Chapter 15
Sam stood outside the huge white house with columns and a deep porch, Bella pressed against her legs. Her heart was beating too fast. The blue door had a pine wreath on it, and she could see lights on inside. Someone was home.
She’d slept with that stupid postcard last night, ever since Ally said she knew who painted it. This morning, after Ryan had dropped her off at the library while he went to finish his Christmas shopping, she’d walked by the house twice already and chickened out both times.
But then she’d gone back to the library, sat and read for a while, then walked back over here, because not knowing was worse than whatever she might find out.
A scent from a long-ago forgotten memory tickled her nose. Sam climbed the steps, her hand shaking as she reached for the door.
It opened before she could knock.
“Well, hello there.” The woman was small and neat-looking, with silver hair and green eyes.
She wore a cardigan and smelled like flowers, the fancy kind that cost money.
It was the scent she barely remembered. She’d thought there had been a pillow in her room when she was little that smelled like those flowers. The name came to her. Gardenias.
“Mrs. Collier?” Sam’s voice came out scratchy.
“Yes, dear. And you must be Sam.” The woman smiled. “I’ve been hoping you’d come by. Would you like some tea? It’s freezing out here.”
Sam blinked. “You’ve been hoping?”
“Oh yes. Ally called to let me know you might visit. She mentioned you had one of my old postcards.” Mrs. Collier stepped back. “Please bring your dog too. Bella, isn’t it?”
The living room was warm and stuffed with old things.
Pillows everywhere, and pictures covering every flat surface.
It smelled of tea and of that gardenia perfume, the memory making her swallow.
But it was the painting above the fireplace that made her stomach drop.
It was the same lake as in her postcard, not Tara’s lake.
“I painted that one about fifteen years ago,” Mrs. Collier said. “From memory. It was a place my daughter loved when she was little.”
Sam’s mouth went dry. “Your daughter?”
Mrs. Collier headed to the kitchen. “Sit down, dearie. This is going to take a while.”
She sat on the edge of the couch, ready to bolt. Bella flopped down at her feet as if to tell her it would be okay, to just be patient. The old lady came back with fancy teacups and cookies that looked homemade.
“My daughter’s name was Rebecca,” Mrs. Collier said, settling into a chair. “She went by Becca. Long red hair, freckles. Always trying to cover them up with makeup.”
Sam’s heart stopped. Her mom’s name. Her mom’s hair, before she shaved it all off after a bad trip one night.
“She was stubborn,” Mrs. Collier kept talking. “Wanted to see everything, do everything. We fought about the boy she wanted to marry.”
Sam went to pick up the teacup, but her hands were shaking so badly the cup rattled against the saucer. She took a big gulp, not caring that the tea burned her mouth.
“What boy?” she coughed.
Mrs. Collier looked sad. “David McKenna. Good-looking, but he was trouble. All the drinking and worse. Big talker, no follow-through. I knew it would end badly, but Becca was in love.” She handed Sam a photo. “Their wedding. She was nineteen.”
Sam stared at the picture. Her parents, young and happy, standing in front of some building. Her mom in a white dress, holding flowers. Her dad’s arm around her waist.
“She looks happy,” Sam said.
“She was. For a while.” Mrs. Collier’s voice got quiet.
“But David couldn’t hold a job. They moved all the time.
Nevada, Arizona, California. Then Key West down in Florida.
Always chasing some new get-rich scheme.
Becca would call when things got bad. I kept begging her to come home, to bring you home. ”
“You knew about me?”
“Of course I knew.” Mrs. Collier’s eyes filled up. “You were born when Becca was twenty-two. She sent me one picture, you were maybe a year old. Dark hair like your dad, but your mom’s eyes.” She blew her nose. “I sent you a pillow I’d made.”
“It smelled like gardenias.” So, the memory of that smell was real. Sam felt like she was choking. For three years, she’d hoped they’d reach out, tell her they’d changed. That they would love her more than their addictions.
“Why didn’t you find us?”
“I tried. For years. But they kept moving, changing numbers. Then...” Mrs. Collier grabbed a tissue.
“Your mom called late one night, needing money. When I called the next day, the phone number had been disconnected. I hired someone the next week to look for you a little over two years ago. He found them a week after I hired him. They were in Texas.”
The teacup slipped out of Sam’s hands, hitting the floor and rolling, the rest of the tea sloshing across the worn hardwood floors, but neither of them noticed as Bella cleaned up the mess.
“They’re dead, aren’t they?” She whispered the words as if saying them would make them somehow more real.
Mrs. Collier nodded, crying now. “Overdose. Your father and then your mother two days later. They were lost in addiction, had been for a very long time.”
The sound that escaped sounded like it came from a wounded animal.
Two years. They’d been dead for two years while she was sleeping in her car, while she was stealing food from gas stations, while she was calling their old numbers over and over, even after that terrible night when one of her dad’s friends had walked in on her in the bathroom and she’d had to hit him with the ceramic bowl on top of the toilet tank to make him stop.
She’d climbed out the window and never looked back.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” Mrs. Collier was next to her now, pulling her into a hug. She was small but strong, and she smelled like those flowers. “I looked for you after that. But you’d disappeared.”
“I ran away when I was thirteen,” Sam choked out as she told her grandmother the story of what happened that night. The story she’d never been able to tell anyone.
“Oh, baby. You’ve been hurting and alone all this time. I am so very sorry for everything you’ve been through.”
They cried together. Sam couldn’t remember the last time an adult had held her while she cried. Maybe never.
When she could finally breathe again, she was curled up against this stranger, who was her grandmother, with Bella’s warm body pressing against her other side, whining softly.
“What happens now?” Sam asked. Her voice sounded like she’d been screaming at the top of her lungs for hours and hours.
