Chapter 2
Olivia pushed her hair back away from her face and stretched her back to try to ease the ache in it. She had another hour of work to do before she could head home for the night.
Thankfully, the twins were still small enough to snuggle on the cot in the back room, and they'd fallen asleep hours ago.
She sighed, looking over the inventory in her candle shop as she packed another gift set, making sure to put plenty of stuffing in the box so the candle would arrive intact.
If it broke, it was on her to replace it, and it came directly out of her profits.
Plus, she didn't want people to order candles from her and have broken pieces arrive in the mail.
The mail orders had seen an uptick in the last few years, but her bread and butter were still the local orders, like the church who ordered candles for their candlelight service every year.
They always requested special candles, custom-made for that service, and then the candles that were left were burned all through the month of January, so people could bask in the glow of Christmas, even though all the other decorations were taken down.
It was a tradition Pastor Johnson had started a few years prior, and the townspeople had loved it. Several times for the Sunday evening service, they had the entire service by candlelight. It was beautiful and warm and cozy and made the winter seem not so long and dreary.
Olivia had never liked the winter, even though Winters was her last name.
Cam had joked that Winterses couldn't live somewhere where they didn't actually have a winter.
She closed the box, holding it still as she sealed it with packing tape, and tried to push back the sadness that always threatened when she thought of her late husband.
He'd loved the Marines, and had signed up for a third tour, even though Olivia had begged him to get out so they could settle down and raise their family together.
But sure enough, no sooner had he re-enlisted than he'd been deployed.
Not anywhere exceptionally dangerous, but during a training exercise, he'd been killed, and he'd never gotten to go to Okinawa.
She had been planning on going with him, and while all of her was devastated that she had lost her husband, there was a part of her that was happy that she hadn't had to move across the globe into a country that she had no interest in making her home.
Japan was probably a really amazing country, and she wouldn't mind visiting, but she didn't want to live there. She wanted to live right here in Mistletoe Meadows. Except... she wanted to live here with her husband and children, not as a single mom and a grieving widow.
Cam, why didn't you listen to me?
She wanted to scream it in his face, although it would do no good. He'd just laugh and ruffle her hair like she was two instead of thirty, and tell her that she was worrying for nothing.
It was so annoying. Because she'd been right.
She wasn't worrying for nothing. She was worrying because it was legit to worry, and her fears had come true.
And now, their boys, Aiden and Ethan, were four years old and had no memories of their father.
Cam hadn't even known she was expecting when he had died.
She was still upset about the fact that he had re-enlisted, and she hadn't told him what she suspected.
Plus, she'd been scared. She didn't want to have babies over on the other side of the world.
Well, she didn't have to. She had them at home, and she had them alone.
Swallowing, she noticed the headlights flash across the shop, and looked out the window to see that the new pastor had arrived at the parsonage for the last time.
Mrs. Tucker had said that he had one more load, and then he'd be there for good.
That was when Mrs. Tucker had picked up the candle that Olivia always gave anyone moving to the community as a housewarming gift.
It smelled like freshly made bread, and she could just sit and burn it all day long.
She loved the scent, and was kind of proud of herself for coming up with it.
It was one that she had invented back when candles were still a hobby for her.
Something she did as therapy, to fill the long days and nights when her husband wasn't home.
She had never aspired to be more than a wife and a mother.
It's what she'd always wanted. Well, she did enjoy leading her small Bible studies, and was working on writing one for herself.
Not that she ever thought she would publish it.
She just always had ideas and thoughts about God and reading the Bible, and had decided to organize them in a way that she could go back and look at years from now.
Plus, she took copious sermon notes, and had notebooks full of those things too.
That was her other hobby. But... what was that to a dead Marine's wife?
She'd kind of gotten away from that in recent years, because partly the candle shop had taken all of her time, and partly because she was a little angry at God. How could he give her twins, and then take her husband away almost in the same breath?
Were those the actions of a loving God? She didn't think so. How could she say that God was good, when she wasn't even sure she believed that anymore?
The car lights shut off, plunging the entire area into darkness. And then she saw the light flicker.
Mrs. Tucker must have lit the candle and put it somewhere in the parsonage.
That made Olivia smile. The idea that there would be a little welcome for the pastor. A little smell of freshly made bread, and maybe it would make him smile.
She hadn't met him. The twins had been sick for a month earlier that fall when he had come for several Sundays and pastored the congregation as a candidate for the church.
Apparently the congregation hadn't needed to hear anyone else, because they loved this Pastor Mark Stevens so much.
Plus he was a good friend of Noah Parker.
As much as Olivia loved Noah, and admired and respected him, she would've liked to have heard the pastor for herself.
But she couldn't take her sick children to church, and one of the things that a single mother didn't have the luxury of doing was to discuss with her husband which one of them was going to go and which one of them was going to stay.
