Pine Hollow Undertakings (Pine Hollow #3)

1. The Surprise

Chapter one

The Surprise

When Julie Anderson first saw Ethan Walker she had been surprised. She shouldn't have been, he was, after all, Adam Walker's only brother and it made perfect sense that he would be standing up for his brother at his wedding. But it surprised her anyway.

She had believed herself. Mostly.

The Friday rehearsal dinner at Grange Hall had been manageable.

There had been enough people, enough noise, enough of Pine Hollow packed into that familiar room that Julie had been able to keep her distance without it being obvious.

She had talked to Kali Peterson for a long time about the bakery's new hours and had helped Lila Monroe settle a minor disagreement with her cousin about the seating arrangement and had eaten two pieces of Rachel Carter's lemon cake and had not, in the entire three hours she was there, been within ten feet of Ethan Walker. She counted that as a victory.

Saturday was harder.

The wedding was held in the park, which was exactly right for Adam and Hannah, exactly the kind of thing Hannah would have chosen, which of course, she had.

The chairs had been arranged in neat rows on the grass and the whole town had turned out in their August best, the women in sundresses and the men in shirt collars they were already working their fingers under.

The light was the particular gold of a Minnesota summer afternoon that made everything look like it had been lit on purpose.

Julie had been to a lot of weddings in this park.

She knew the ground under her heels and the way the breeze came through the trees along the east edge and the particular smell of cut grass and wildflowers that meant summer in Pine Hollow.

She slipped into a chair near the middle, fourth row on the groom's side, next to Lila Monroe who was already there in a blue dress that matched her eyeshadow and smelled like the good perfume she saved for occasions such as this one. Lila leaned over immediately.

"You're almost late," Lila whispered.

"I'm not late. They haven't started."

"Almost late is its own category." Lila patted her hand. "You look beautiful."

Julie thanked her and smoothed the skirt of her navy dress and looked toward the front where Ethan and Adam were beginning to take their positions.

She had stopped at the funeral home on the way, which was her own fault.

There had been nothing urgent, just a delivery she had wanted to confirm, but that was the thing about running a funeral home in a town of eighteen hundred people.

There was always something. She had learned a long time ago that the job did not take Saturdays off just because she wanted it to.

Her late husband Mark used to say she would be late to her own funeral.

She had told him that was the idea. He had laughed, and she had loved him for laughing.

Now he was buried in the Pine Hollow cemetery on the east side of town and she drove past it every single day.

She found Ethan before she meant to.

He was standing to the right of where Adam would stand, one step back, looking out at the gathered crowd the way people do when they are trying to look relaxed and not quite managing it.

He was wearing a dark suit that fit him well and his hair was shorter than she remembered from the rehearsal dinner, or maybe she just hadn't let herself look long enough on Friday to notice.

He was older. Of course he was older, they were all older, but it landed differently than she had prepared for.

The boy she had known at seventeen had become someone substantial, someone who took up space in a way that had nothing to do with size.

She had thought she remembered him clearly. She had been wrong about that.

He glanced out at the crowd and she looked down at the program in her hands.

Ethan Walker, Best Man.

She already knew that. She had known it for two weeks. There was no reason for her heart to do what it was doing.

Lila leaned over again. "Did you see who's standing up there?"

"I see him."

"He got handsome."

"Lila."

"I'm just observing." Lila folded her hands in her lap with the satisfied expression of someone who had made her point. "I'm allowed to observe."

The music changed before Julie had to respond, and the guests rose around her as Hannah Brooks, soon to become Hannah Walker, came through the gap in the rows on her father's arm. Every head turned to watch her walk toward the man waiting for her.

Hannah was radiant in the way that brides oftentimes are and sometimes aren't, the kind that has nothing to do with the dress or the flowers or the careful work Lila had done with her hair that morning, but comes from somewhere deeper.

From a person being exactly where they are supposed to be and knowing it.

Julie had seen a lot of weddings. She knew the difference between a bride who was happy and a bride who was certain. Hannah was both.

