Chapter Fifty-Six
Evie
All three of them were angry.
Good. Anger was honest. Politeness was armor, and these men had spent thirty years forging enough to outfit a war.
Cody entered first. Gabe came through the opposite door and went still at the sight of Cody, offended, as if the universe had delivered a personal insult.
Thomas entered last, closed the door, and cataloged every exit before his gaze settled on the others.
He nearly turned and left but something held him there. Pride perhaps.
Evie kept her hands wrapped around her chipped mug. The tea had gone bitter. She drank it anyway.
“What the hell is this?” Cody demanded.
“Where are our children?” Gabe’s voice was ice.
“Gone,” Evie said. “Safe. They left together.”
Cody turned toward the door. Gabe demanded they be brought back. Thomas’s hand twitched toward the handle. All of them began attempting to use their phones, but sadly there was no service on the mountain.
Evie set her mug down. “Your children brought you here because they came to me looking for answers. About Evan. About all of it.”
“There is no all of it,” Cody said.
“That sentence,” Evie replied, “is why we’re here.”
She looked at the three older, harder versions of the young men Celia had once described. Thomas, the steady bridge. Cody, quiet and brilliant. Gabe, alive in every direction, charming because the world had rarely denied him.
Then Celia made one choice, and all three had spent thirty years blaming that choice for ruining them.
“I know someone took Evan from a barn, beat him, and left him for dead,” Evie said. “And I know that until you start to work together, things will get worse.”
Thomas spoke for the first time. “What are you talking about? What do you know?”
“More than any of you want me to. Celia came here for years. She sat where you’re standing, drank tea she hated, and told me what she couldn’t tell her husband, her children, or the men who turned her life into a story about themselves.”
Cody’s voice dropped. “Do not speak for my wife.”
“She spoke for herself. You simply weren’t listening.”
Gabe asked the question she had expected: “How can what happened to Evan have anything to do with Celia?”
Evie leaned against the counter. “You each remember Celia as she existed in your version. Gabe remembers the woman who humiliated him. Cody remembers the one who chose him. Thomas remembers the friend whose choice destroyed everything.”
She held up a hand before they could interrupt.
“Celia was just a woman surrounded by men who could not stop measuring themselves against one another. She chose Cody freely. Not because you lacked value, Gabe, not because Cody tricked her, but because she thought he would give her the simple life she wanted.”
Gabe’s mouth twisted. “And that ended well.”
Cody moved. Evie’s voice cracked through the room like a whip. “Sit down. Thirty years later and you still cannot hear her choice without turning it into evidence against each other.”
She stepped closer to Gabe. “You were hurt. You wanted her.”
“I didn’t want her,” Gabe growled. “My parents wanted her for me. Her parents wanted the same. We didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter, but we’d made ourselves okay with it.”
Evie took a moment to absorb that.
“So, yes,” Gabe continued angrily. “I was humiliated. I agreed to marry her and everyone knew it, but then she chose him.”
“And you couldn’t let them be happy, could you?”
Face tight with fury, he glared at Cody. “You ruined my life. Nothing I ever did after that was good enough. Not to my parents. Not to anyone in my circle.”
“Beth didn’t see you that way,” Evie said quietly.
“No, she didn’t.” Gabe went rigid. “She didn’t care about any of that. She loved me.”
“But that wasn’t enough for you, was it, Gabe?” Evie pushed.
The room silenced. “You chose revenge and pettiness over the person who saw you and your faults and loved you anyway.”
Gabe’s face lost color.
Evie turned to Cody before he could rebuild.
“You were no better. You loved Celia. She never doubted it. That makes what you did worse. She chose you when you had nothing and she walked away from everything she’d ever known to do that.
Her parents disowned her. Her friends forgot her name.
And yet, she thought life with you was the right choice.
Then Gabe arrived, and she lost you to him and your need to prove yourself to him.
All she wanted was you, but while you chased money, all she had were the horses, and then the kids.
She stayed, but she was lonely. She came here because she needed to tell someone that she was torn between loving you and hating who you’d become. ”
Cody’s face collapsed. The anger that had held him upright gave way.
Evie turned last to Thomas, who had not moved from the door.
“I don’t know much about you, but what I do know I don’t like.
Celia told me what happened at college. And it wasn’t right what Gabe and Cody did.
They saw the dissolution of their friendship as a dissolution of their work with you.
But she reached out to help you. She wanted to get the three of you together, make them see what they’d done.
But you blamed her for what happened, didn’t you, Thomas? Called her a few names?”
Thomas’s eyes met hers, guarded but raw. “I was angry. My parents had just lost their home because of them.”
“No. You did that. They didn’t take out those loans on your parents’ home. They didn’t gamble everything. And they weren’t too proud to say what they’d done.”
Gabe and Cody looked from each other to Thomas. Gabe spoke first. “You could have come to me. I would have helped you.”
“I wanted nothing from you,” Thomas growled. “And everything I’ve built, I built without you.”