Everything was on her shoulders.
She set the box aside and started packing a new one. She had twenty more orders to do before she could quit for the night.
Her eyes were drawn again to the window, just in time to see the lights in the parsonage go on, and see a figure, tall and broad-shouldered, outlined in the door before it closed behind him.
She hadn't even asked how old the pastor was, although someone had told her that he was a single man with no children.
That made her feel like maybe he was just a kid out of college.
That age felt so long ago for her. She had been so young and full of dreams and so sure that she could conquer the world, and then she'd met Cam and fallen in love and been eager to start their lives together.
None of it had turned out the way she thought.
She carefully put a brochure at the top of the box before she closed it and grabbed the packing tape again.
Leaning over, she punched the button on her computer to send the information to the printer to print out a label.
She used to love making candles and packing them with care, sending them along to brighten someone’s day - literally. But now that she had to do it in order to feed her family, it felt more like pressure, less like fun.
She supposed that's what being an adult was.
There was rustling from the back, and she turned her head, glancing at her boys.
At four years old, they only had one more year at home with her before she had to send them to kindergarten.
In her mind, when she got married, she had wanted to homeschool. But there was just no way she could take the time that would entail and still work full-time to support the family.
Lord, I know I have to give up things that I want in order to do your will. But when they're good things, things that I think should be your will, but seem to not be, it's hard.
Wouldn't it be best for the boys to be homeschooled? For her to keep them out of school and teach them from God's word every day, showing them science and history from the lens of a Christian perspective?
She wouldn't say that she was bitter against God, but she definitely wasn't as close to Him as she used to be. After all, she didn't really understand why he'd taken her husband and left her alone.
Maybe it was so that she would reconcile with her parents.
No. She wasn't even going to go there. She wouldn't even entertain that thought.
"Mommy?" Aiden, the more outgoing and energetic of the two boys, came out of the back room, rubbing his eyes. "Is it time to go home?"
"As soon as I get these orders packed," she said gently.
Aiden looked so much like his dad. Blonde hair, blue eyes, a mischievous grin, and a bent towards trouble.
Ethan was so much more like her, dark and serious, always counting the cost before he jumped in behind his twin.
They got along so well, since Aiden was the natural leader and Ethan was his natural sidekick.
Of course, Ethan had a tendency to think things through, and as the boys had gotten older, she noticed Aiden depending more and more on his twin's ability to process information. It was how she and Cam had worked.
A scraping sound pulled her mind back to the present. Aiden had gotten his stool and was sliding it over. He climbed up, got the curly paper ribbons that she boxed up with the candles, and started putting them in the bottom of the open box beside her.
"With your help I'll get done a lot sooner."
He grinned up at her. "Ethan's still sleeping."
"He is. It was really good of you to get up without waking him."
"That's what you told me to do," he chirped, already his naturally optimistic and positive personality coming out.
"Yeah." When he was younger, he'd had a tendency to run over everything, with no concept that there were other people in the world.
That included his brother, who always required a little bit more sleep.
Aiden would wake him up without meaning to, and then she would have two grumpy boys on her hands.
Those days of juggling the twins were so hard.
They wouldn't have been that hard if you would've allowed your parents to help you.
She finished wrapping the candle in crinkly paper and pulled the ends down, nestling it into the curly cues Aiden had put in the bottom. She was not going to think about her parents, and was not going to think about Cam.
She could think about the new pastor, and wonder what changes he would bring. Everyone at the church hoped that he'd pretty much keep everything the same, since Pastor Johnson had been so beloved by everyone. But she knew that a new person usually liked to put their mark on things.
Hopefully he wouldn't go and mess up a bunch of stuff that was already working.
Hopefully, he would like her candles, and not go to the church meeting later this week and tell them that he wanted to cancel the tradition. She was depending on that order since she made almost fifty percent of her income in December, and a good chunk of that was the church orders she fulfilled.
Looking back, maybe Pastor Johnson had ordered more candles than strictly necessary just to support her and enable her to work.
She hated accepting help from anyone, and while she didn't think that she was proud of the fact that she was able to do things on her own, she definitely did like that she had been able to support herself. Without depending on the government, or anyone else, to take care of her.
That was especially true considering that she didn't have a college education, and almost everyone had assumed that she was going to go crawling back to her parents once her husband died.
She supposed she'd proved those people wrong.
But even as she thought that, she knew that it wasn't just her. God had been good to her. She really couldn't take credit for any of it.
"This is the last one?" Aidan piped up from beside her.
He slid the last box that she had out on the table and started filling it.
"It sure is. The work just flew by with you helping me."
He beamed. Both of her boys loved helping, and she was glad they did, since so much of their time was spent in the shop, trying to make enough candles that she could keep food on the table and the lights on.
So far, so good.