Chapter Seven
Seven
“Well, it looks like everything is coming together for Dad’s Christmas party,” Sierra said brightly, looking down at the car seat next to her that contained a sleeping newborn. “Gage will be there, kind of a triumphant return, coming-out kind of thing.”
Maddy’s older brother shifted in his seat, his arms crossed over his broad chest. “You make me sound like a debutante having a coming-out ball.”
“That would be a surprise,” his girlfriend, Rebecca Bear, said, putting her hand over his.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Sierra said, smiling, her slightly rounder post-childbirth cheeks making her look even younger than she usually did.
Maddy was having a difficult time concentrating. She had met her siblings early at The Grind, the most popular coffee shop in Copper Ridge, so that they could all get on the same page about the big West family soiree that would be thrown on Christmas Eve.
Maddy was ambivalent about it. Mostly she wanted to crawl back under the covers with Sam and burrow until winter passed. But they had agreed that it would go on only until Christmas. Which meant that not only was she dreading the party, it also marked the end of their blissful affair.
By the time Sam had left last night, it had been the next morning, just very early, the sun still inky black as he’d walked out of her house and to his truck.
She had wanted him to stay the entire night, and that was dangerous. She didn’t need all that. Didn’t need to be held by him, didn’t need to wake up in his arms.
“Madison.” The sound of her full name jerked her out of her fantasy. She looked up, to see that Colton had been addressing her.
“What?” she asked. “I zoned out for a minute. I haven’t had all the caffeine I need yet.
” Mostly because she had barely slept. She had expected to go out like a light after Sam had left her, but that had not been the case.
She had just sort of lay there feeling a little bit achy and lonely and wishing that she didn’t.
“Just wondering how you were feeling about Jack coming. You know, now that the whole town knows that he’s our half brother, it really is for the best if he comes. I’ve already talked to Dad about it, and he agrees.”
“Great,” she said, “and what about Mom?”
“I expect she’ll go along with it. She always does. Anyway, Jack is a thirty-five-year-old sin. There’s not much use holding it against him now.”
“There never was,” Maddy said, staring fixedly at her disposable coffee cup, allowing the warm liquid inside to heat her fingertips. She felt like a hypocrite saying that. Mostly because there was something about Jack that was difficult for her.
Well, she knew what it was. The fact that he was evidence of an affair her father had had. The fact that her father was the sort of man who cheated on his wife.
That her father was the sort of man more able to identify with the man who had broken Maddy’s heart than he was able to identify with Maddy herself.
But Jack had nothing to do with that. Not really. She knew that logically. He was a good man, married to a great woman, with an adorable baby she really did want in her life. It was just that sometimes it needled at her. Got under her skin.
“True enough,” Colton said. If he noticed her unease, he certainly didn’t betray that he did.
The idea of trying to survive through another West family party just about made her jump up from the coffee shop, run down Main Street and scamper under a rock.
She just didn’t know if she could do it.
Stand there in a pretty dress trying to pretend that she was something the entire town knew she wasn’t.
Trying to pretend that she was anything other than a disappointment.
That her whole family was anything other than tarnished.
Sam didn’t feel that way. Not about her. Suddenly, she thought about standing there with him. Sam in a tux, warm and solid next to her...
She blinked, cutting off that line of thinking. There was no reason to be having those fantasies. What she and Sam had was not that. Whatever it was, it wasn’t that.
“Then it’s settled,” Maddy said, a little bit too brightly. “Jack and his family will come to the party.”
That sentence made another strange, hollow sensation echo through her.
Jack would be there with his family. Sierra and Ace would be there together with their baby.
Colton would be there with his wife, Lydia, and while they hadn’t made it official yet, Gage and Rebecca were rarely anywhere without each other, and it was plain to anyone who had eyes that Rebecca had changed Gage in a profound way.
That she was his support and he was hers.
It was just another way in which Maddy stood alone.
