“Alex, we want to keep the store, give it a go.”
“We?” Alex asked.
“Freesia and I.”
Alex’s gaze shifted from Charlotte to Freesia. “That true?”
Freesia nodded.
“I see.” Alex sat in the high-back chair, the seat of so much love and discord. Perched at the cushion’s edge, ready to spring, she gathered her composure around her like a wool cloak.
Charlotte couldn’t bear it. The divisiveness. The us-versus-her thing they had going. She approached her big sister and crouched down like she was giving out soothing words after a skinned knee.
“All my life, I’ve felt like a sheet of paper, ripped into smaller pieces to make others feel whole. When I got married, I gave the biggest piece to Nash. Three kids each took their piece, and when Daddy was sick, his piece became everything. When he died, I gave another piece to Mama to run the shop. Just once, even if only for a while, I want to feel what it’s like to take back a piece, for me.”
Alex swiped a fallen strand of Charlotte’s long bangs aside and tucked it behind her ear. The gesture was maternal, sweet, and wholly Alex, never one to allow one hair out of place. Her expression remained unreadable.
“If anyone can help us turn this place around, it’s you.” Charlotte nudged her sister’s knee. “Best businesswoman east of the Mississippi—by about twenty miles or so.”
She didn’t quite smile. More like she’d left her anger in the car and didn’t want to go back for it. Her head cocked to one side.
“It’s specialized, Evangeline. This business is once or twice in a person’s lifetime. In a place with such a small population, that frequency isn’t viable. It never was. That’s the reason Mama and Daddy had almost nothing left to show for it.”
They both knew that wasn’t true. Charlotte had seen the numbers, money spent on a private school education up north. Alex rewriting history to ease a guilt Charlotte had never once made her feel.
“They had what was inside these four walls. This place is special, Alex. And with Freesia’s one-of-a-kind dresses and a website that Mama always resisted, we can draw traditional and modern customers from all over. Do both. Diversify. Isn’t that one of those fancy words you’re always throwing around?”
This time, Alex gave a shaky smile.
“We’ll listen. Go to every realtor meeting. I promise. But you gotta let us in. We can try this without you, but we’d rather be successful with you.”
“Three months,” said Freesia. “I’ll sign the contract of sale as soon as your realtor can have it drawn, but it stays in the shop safe for one business quarter on good faith. If the business doesn’t show a profit by the end of April, I’ll head back to Georgia with my third of the sale, and you can forget you ever saw me.”
“I’ll sign, too,” Charlotte said. “We’ll call it The April Experiment.”
“You’re asking me to handle financials from Boston?”
“I’m asking to you to handle Boston from Devon,” said Charlotte. “Most of what you do is done on a laptop with numbers and graphs no one but you understand, anyway. For the rest of it, you can commute. You said, yourself, that you have a kazillion vacation days built up and Michael is always busy the first half of the year with his fundraising and campaigning, anyhow.”
Alex stood and turned away. Something was wrong, far beyond the business, Mama’s death, her whole aversion to the Deep South. Charlotte had known it since Alex had set foot back in Devon.
“We can put a desk upstairs,” Freesia offered. “Your own space to keep an eye on things while the place is renovated. Be good to address the rotting floor and the drywall that was never finished in the office. Would get more in the asking price come May.
“I have to go home,” said Alex.
“And you will,” said Charlotte. “When need be.”
“I have a lot going on. Bear…he’s sick. I can’t kennel him.”
“Why on earth would you kennel him? Bless his heart, I’m sure Michael is taking good care.”
Alex’s chin lowered. Her dark hair curtained forward.
Charlotte couldn’t put her finger on it. Her sister was reaching for reasons to go when she had the very best reason to stay: family. Devon was where Alex belonged. As sure as Charlotte stood there with a belly fussing for dinner, she was convinced that no one traveled that far away from their roots without being whipped around by life’s branches.
“Let’s do this. Let’s be this, together,” said Charlotte. “All in.”
Alex turned, her gaze holding her sister’s. “April 30th.”
“Not one day more,” Charlotte assured her.
“I’ll regret this.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.”
Alex glanced toward the street as if she sought out one last means of escape. “All right.”
