Chapter 2 #2
And these last few years had been especially challenging.
His best friend, Jensen Webb, had somehow convinced his baby sister, Willow, to join the military.
It went against Ransom’s advice, and it left him sleepless for months.
Sure, he was an Army man himself, but that didn’t mean that he could live with his baby sister being in harm’s way.
And up to that point, Willow had looked up to him her whole life.
Ransom felt like he’d lost faith in his best friend and the trust of his little sister all at once.
Of course, he and Cassie had split up while he was away. That hadn’t really been a surprise. But what was a surprise was when he came home from serving and she promptly left with her new guy, all but saying that she’d had enough of being a parent and that it was now his turn.
He was grateful that at least he’d had video calls with the kids every week while he was gone, so he wasn’t a stranger to them. But it was a lot to ask of them to adjust to such a big change in their young lives.
And jumping into the return to civilian life and being a single dad all at once hadn’t exactly been easy for Ransom, no matter how much he treasured his time with the kids.
They were both incredibly resilient, and just generally awesome.
And he thought that was mostly due to the fact that they had each other.
Now that he finally had his feet under him, Willow was back home this winter, leaving him with the challenge of how to mend fences after years of quiet resentment.
And if that wasn’t enough to throw him off balance, apparently Hailey was home now too.
His heart ached all over again as he looked at the woman he had once loved and thought about what could have been.
I could never have let her stay, knowing her dreams weren’t here, he reminded himself for about the millionth time since the day she left Trinity Falls.
And as he thought through every awful decision he’d made in his life, he couldn’t stop seeing the look on her face the night he’d broken things off.
If I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have Travis and Mae, he reminded himself. And it would have killed her dreams.
But none of that mattered right now. What mattered now was what was right in front of him, and he was thankful for that.
The kids led Hailey over to the kitchen island and Mae hopped up on her stool to show her everything while Travis spread softened butter on a baguette.
“The sauce looks amazing,” Hailey said appreciatively.
“My daddy sneaks vegetables in it,” Mae revealed.
“That was some secret recipe I had,” Ransom teased as he walked over to join them. “Thanks a lot.”
Mae predictably cracked up, practically folding in half as she clung to the counter.
Hailey automatically put a hand on Mae’s waist to make sure she wouldn’t fall off the stool, and Ransom felt another tug in his heart.
He fixed his mind on their meal, getting the spaghetti and meatballs put together while Hailey and the kids got the garlic bread taken care of.
He couldn’t help noticing Hailey asking Mae to demonstrate her garlic sprinkling technique, as if she knew instinctively that the little girl wanted to be helpful.
Once the bread was in the oven, the kids brought Hailey over to the table to admire their advent calendars.
Their grandma had gone to be with her sister, who wasn’t well, so she couldn’t be around right now. They all missed her terribly, but she had taken to sending the kids mail and postcards, which never failed to charm them. And when they got the advent calendars she sent, they were beside themselves.
“Oh, these are beautiful,” Hailey said.
“They’re from Switzerland,” Travis told her. “That’s why we can’t read some of the words.”
“And they have chocolate in them,” Mae said, her eyes dreamy, her index finger toying with one of the little cardboard windows.
“You can open them after dinner,” Ransom reminded her as he started carrying over bowls of spaghetti.
“Dinnertime,” Travis sang out happily.
“Give me one with lots of meatballs,” Mae said, smiling up at Ransom.
Hailey hopped up and poured milk for the kids while Ransom got the garlic bread out and cut it up.
“I’ll say grace,” Travis offered when they got back to the table.
“Shouldn’t we wait for your mommy?” Hailey asked.
Travis looked to Ransom, his eyes widening with a panicked look.
“Our mommy doesn’t live here,” Mae said lightly before Ransom could think of what to say. “She runned away.”
“She ran away,” Travis corrected her.
“She did not run away,” Ransom said quickly. “She’s living on the west coast now and she stays too busy to visit much.”
“She never visits,” Travis rightly pointed out.
“You’re divorced,” Mae whispered to Ransom, like a scandalized lady at a society tea party spilling gossip.
He glanced up at Hailey, wondering what she was making of all this. He didn’t mind the kids’ honesty. He had never been one to gloss over tough topics, and he wanted them to speak their minds. But this conversation was kind of a lot.
“I would love for you to say grace,” Hailey said politely to Travis, who positively beamed back at her.
An hour later, the meal was eaten, and Hailey had insisted on drying the dishes while Ransom washed them. Travis wiped down the counters, and Mae loudly sang “The First Noel,” while she pushed all the chairs back to the table.
“Kids,” Ransom said as he handed Hailey the last plate. “Why don’t you go on up and brush your teeth, put on pajamas, and pick out a book for us to read? I’m going to walk Hailey back to the cottage and see if I can figure out why the power’s out.”
“Okay,” Travis said. “It’s all right, Mae, because we can see the cottage from your window, right?”
“Right,” she said, popping her head up from under the table where she had been grabbing a fallen napkin.
“Are you sure?” Hailey asked softly, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear as she looked up at Ransom.
“Of course,” he said, looking away before he gave in to the temptation to slide his own fingers through that golden hair.
They went to the front hall and pulled on coats and scarves before he opened the door and stepped outside. Clouds covered the stars again, and a freezing wind swirled lazy snowflakes in circles before they could drift to the ground.