Mrs. Collier smoothed her hair. “Now we get to know each other. I’ve got years of stories about your mom saved up. And you’ve got a family now, even if it’s just one crazy old lady who talks to her roses.”
“What about school?” Sam had been working with Ryan, but the idea of sitting in a classroom with normal kids made her want to puke.
“We’ll figure it out. There’s time for all of it—school, figuring out what you want to do, just being a kid for a while.
And if you don’t want to go to school, we’ll get a tutor.
” Mrs. Collier pulled back to look at her.
“You look just like her, you know. Deep down inside, Becca would be so proud that she had such an amazing daughter.”
Sam closed her eyes. For the first time in forever, she wasn’t thinking about surviving for one more day. For the first time in forever, maybe things could be okay.
* * *
The call came at seven in the morning, jarring Tara awake. The ring cut through the silence, and she knew before looking at the screen that it wasn’t good news.
“Matt?” Her voice was thick with sleep.
“She didn’t recognize me yesterday.” Matt’s voice was hollow with exhaustion. “Not at all. When I walked into her room, she started screaming for help, saying a stranger was trying to break in. The nurses had to sedate her.”
Her heart clenched. Will’s arm tightened around her as she sat up in bed.
“Oh, Matt. I’m so sorry.”
“Over thirty years of marriage, and she looked at me like I was going to hurt her.” His voice cracked. “The doctor says it’s normal progression, but Tara... she was terrified of me. Of me.”
Tara closed her eyes, fighting back tears. Patty, who had trusted Matt completely, used to brag about having the most devoted husband in Miami.
“This morning she thought I was her father,” Matt continued. “Kept asking when her mother was coming to pick her up from school. She’s fifty-five years old, and she thinks she’s eight.”
They talked for another ten minutes, Matt sharing Patty had stopped eating regularly because she forgot what meals were for. When Tara finally hung up, Will was already up, putting on his robe.
“How bad?” he asked softly.
“She doesn’t know him anymore,” she whispered, allowing herself to sink into his embrace. “Her own husband is a stranger to her now.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“I keep thinking about the last time we talked. Kept asking if I’d seen her psychology textbook.” Her voice broke slightly. “She was so frustrated when I couldn’t answer her questions about classes she had taken over thirty years ago.”
Will’s hand moved in slow circles across her back. “You can’t save her from this. All you can do is love her.”
“But she won’t even remember that I do,” Tara said. “What’s the point of love if it just... disappears?”
“The point is that you’ll remember,” he said firmly. “Matt will remember. Everyone whose life she touched will carry those memories forward.”
Tara wanted to believe it would be enough. She thought about Patty’s fierce loyalty, the way she’d given Tara money for a fresh start. How she’d always known exactly what to say when life felt impossible, how she’d always been there, the very best friend she would ever have.
Ignoring the cold, she grabbed a quilt and took her coffee down to the dock, sitting in the chair, looking out over the water while Will left to work on a last-minute Christmas order. The familiar ritual grounded her, gave her hands something to do while her heart ached.
Sam’s little camper, decorated with its cheerful blue bows, caught her eye. Despite her worry about Patty, she felt a spark of hope that at least here one lost soul had found family.
Even if in Miami, another was slowly losing everything she’d ever known.
* * *
The plastic stick shook in Christina’s hands as she stared at the two pink lines that had just rearranged her entire future. She sat on the closed toilet in the bathroom, looking at the other two sticks on the counter. All three with identical results.
Pregnant.
The word echoed in her mind like a foreign language, impossible to believe despite the evidence in her shaking fingers.
She’d taken the test on a whim, mostly to rule out pregnancy as the cause of her nausea and exhaustion, sure it was cancer like her friend, Maria.
Her periods had always been irregular, sometimes three months between cycles, so the absence of two hadn’t seemed significant.
But now, staring at those pink lines, everything clicked into place. The waves of sickness that struck without warning. How her jeans were a little tighter around her waist despite her not eating as much. The bone-deep fatigue that no amount of sleep seemed to cure.
She was pregnant. With a stranger’s baby.
The memory of that night in Miami rushed back.
The farewell party her friends had thrown before she and Ryan had packed up their lives and moved here to North Carolina, the expensive nightclub where they’d celebrated.
She’d been feeling free and reckless, wanting one last night of the fun version of herself she’d put away when Ryan had shown up at her door.
The man had been breathtakingly gorgeous.
Dark hair, green eyes, a smile that suggested he was used to getting whatever he wanted.
He’d wanted to tell her his name, talk about what they did for a living.
But she’d said no, wanting to be fully present in the moment, not thinking about anything but losing herself to the music.
With a grin, he’d agreed, and they’d danced, laughed, drunk too much champagne.
When he’d suggested they continue the fun at his place, she’d said yes without hesitation.
It had felt like the perfect way to end her old life.
Wild and spontaneous and completely unlike the careful, responsible Christina she’d become.
The sex had been amazing, passionate in the way that only happened with beautiful strangers.
But when she’d woken up the next morning in his sleek condo that overlooked the ocean, tangled in sheets that smelled like expensive cologne, something had felt different.
The reckless thrill she’d been chasing felt hollow in the daylight.
She’d slipped out quietly while he was still sleeping, grabbing her red dress and crystal-studded heels, tiptoeing to the door without a sound. She remembered the way his hand had reached across the empty space where she’d been lying, how he’d stirred and mumbled something that sounded like, stay.
She’d told herself it didn’t matter. It was just a fun story to remember, a single night of freedom before starting her new life in Blueberry Hill. She’d never expected to see him again and had deliberately avoided giving him her contact information. She hadn’t even told him her name.
And now she was carrying his child.