Adam Walker, standing there waiting, looked like a man who had been waiting his whole life for this exact moment and had only just understood that the waiting was over.

Julie had known Adam since he was a boy.

Had watched him grow up, had watched him work his father's farm, had watched him become the kind of steady, serious man that Pine Hollow produced sometimes.

She had never seen him look like this. It made her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with sadness and everything to do with the particular loneliness of watching other people arrive at things you had stopped expecting for yourself.

She did not look at Ethan.

She looked at Hannah's father, who was crying already, and at Jake Peterson in the second row with Kali tucked under his arm and at least four of their eleven children arranged beside them in descending order of height.

She looked at Harold Jensen who had worn the same brown suit to every event in Pine Hollow for as long as Julie could remember and was apparently not planning to change that tradition today.

The vows began.

She had heard a lot of vows. Not at weddings, but after them, when the people who had made them were gone and the words got read back at gravesides and in funeral homes and in the quiet of arrangements meetings where families tried to remember what mattered most about the person they had lost. She had heard those promises in eulogies and on memorial cards and in the things people said when they were trying to explain who someone had been.

She knew what they cost. She knew what it meant to make them and what it meant to try to keep them and what it meant to stand at a graveside in November and understand that keeping them was no longer an option.

To have and to hold.

Mark had held her hand when he was dying.

She had held his back and not let go until she had to, and afterward she had gone home and sat in their kitchen for a very long time before she called anyone.

Because once she called someone it would start, the arrangements and the decisions and the professional part of her brain taking over the way it always did, and she had wanted a few more minutes of just being his wife.

From this day forward.

She had thought, once, a long time ago, that she would make these promises to Ethan Walker.

She had been seventeen and completely certain the way only seventeen-year-olds manage to be certain, with their whole futures still abstract and their feelings still the biggest thing in any room.

Then he had left, and she had learned that certainty was just another thing you could be wrong about, and she had built a life anyway.

A real life. A good one. She did not spend time regretting it.

She was not regretting it now.

Adam's voice cracked on the last line of his vows and a soft ripple of laughter moved through the gathered crowd, the affectionate kind, the kind that meant everyone there was rooting for him. Hannah reached up and touched his face. The officiant smiled and kept going.

Julie looked down at her hands.

When Adam and Hannah were pronounced husband and wife and Adam kissed Hannah like the rest of Pine Hollow had ceased to exist, Julie rose with everyone else and clapped and felt the smile on her face go from something she was maintaining to something she actually meant.

She was happy for them. Genuinely and completely happy for them, and whatever else she was feeling she could sort out later, privately, the way she sorted out most things.

Outside in the August sun the wedding party was forming up for photographs and Pine Hollow was doing what Pine Hollow did, everyone talking at once, children running between adult legs, Harold Jensen immediately locating the refreshment table that had been set up near the edge of the grass.

Julie stood with Lila and accepted a glass of lemonade from Hannah's niece and watched the photographer arrange Adam and Hannah and their people in the afternoon light.

The park looked the way it always looked in August, green and familiar and exactly itself.

Ethan was laughing at something Sarah Erickson had said, his head tilted back, and she watched him for exactly as long as she could justify and then looked away.

"Reception's at four," Lila said. "At the Grange."

"I know."

"Are you all right?"

Julie looked at her. Lila was watching her with the careful expression of a woman who had been doing hair in Pine Hollow for ten years and knew everyone's business and mostly kept it to herself. Mostly.

"I'm fine," Julie said. "I'm happy for them."

"I know you are." Lila sipped her lemonade. "That's not what I asked."

Julie did not answer that, and Lila, to her credit, did not push.

They stood together in the August sun and watched Adam Walker pull his new wife close for one more photograph, and somewhere behind Julie, Ethan Walker was still laughing at something, and the afternoon stretched out ahead of her with the reception still to come.

She was fine. She had been fine for years. One afternoon was not going to change that.