“Wow,” Hailey said.
“I bet you see plenty of wild weather in New York,” he said.
“It’s not the same,” she said, shaking her head. “It can be beautiful when it snows, especially over Central Park. But the wind comes whipping between the buildings, and there’s always so much light from every direction, and the sounds of cars passing and planes overhead. This is just… peaceful.”
Ransom realized with surprise that he had been waiting for her to say it was lonesome.
Is that because I actually think it’s lonesome?
There was something wistful about the bare meadow sleeping under its blanket of snow with nothing but the hush of the wind for miles. But surely he hadn’t always felt that way. He loved Trinity Falls, heart and soul.
It’s because there are no other grownups in my life right now.
His mother had said some version of that to him every time they spoke lately.
At first he’d rolled his eyes inwardly at the idea.
Cassie had been a grownup and the damage she’d done to the kids was so awful he couldn’t conceive of making them vulnerable to another rejection by looking for another relationship.
It was perfectly fine that he spent his days talking only to kids and dogs. He’d certainly had worse conversations in his time.
“Anyway,” Hailey said. “Thank you for helping me tonight.”
“Of course,” he told her. “By the way, I was sorry to see BeeBee pass away on the show. I thought there was a lot of potential for her.”
“Thanks,” she said, looking surprised.
“What, you think your hometown fans don’t keep up with you out here in the sticks?” he teased.
She smiled at him, and then shook her head as if to say Classic Ransom.
“Seriously though,” he said. “I know your character got killed off and all, but that was only last night, and you already bought a place down here?”
“Well, I knew that my character was going to die like a month ago,” she explained, frowning. “But they made me sign an NDA, so I couldn’t tell anyone. I had to wait to leave New York until the episode aired.”
“That makes sense,” he said, nodding. “If you moved away or started working on another show it would be kind of a spoiler.”
“And I’d hate to ruin your enjoyment of Ridley Hospital,” she said.
“Oh, I won’t be watching it anymore,” he said. “I was a BeeBee Evans fan, not a Ridley Hospital fan.”
She laughed and the sound rang like bells through the frozen night.
She’s home, his helpless heart cried out.
But he knew better than to think it was forever.
She would be cast again immediately, and maybe even go on to play the kinds of parts she had wanted in the first place.
The only reason she didn’t have another show already was that she hadn’t been allowed to audition.
The farm was probably just an investment for her, or a nod to sentimentality.
If it is, then she’s sentimental about me.
But that kind of thinking was dangerous, so he pushed it out of his head.
“So, the power was out when you got there?” he asked her, forcing himself back to the task at hand as they crossed through the pine trees and the cottage came fully into view.
“No,” she said. “I came in and I was turning on lights and it went out as soon as I got back to the bedroom. Scared me to death.”
He tried not to smile at the idea. Hailey had always been easily frightened.
They had never been able to watch any scary movies when they came to the theater over in Springton Valley.
She didn’t even like hearing ghost stories around the campfire.
The idea of her all the way back in the bedroom of the old cottage when the power went out was a funny image, even if he did hate the idea of her being scared and alone.
No wonder she had hurried out of the house and run across the meadow.
“I’ll need to go down to the basement and check the breaker box,” he told her when they reached the front door. “But you can stay upstairs and just holler if the lights come on, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, in obvious relief. “Thank you, Ransom.”
He headed around the side to the metal doors and lifted one side to enter the basement from outside. The concrete steps were full of dead leaves and spiderwebs but they were perfectly sound.
He couldn’t help but chuckle at the idea that she had bought the house but was afraid to go into the basement with the power out.
He used the light on his phone to locate the panel, which has a tripped main breaker, just as he’d suspected.
He flipped it back, and a moment later heard Hailey cheering.
The sound filled his heart with sunlight for the second time in ten minutes.
When he got back outside, every single window of the cottage was illuminated, flooding the snowy yard with golden light. Hailey stood on the front lawn waiting for him with a big smile on her face, her hair aglow under the post light.
“You did it,” she said happily, like he was a superhero or something.
“It was just a breaker,” he said, though his chest was filled with pride at having made her smile like that.
“It wasn’t just anything,” she said. “Honestly? I was so spooked I probably would have gone to a hotel and called the power company in the morning.”
That made him laugh, and she joined him.
Hailey never had taken herself too seriously. It was one of his favorite things about her.
“Call me anytime,” he told her. “Or just stop by. I’m always glad to help.”
She tilted her chin up to look him right in the eyes and it was only then that he realized how close he was standing to her.
The wind lifted her hair and he caught a hint of her spiced apple shampoo. It snapped him back to the past, to that day in the barn when he’d kissed her…
His heart thundered in his chest and suddenly he ached to hold her close and never let her go again.
“I… I’d better get back to the kids,” he said, forcing himself to tear his eyes from hers. “See you around.”
See you around?
Seriously?
You reunite with the love of your life and that’s the best you can do?
“Okay,” she said, her voice a little breathless. “See you around, Ransom.”
He forced his feet to begin the walk back toward the pine trees, wanting nothing more than to turn around, fighting the urge to turn back to her with every step.
She’s just touching down, he told himself sternly. She’s not going to stay.
But somehow, his heart felt like it was breaking all over again.