Mine to Tell Read Online Free PDF Page B

tossed out.
    “I’m really not breaking us up,” I swore. “You were wise enough to see something was wrong, and I want to fix it. This is the only way I can.” Through the pain on his face I could see he wanted to believe me. It was then that I knew it was time to go. I had to get away before I lied my way right into staying instead of moving back home into Julianne’s house and fixing it up like I’d told everyone I was going to do.
    Edith, my boss at the newspaper, had been surprised at my announcement, but she liked me and agreed to buy articles from me about the renovation project if I could turn it into a human interest story. Their photographer, Jill, who’d become my best friend, told me she’d be glad to add pictures to the story anytime I wanted. I’d used her enthusiasm and my editor’s promise to print the story as leverage when I broke the news to my parents. They reacted like Trevor when I’d told them I was coming home to open Julianne’s house. I was a villain, a bad person, a woman destined for ruin, who cared little about her family. My newspaper’s support gave no credibility to what I said I planned to do. My mother argued and said I couldn’t do it. Everyone may have been right about my renovation skills, but it was restoring Julianne that frightened them, just as it did me.
    I reached up and hugged Trevor, wrapped my arms around him, and gave him a few moments to hug back. He did. And he held on when I was ready to let go. “See you soon, Trev,” I whispered in his ear. He let go then, and I climbed into my car and drove away.
    ****
    It was late in the day when I reached home. I was going to spend the night in my old childhood bedroom at my parents’ house and try to avoid all the questions about whether the wedding was postponed, the caterer cancelled, the flowers put on hold, and all of the other important details a possibly delayed wedding entailed. Trevor was their leverage like the newspaper article was mine, pawns in a war over Julianne’s house and the associated shame that went with it. This was going to be traumatic for my family. Not just because I was opening the Pandora’s Box of family sins they’d despised all these years, but also because of Trevor. They would fret over him, side with him, and probably take it better if I’d stayed in Cincinnati and he had moved here.
    In the morning I would move into Julianne’s house. Tomorrow was the day I would tear down the last barrier between me and my great-grandmother, the one I believed she had wanted torn down all these years. And hopefully with it would come down the barrier between me and Trevor, the Crouse women and the world, the Crouse women and themselves.

Chapter 6
    “Oh, that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest.”
    The door to Julianne’s house swung open, arthritic in its movement, sluggish after all these years of no one passing through. I stood at the threshold with a hammer in my hand, boxes and suitcases stacked behind me, and at my feet the old planks that had separated this house from the world. I took a deep breath and listened, waited for her voice in the musty quiet, the audible sound of an older woman welcoming me finally into her world as she heralded me in.
    In the tomblike stillness I heard a voice. Not hers, but Grandpa Samuel’s. The one he had kept to himself when he’d found out what I was planning to do this morning. His silence was loud in my heart, the agony on his face as he’d turned away more distinct than the arguments my mother had made.
    “You can’t do this. It’s wrong,” Mama had exclaimed before Grandpa Samuel appeared, her voice high and unattractive. I was ambushed at the breakfast table by my mother and father, and Paul Junior who was still living at home, pretending he’d actually take over the family farm someday. I focused on my parents and prayed Paul Junior would miraculously stay quiet and not degrade this into one of his sibling rivalry