Below the Far Horizon (Raspberry Ridge #8)

Chapter 1

One

G race Tyack pulled into the driveway at her mother’s house in Raspberry Ridge, the town in which she grew up, and pulled in a deep breath of cool, fresh lake air.

Everything still looked the same. Large trees shaded the street that dead-ended at the edge of a cliff, the base of which was surrounded by Pebble Beach, that rocky stretch of shore that lead to Lake Michigan.

The healing garden that was now at the end of the road, before the cliff, hadn’t been there when she’d been growing up, but that was one of the few changes.

A couple big houses on the hill she remembered from childhood looked lived in and cheerful rather than old and imposing the way she remembered them, but it could be her different perspective as an adult rather than any specific changes that had been made.

Her mother’s house was a block back from the dead end. Grace had been dreading the end of her trip, so she’d driven to the healing garden, sat there for a bit, and turned around.

She’d been tempted to park and walk through it, but she didn’t want to meet anyone she knew.

She was saving all of her courage to face her mother.

It seemed the time had come .

Her sisters, Stacy and Jill, would be there too. They had been taking care of their mother during her hip replacement from the beginning at the hospital with her and had gone through the first week of dealing with the aftermath of surgery and the hardest part of the pain.

They both needed to go back to their jobs, and Grace… Grace didn’t have a job to go back to.

Taking another deep, cleansing breath, dreading the conversation she was going to have to have with all of her heart, Grace forced herself to touch the handle of the door before she yanked it and stepped out.

It was a BMW, and she owed too much on it to sell it and get out from underneath it. So she kept it, although she had no idea how she was going to make the payments. She’d missed last month, and late notices were piling up in her mailbox.

That was one of the reasons she did not leave a forwarding address.

That, and while she knew her mother would be fine with her moving in permanently, her mother did not yet know that her husband had cheated on her and left, that the papers for her divorce were signed.

Her mother also didn’t know that she was currently unemployed.

Yeah. Some success story she was. Her mother was sure to be proud.

Gritting her teeth and flexing her lips, practicing a smile that felt more like a snarl, she lifted her head and put her shoulders back.

She wasn’t going to go slinking into the house.

She had her pride after all. And she’d left town full of sass and confidence, sure that she was going to take the world by storm, beat it into submission, and come out on top.

That wasn’t exactly what had happened.

Tulips bloomed along the wall, the same tulips that had come up every year of Grace’s life. Red and purple and yellow and pink. Pretty and regal, the day they poked through the ground was always the day she finally felt she had evidence for the promise of spring.

Winters along the shores of Lake Michigan could be cold and brutal. To put it mildly. Grace thought anyone and anything who could grow up enduring those kinds of conditions would have to be strong and hardy.

But she hadn’t exactly been strong and hardy as she fumbled and mumbled her way into the city, married the wrong man, got a job that she hated, and basically made a mess of her life.

Just the fact that you survived all of that means you are strong and hardy.

The voice spoke in her head as she put one foot on the porch step.

Really? Was it just the idea that she hadn’t been brought to her knees, begging God for mercy, that meant that she was stronger than she thought she was?

Or maybe it was the idea that it wasn’t her strength but the Lord’s. Because that was the one thing that the events of the last year had taught her. The religion of her childhood had a place in her life.

She continued on the steps and then paused at the door. Should she knock?

She’d been back a couple of times for Christmas, staying only as long as necessary.

Her husband had come with her once, but the second time she’d come, he’d insisted that he needed to stay and work and couldn’t take the time away from his job to accompany her to her home for Christmas.

She hadn’t given him a hard time, because he hadn’t been back to see his parents the entire time they’d been together.

She’d never met them. She didn’t even know if they really existed or if he’d hatched or maybe been dropped out of an alien spacecraft, considering all the lies he told her over the years.

Lies that hadn’t come out until she figured out that he had been cheating on her, regularly, behind her back.