“It’s always someone else’s fault. Gabe, you blame your parents. Cody, you blame Gabe. Thomas, you blame both of them. When are any of you going to own your own mistakes?”
The room fractured. Gabe and Cody tried to turn on each other again. Thomas silenced them with a single “You both make me sick.”
Evie struck the counter. “Listen to yourselves. Thirty years later and each of you is still using another man’s guilt to make you innocent.
You were friends. Celia did not ruin that.
You ruined yourselves. And your children are paying the price for your pride,” Evie said.
“They’re why I brought you here. They’re what should matter most.”
The men offered the expected defenses: Everything they did they did for their children.
“And yet, you have failed them and continue to fail them.” She looked at her own trembling hands.
“I know what failure looks like. My husband died while I was still convincing myself I could save him. I failed my daughter because I couldn’t put my grief aside long enough to be a good mother to her.
Failure and I are good friends. But you have a chance to change before that’s your story as well. ”
The anger in the room shifted into something quieter, heavier.
“You think losing your children is something that might happen someday,” Evie said softly.
“It has already begun. Bella and Drew married without any of you there. Evan and Nora are starting a life that may not include either of you. And Elise, God bless her, has fallen for Brady and is embracing this town. I don’t know if you’ll lose them to whoever is stalking the Hollistons or if they’ll simply cut you out of their lives, but it doesn’t have to be that way. ”
Silence pooled. Outside, wind moved through the pines.
Gabe turned to the window. “Did Celia hate me?”
“No. She was angry. Frustrated. Sometimes frightened by how far you would go. But she didn’t hate you. She thought Beth deserved to be loved without competing with a ghost.”
Cody sat at last. “Did she want to leave me?”
“She loved you. She didn’t regret choosing you. She regretted that loving you was never enough to make you choose her over your competition with Gabe.”
Thomas stood by the open door. “I’ll be taking Elise home with me.”
Evie said, “I wouldn’t try that if I were you. She loves Brady. Do you really want to make her choose? And before you say yes, know that she might not choose you.”
Thomas opened the door. “I know who you are, Evie Thorne. You claim to be an Oracle, but you don’t know anything.”
Evie straightened. “I’ve never claimed to be anything but someone who wants to be alone. Your child came to me, along with theirs, and asked for my help. If what you learned today isn’t enough to wake you up, that’s on you. Now get out of my house.”
After Thomas left, Gabe approached Evie. “Celia died on this mountain. Alone. Because of me?”
Evie’s shoulders drooped. “Not just you. She could have done what Beth did and left, but she didn’t. And she didn’t have to ride out alone that day. What happened was an accident, but what you did . . . the bitterness you held onto. That’s something you must live with.”
Gabe exchanged an angry, but complicated look with Cody. He almost looked as if he might say something to him, then turned and walked out as well.
Cody lingered. “I miss her every day. I loved her so much.”
“I know you did.”
“Gabe wasn’t the reason she rode out alone that day. I was. Wasn’t I?”
“You heard what I said to him. Celia was a complicated woman who brought her own trauma with her to the mountain. She had a fantasy of a perfect little life with you, up here, away from her family, their friends, and everything she hated about them. And then you became like them . . .”
He slumped, head down. “I would do anything to have her back, to have one more chance. I’d do everything differently.”
With a sigh, Evie said, “Life doesn’t come with do-overs. All we can do is try to be better than we were. Nora needs you. So does Drew. You can’t go back and be someone different for Celia, but you can be the kind of father your children need.”
“And what is that?” His anguish was real.
“That’s a question for them, not me.”
After Cody left, Evie stood alone until her hands shook so badly she gripped the counter. Laurent stepped out from the back room. He caught the mug before it fell, then took her hand.
“So who do you think is responsible?” he asked.
She shook her head. “None of them. All of them. I just told three fathers they damaged their children,” she whispered. “Who the hell am I to judge them? Hope doesn’t even speak to me.”
Laurent’s voice was gentle. “You told them pain doesn’t excuse what they did next. And you asked them to do better. It was what they needed to hear.”
“My granddaughter wants to come here. Thinking I’m some wise woman in the woods.” Evie closed her eyes. “Hope wrote me a letter about it. Sent it to me via Mabel’s kids. She wants me to tell Brooke that I don’t want to meet her.”
“Now that Brooke is an adult, it’s no longer Hope’s decision.”
“But she’s right. I wasn’t the mother Hope needed me to be.
I don’t blame her for wanting nothing to do with me.
Brooke will come here looking for a magical grandmother with gifts to pass on.
She’ll leave disappointed. I have nothing to give anyone.
” She sighed. “And no answers to give the children of the men I just threw out.”
“Have some faith. You made a difference today.” He kissed her gently. “And let Brooke come,” he said softly, holding her tenderly. “Let her see the real you. The one I’ve loved all these years.”
“I’m not who she thinks I am.”
“No, but maybe you’re who she needs.”