything she could do to change it now.
The decisions had been made, consequences had been lived through, and there was no turning back.
However, sometimes a person got to a fork in the road and they had to make a decision about how they were going to move forward.
She already made that decision too. She decided that she was going to sell the house in the suburbs and move to Raspberry Ridge.
And now, here she was, almost back in her hometown for the first time since she left almost two decades ago, and she felt like turning around and running.
She had no idea where she would run to.
As her white SUV crested the last hill, the expanse and magnificence of Lake Michigan came into view.
The sun glittered on the water, and Shannon’s breath caught in her throat.
Grateful that the road was deserted, she pulled to the side of the road and came to a stop, her hands resting on the wheel, her eyes on the immense and beloved lake in front of her.
This was her last view as she left town all those years ago, her heart cracked and broken, and she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to function without pain again.
The pain had faded, although she had come to understand that it would never truly go away.
One could not lose one’s daughter—a child that had come from one’s own body, one that she had nurtured and cared for for the first fourteen years of her life—and not expect there to be a permanent mark on her soul.
She pulled both lips in between her teeth as she looked at the rippling water, the sunlight glistening, always moving, shimmering and shining, then dark, cloudy, and dreamlike.
She couldn’t figure out whether it felt good to be home, or maybe she just felt relief. Relief that she had a soft place to land after all this time.
Of course, the landing might not be as soft as what she hoped. She shoved that thought aside. She would face that when she had to, but first, she had to get into town.
Taking one last long look at the shimmering lake in front of her, she took another deep breath, as though to fortify herself for the last, and hardest, leg of her journey, before she pulled back out on the highway.
No cars had passed. At least that hadn’t changed.
Raspberry Ridge was a beautiful little gem that not very many people knew about.
If tourists knew, they would flock here, although they’d have to find a different place to stay, since the old inn had long ago shut down, although Shannon could remember pieces of it from her childhood.
Still, that was more than forty years ago, and so much had changed. So much. She tried to push those thoughts aside. Change wasn’t necessarily bad, but it was easier to swallow in small doses.
She was face-to-face with the fact that because she hadn’t been there for almost twenty years and had decided to come back to live without visiting first, she was going to have a lot of big doses of change.
Her car moved slowly down the highway, as though she wanted to put off the inevitable for as long as she could, but soon the first houses of Raspberry Ridge came into view.
The same, yet different. Older, more paint chips, more weather-beaten.
They’d been through almost twenty Michigan winters, which was no small thing, especially along the lake.
Winter had always been fun to her, lots of snow, lots of things to do—skiing and sledding and building snow forts and castles and playing with her children in it, even ice-skating at times.
Winter had been her favorite time of the year, and she’d always been a little disappointed when the snow had melted and spring had sprung.
Not that she didn’t love Michigan springs and summers as well. Fall was maybe her least favorite time, but it held the promise of another winter coming.
Now that she was older, the cold got to her more, the wind felt chillier. Her coats and winter clothing didn’t keep the chill out like they used to. Maybe she would hate winter. Maybe this was a big mistake. Maybe she should have gone to Florida.
She kept puttering along. There was the church on the hill.
The old one that had closed before she had left and before the new one closer to the lake had opened.
That’s where the grave was. The one she hadn’t visited in almost twenty years.
What kind of mother was she to have not visited her daughter’s grave in all that time?
She felt guilt clogging up her throat, but she pushed it down. Forcefully. After all, she had taken the absolute very best care of her daughter while she had been alive. She had been the very best mother that she could possibly be. Who cared whether she took care of the grave after her death?
Suddenly she had an urgent need to see it. But she was already past the place where she needed to pull off, and she kept going.
There, at the end of the dead-end street, she could see the healing garden that had taken the place of the old gazebo that had sat there all through her childhood.
It had started to decay and fall, and the town had demolished it before her children had been old enough to hang out there like she and her friends had.
They had had so much fun sitting in the gazebo, talking, making plans, using it as a meeting point for a trip to the pebble beach.
So many memories, and yet the gazebo was long gone.
She turned her head and saw Fran’s store.
Almost without thinking, her hands turned the wheel, and she pulled in along the street, parking right in front of the store that didn’t seem to have changed at all since the day Shannon had left.
She had stopped here and bought a soda and a bag of chips for both of her children.
They had been a good bit younger than Yolanda at eight and ten, and she hadn’t wanted to have a whole lot of questions, she hadn’t wanted to have to talk to them.
So, she convinced her husband to stop, and she’d run in and gotten them what amounted to bribes to stay quiet for the trip to Detroit.
James hadn’t wanted to stop, not when they were just getting started, but she insisted.
She couldn’t even think about James, so she put those memories aside to think about later too.
It seemed like that was what she did with everything her whole life, set it aside until she was able to handle it.
When would she be able? Here she was, fifty years old, and still didn’t feel like she was adult enough to face all the pain and heartbreak in her past.
But she definitely couldn’t think about that now. Not if she was going to go into Fran’s, which apparently she was since she had parked the car right in front of the store.
Part of her wanted to go in, to see what had changed, and part of her wanted to run in the other direction.
Deliberately putting her hand on the latch and yanking hard, she opened her door and stepped out, adjusting her purse over her shoulder and squinting in the bright sunlight. She adjusted her shades and closed the door, walking with determined steps to Holloway’s General Store.
The bell jangled over her head as she opened the door and stepped in.
It wasn’t hard to recognize Fran, who was adjusting some candy on a shelf right in front of the checkout counter.
Her hair was white, and there were definitely added pounds, which gave her figure a more matronly look than what Shannon remembered, but Fran wasn’t the only one who had a more matronly look.