Sweet Laurel Falls Read Online Free PDF Page B

on
her desk, staring into space.
    Jackson Lange was here in Hope’s Crossing.
    She’d never thought she would have occasion to use those
particular words together in the same sentence. Stupid and shortsighted of her,
she supposed. This was his hometown, and despite his avowed hatred of the place,
she should have expected that someday he would eventually be drawn back.
    One would assume some latent affection for the town where he
had lived his first eighteen years must have seeped into his bones. It was only
natural. Salmon spent their last breaths returning to their birthplace. Why
should she simply have assumed Jackson wouldn’t want to come back at least once
in twenty years?
    In her own defense, she had always assumed his hatred for his
father would also serve to keep him away.
    In the early years after Sage was born, she used to come up
with all these crazy, complicated scenarios in her head for what might happen if
he did return. She had worked it all out—what she
would say to him, how he would respond, the immense self-satisfaction she fully
expected to find from throwing back in his face that he had left her yet she had
managed to move on and survive.
    In her perfect imagination, he would come back on the
proverbial hands and knees, telling her what a fool he had been, begging her to
forgive him, promising he would never be parted from her again.
    Around the time she’d met Christian, she had been more than
ready to put those fantasies away as both impossible and undesirable. She had
put all her resources into thrusting Jack firmly into her past, and focusing
instead on her new relationship and the love she told herself she felt for
Chris.
    She could never completely assign him to the past, of course,
not when her beautiful, smart, clever child bore half his DNA. Sage was always a
reminder of Jack. She would turn her head a certain angle, and Maura would
remember Jack looking at her the same way. Sage would come up with a
particularly persuasive argument for something, twist logic and sense in a way
that never would have occurred to Maura, and she would remember how brilliantly
Jack could do the same.
    In all those early fantasies and all the years to come later,
it had never once occurred to her that someday Sage might find him on her own
and bring him back to the town he couldn’t wait to leave.
    Her sigh sounded pathetic in her small office, and she shook
her head. Nothing she could do about this now. Against all odds, he and Sage had found each other, and now she would have to
deal with the consequences of him in their lives. A smart woman would find a way
to make the best of it—but right now she didn’t, for the life of her, know how
she was supposed to do that.
    “Having a rough night?”
    She turned at the voice and found her mother in the doorway,
still lovely at sixty with her ageless skin and Maura’s own auburn hair, the
color now carefully maintained at To Dye For. Emotions crowded her chest at the
sight of the sympathy in her mother’s green eyes behind her little glasses, and
she suddenly wanted to rest her head on Mary Ella’s shoulder, as Sage had done
with her earlier, and weep and weep.
    Her mother and her sisters were her best friends, and she
didn’t think she would have survived the past eight months without them. Or what
she would have done twenty years ago, when she was seventeen and terrified and
pregnant in a small town that could still be closed-minded and mean about those
sorts of things.
    She fought back the tears and mustered a smile. “Rough night?
Yeah. You could say that.”
    “Oh, honey. Why did you keep this to yourself all these
years?”
    “I didn’t think it mattered. He was gone and insisted he wasn’t
ever coming back. Why did I need to flit around town badmouthing him for
knocking me up and then taking off?”
    Mary Ella stepped forward and pulled her into a hug, and those
blasted tears threatened again. “I have to admit, I suspected. I knew you had
become