Wow, what a whiny, tragic thought. It wasn’t like she wanted her siblings to have nothing. It wasn’t like she wanted them to spend their lives alone. Of course she wanted them to have significant others. Maybe she would get around to having one too, eventually.
But it wouldn’t be Sam. So she needed to stop having fantasies about him in that role. Naked fantasies. That was all she was allowed.
“Great,” Sierra said, lifting up her coffee cup.
“I’m going to go order a coffee for Ace and head back home.
He’s probably just now getting up. He worked closing at the bar last night and then got up to feed the baby.
I owe him caffeine and my eternal devotion.
But he will want me to lead with the caffeine.
” She waved and picked up the bucket seat, heading toward the counter.
“I have to go too,” Colton said, leaning forward and kissing Maddy on the cheek. “See you later.”
Gage nodded slowly, his dark gaze on Rebecca. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and stood up. “I’m going to grab a refill,” she said, making her way to the counter.
As soon as she was out of earshot, Gage turned his focus to her, and Maddy knew that the refill was only a decoy.
“Are you okay?”
This question, coming from the brother she knew the least, the brother who had been out of her life for seventeen years before coming back into town almost two months ago, was strange.
And yet in some ways it wasn’t. She had felt, from the moment he had returned, that there was something similar in the two of them.
Something broken and strong that maybe the rest of them couldn’t understand.
Since then, she had learned more about the circumstances behind his leaving. The accident that he had been involved in that had left Rebecca Bear scarred as a child. Much to Maddy’s surprise, they now seemed to be in love.
Which, while she was happy for him, was also a little annoying. Rebecca was the woman he had damaged—however accidentally—and she could love him, while Maddy seemed to be some kind of remote island no one wanted to connect with.
If she took the Gage approach, she could throw hot coffee on the nearest handsome guy, wait a decade and a half and see if his feelings changed for her over time. However, she imagined that was somewhat unrealistic.
“I’m fine,” she said brightly. “Always fine.”
“Right. Except I’m used to you sounding dry with notes of sarcasm and today you’ve been overly peppy and sparkly like a Christmas angel, and I think we both know that isn’t real.”
“Well, the alternative is me complaining about how this time of year gets me a little bit down, and given the general mood around the table, that didn’t seem to be the best idea.”
“Right. Why don’t you like this time of year?”
“I don’t know, Gage. Think back to all the years you spent in solitude on the road. Then tell me how you felt about Christmas.”
“At best, it didn’t seem to matter much.
At worst, it reminded me of when I was happy.
When I was home with all of you. And when home felt like a happy place.
That was the hardest part, Maddy. Being away and longing for a home I couldn’t go back to.
Because it didn’t exist. Not really. After everything I found out about Dad, I knew it wouldn’t ever feel the same. ”
Her throat tightened, emotion swamping her.
She had always known that Gage was the one who would understand her.
She had been right. Because no one had ever said quite so perfectly exactly what she felt inside, what she had felt ever since news of her dalliance with her dressage trainer had made its way back to Nathan West’s ears.
“It’s so strange that you put it that way,” she said, “because that is exactly how it feels. I live at home. I never left. And I...I ache for something I can never have again. Even if it’s just to see my parents in the way that I used to.”
“You saw how it was with all of us sitting here,” Gage said.
“It’s something that I never thought I would have.
The fact that you’ve all been willing to forgive me, to let me back into your lives after I was gone for so long, changes the shape of things.
We are the ones that can make it different.
We can fix what happened with Jack—or move forward into fixing it.
There’s no reason you and I can’t be fixed too, Maddy. ”
She nodded, her throat so tight she couldn’t speak. She stood, holding her coffee cup against her chest. “I am looking forward to seeing you at the Christmas party.” Then she forced a smile and walked out of The Grind.
She took a deep breath of the freezing air, hoping that it might wash some of the stale feelings of sadness and grief right out of her body. Then she looked down Main Street, at all of the Christmas lights gilding the edges of the brick buildings like glimmering precious metal.
Christmas wreaths hung from every surface that would take them, velvet bows a crimson beacon against the intense green.