His late nights of working had actually been meeting other women at bars.

His work-related expenses had been hotel bills, sure, but they were for the women that he’d hooked up with behind her back.

And she had been blissfully unaware.

What a farce her marriage had been. The one saving grace was the fact that her husband had adamantly refused her request to consider having children.

She had begged and pleaded, wanting to start a family, buoyed by memories of her own family growing up beside the shores of Lake Michigan.

They had been happy, idyllic days. Days she wanted to recapture, and maybe she thought the best way to do that would be to have a family of her own .

Still, her husband had adamantly refused. And Grace had ended up being happy about that, after all of the details of his exploits had come out.

Maybe not all of them. She actually didn’t know if she knew all of them or not. Maybe there were things he had done behind her back that she had never found out about. That was quite possible. He wasn’t exactly known as an honest person or someone who ever told the truth. Ever.

She almost snorted. Her ex was the kind of person who didn’t tell the truth if a lie would suffice.

The clean lake breeze lifted her hair. That part of her life was over now. She tried to push it out of her mind and focus on the conversation she would be having when she stepped in the door.

Deciding a combination of knocking and walking in would be the best move, she rapped on the door before she opened it and stepped inside.

She had prepared herself for seeing her mother and the questions that her family would invariably ask.

The confrontation of her sisters over the fact that she was broke, jobless, husbandless, and driving a BMW that may or may not be repossessed in the near future.

All of those things she expected, and felt she deserved, to be grilled on.

What she hadn’t expected was the way the scent of her mother’s home, familiar and beloved and bringing back all of the happy and wishful memories of her youth, would hit her.

She was still reeling from the slightly yeasty smell, mixed with flowers and her mother’s hand cream, when Stacy, her older sister, appeared in the doorway of the living room.

“I thought you were coming yesterday,” Stacy said, in lieu of a greeting apparently.

Grace reminded herself that she needed to be humble. She’d been proud for way too long.

“I’m sorry. I…got held up.” Not by anything in particular.

Just by her own cowardice. She didn’t want to leave her home, the home she lived in since she got married ten years prior.

Her husband had claimed it had been a gift from his parents.

Now she wondered. But what else wo uld it have been?

His paramours hadn’t exactly been giving him money. It was the other way around.

Even though it had been a year since she first found out, pain still balled up inside of her.

Maybe she was paying for all the lost dreams or for the way that she had been determined to make a success of herself.

To show everyone that even though she was a small-town girl, she could play on the big stage.

And maybe it had to do with the fact that she was running from the memories, the tragedy that she never thought about and that she wanted to overcome.

To have so much success in her life that she never had to look back and think about what might have been.

What she lost, what the people of this town lost.

“Mom is in the den. She prefers that room to this one, as you would know if you had been here at all.”

“That’s the way it was when we were little. I guess I remember.”

Stacy gave her an eye. Maybe at the humility in her tone.

Then she lifted her head in acknowledgment, turned around, and started marching toward the den.

Grace looked toward the kitchen, the bright cheerfulness still familiar and beckoning her, but she ignored the call.

She needed to go see her mom. And Jill, her younger sister.

Get those introductions and interrogations out of the way.

If all three of them were in the room with her, perhaps she would only have to do this once.

Her mom sat on the couch, a soft blanket over her, wearing a comfy brown top, not jammies, although a worn pair of slippers sat beside the couch. They were not the slippers her mom had worn when she had been a child. Had those worn out? Been lost? Grace hadn’t been around enough to know.

“Grace!” her mother said, looking up and holding her arms out.

Gita Honea was a naturally optimistic, happy person who’d made Grace’s childhood idyllic. She’d been the perfect mother, as far as Grace could tell, even though Grace had gone through a period of rebellion in her teenage years, like every teenager did, right?

That wasn’t true. She’d known teens who had grown closer to their parents during those years. Unfortunately, she didn’t have that kind of wisdom at the time to know that was the best way for a person’s life to go .