Chapter 20
Jenna sat in the passenger seat for one extra breath after Luke’s door closed.
Just one. Just long enough to lift an unspoken prayer.
She didn’t have the words—but God knew the silent cries of her heart. And she knew He’d be with her in this moment.
But she mostly prayed He’d be with her kids during this reunion. She didn’t want to hurt them any more than they’d already been hurt. She couldn’t live with herself if she did.
Finally, she climbed out.
The evening air felt cool and sharp around her, and it smelled of pine and damp earth from the earlier rain. She stood on the driveway a moment and stared at the farmhouse. She thought about all the times she’d imagined this reunion.
She hadn’t pictured it happening at Refuge Cove. She hadn’t pictured any of today like it had turned out. Life had a way of doing that.
Luke came around the front of the truck and nodded toward the door. “Caleb and Naomi are inside. My mom too. The kids—”
She looked at him, waiting for him to finish.
“Like I mentioned earlier, they’re here,” he finally said. “But they don’t know you’re coming. I . . . I didn’t know how to tell them over the phone.”
Jenna’s throat tightened to the point she didn’t trust herself to speak. Suddenly, she second-guessed everything. Maybe she should have changed clothes. Cleaned herself up. Put some concealer beneath her eyes.
But it was too late for any of that now.
Luke opened the door, and voices sounded from somewhere deeper in the house.
Then . . . a child’s laugh. The sound was high and bright and completely unguarded.
Her heart squeezed.
Cora. That had to be Cora.
Luke led Jenna through the kitchen and into the main room.
Nerves rippled through her, and her lungs tightened.
You can do this. You can do this, she repeated to herself.
She quickly scanned the room. Caleb stood near the fireplace. Naomi sat on the couch with a baby asleep against her shoulder. Luke’s mother stood near the stairway.
A husky lifted its head from the rug and came to investigate her, followed by a golden retriever that pushed its nose into her hand like they were old friends. Jenna gave them an absent pat, her attention already somewhere else.
Off near the corner, a chocolate Lab watched from a distance. She didn’t come closer. She just held those pale amber eyes on Jenna, measuring her.
Jenna’s eyes moved past all of them, searching out the people she’d really wanted to see.
Her children. They were here. In the living room.
Looking as normal as normal could be.
Liam sat on the couch with a book open in front of him. He looked up when they walked in. Then his eyes found her face.
He went completely still, and his book slid sideways in his lap.
Cora sat cross-legged on the rug in front of the fireplace with a drawing spread out before her, a crayon still in her hand. She looked up a half second after Liam did, following his gaze. Then she saw Jenna, and her mouth dropped open.
Jonah sat on the floor beside Cora, a small wooden truck in his hand. He looked at his mom with open, curious—and slightly confused—eyes.
No one moved for a long moment.
Then Cora dropped the crayon. “Mama?”
She scrambled to her feet and crossed the room at a dead run. Jenna barely had time to crouch before Cora’s arms were around her neck, fierce and certain.
Jenna embraced her daughter and held on. Tears sprang to her eyes.
“I knew you’d come back,” Cora murmured. “I knew it!”
Liam’s book hit the cushion. His footsteps pattered across the room, and he paused beside her. He didn’t reach for her.
“It’s okay,” she murmured. “You can hug me when you’re ready to hug me.”
He stared at her another moment but remained where he was, questions—maybe even accusations—in his gaze.
Her heart ached at his reaction, but she understood. She’d hurt him, and forgiveness took time.
Then small footsteps sounded. A second pair of arms wrapped around her neck.
Jonah.
She couldn’t speak. She didn’t try.
Tears streamed down her face and dropped into Cora’s hair, into the silence of the room, into the warmth of the children who’d found their way back into her arms.
Jenna held on, her heart aching with gratitude . . . and prayers that seeing them again was the right thing.
Luke stood back and watched the reunion. He wondered for a minute if he should ask everyone else to leave. If he should give Jenna and the kids some privacy. But his family was a part of this. They’d helped to pick up the slack for the past couple of years.
They deserved some answers also. So unless Jenna explicitly looked as if she wanted them to leave, he wouldn’t ask.
He’d told himself on the drive over that he’d manage this carefully. Told himself that he’d introduce Jenna to the kids, give them time to adjust, and he’d keep the emotional temperature somewhere manageable.
He’d had a whole approach worked out in his head.
Then Cora had run across the room, and every carefully constructed plan had dissolved on the spot.
He watched Jenna hold Cora and Jonah, tears rolling down her face. He watched Liam standing by cautiously—heartbreakingly so.
Luke looked away, his heart unable to process everything.
Instead, he stared at the fireplace. At the flames moving against the back of the grate. At the crayon Cora had dropped on the rug.
Unwillingly, his gaze went back to his children. He couldn’t seem to stop himself.
At one time in his life, he’d dreamed about this reunion. Now it was here.
But it wasn’t what he expected.
Emotion churned in his chest. His anger was still there, banked and quiet, waiting for its turn. Forgiveness hadn’t fully formed—and maybe it never would.
His feelings were more complicated than either of those things.
Liam’s face undid him most.
His son—his careful, watchful, too-serious eight-year-old—only stared at his mother.
Luke’s jaw tightened. He breathed through his nose, slow and even, as he tried to keep his emotions tightly controlled.
Someone squeezed his arm.
He looked up and saw his mother had appeared beside him, the dish towel still in her hand. Her eyes were on the huddle of her grandchildren and the woman at the center of them.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
He knew there was no judgment in her gaze. No I-told-you-so, no careful withholding of opinion. Just the steady, clear-eyed look of a woman who’d lived long enough to know that some things didn’t resolve cleanly.
Cora’s voice rose above the quiet of the room, animated and unstoppable, her words tumbling out like she’d been saving them up.
He caught fragments.
I lost another tooth, and Daddy taught me to braid hair, and I have a drawing I want to show you.
She pulled back just far enough to look at Jenna’s face while she talked, her hands already moving. Then she leaned back in again as if the distance had been too much.
Jenna was nodding. Crying. Nodding some more. Listening to every word as if she was memorizing the moment.
Liam still hadn’t moved closer.
Jonah had climbed partially into Jenna’s lap and studied her face. He reached up and touched his mom’s cheek. Jenna caught his hand, held it there, and closed her eyes again.
Luke pressed his lips together.
He’d spent two years being angry. But he wouldn’t begrudge his children this moment.
Whatever came next—whatever hard conversations lay ahead, whatever it cost all of them to find their way through this—his kids needed their mother.
And she was here now.
He took another slow breath.
Then he put his back against the wall and gave Jenna and the kids the time they needed.