What came out of Charlotte’s throat was neither a hoot nor a holler. Straight-up, it came out like a snort of glee. She hugged Alex and bounced up and down, a little like dry humping a marble pillar without the naughty bits, but Charlotte didn’t care.
Freesia stood beside them, at some distance, hand extended.
Alex grasped it.
At the first touch between them, Charlotte’s heart beat double-time.
“If Freesia’s gonna sew the best damned bridal gown this state has ever seen, she needs a place to work—dress forms, oiled machine, supplies. Three months at the inn’ll cut into her finances so much she won’t be able to pay attention. And one day under my roof with three kids and a husband that thinks wearing pants is high living, she’ll be hightailing it back to Georgia long before May.”
“She’s right,” Alex said. “If we’re going to do this right, it should work for everyone. You can move into the house. Mama’s sewing room should have everything you need.”
“Will you look at that?” Charlotte beamed. “Like we’re sisters already.”
And yet.
Alex took a step back then two, distancing herself, a colorless wash to her complexion.
“She’ll never be my sister.”
The opening and closing of the shop door ushered in the cold once again.
8
Alex
“It’s a trick question,” said Alex.
She rapped the eraser-end of her pencil against the kitchen table. In her fourth year at Saint Sebastian’s Academy, she wore a plaid-skirted uniform and swept her Mary Janes in amplified arcs beneath her chair. Before her, she had transformed graph paper into a logic system of Xs—facts—and Os—the not-quite-sures. Elias March had The Advocate open, a nip of whiskey riding the bottom of his glass.
“Why?”
“The clues say nothing about a fish. It’s implied because the only other animals are a dog, a cat, a horse, and a bird. Maybe the German in the green house who likes coffee owns a ferret.”
The newspaper’s top corner bent to reveal her father’s watery gray eyes behind his reading glasses. His cheeks rounded, giving his dark frames a boost. “Einstein’s humor, I suppose.”
“Does that make us part of the two percent who can solve the riddle?”
He snatched her nose with his first two fingers, a trick that wasn’t really a trick once she figured out her nose was really his bent thumb. Still, he always stole it when she impressed him.
“Alexandra, it makes you part of the two percent who can accomplish anything in life so long as you think through challenges.”
That same year, she had puzzled through his truck taillights disappearing in an autumn fog. Turned out, she wasn’t in the two percent on that one.
Inside her childhood home, Freesia rattled the empty spaces, her every movement like a curator at a museum. Her composed manner, her talent for gathering every thought before speaking, drove Alex to teeth gnashing and dark fantasies about her wandering out late at night and never coming back. Freesia was undeniably Elias’s child in those composed moments. In many ways, his attention to life was what Alex had
loved most about him, but where had his concern for details been during those sixteen lost days?
Alex snuggled beneath the sheepskin blanket in the backyard. Fire pit flames had long given way to blackened remains. She wanted to add a log and stay on the Adirondack until the light turned off behind Charlotte’s old curtains, but Freesia haunted the house well past midnight. Sleeplessness something else they shared, apart from being the daughter of a dead man.
Applying the logic system of Xs—facts—and Os—the not-quite-sures, Alex had come to three conclusions. Elias March’s seven hundred and twenty-seven mile journey to the Georgia coast would have carved four travel days from the sixteen, given his old truck’s propensity for overheating. He had never mentioned a passing interest in Georgia—or the east coast, for that matter—so meandering travels likely subtracted even more days from the twelve he had left with Freesia’s mother—Camilla Day—though Alex felt like she’d swallowed embers each time the woman’s name surfaced in her mind. And her father’s balm of choice and latent demon—whiskey—was present in his decision to betray his family.
The answers were less than perfect, but they were something.
Her blinks grew long, heavy. She must have dozed because her awareness that the fire had been stacked came slowly. Robust flames pushed back against the night’s low ceiling. The blanket was tucked around her like a cocoon.
Jonah filled the adjacent chair. He manned the fire pit like they were in Siberia and he was singularly responsible for them making it out alive. Mostly, she guessed life and death was easier to think about than what had passed between them.
“Hey,” said Alex.
“Always did like sleeping out under the stars.”
Memories flushed her cheeks. “As I recall, there never was much sleeping.”
Jonah smiled. One of those close-lipped, nostalgic numbers that holds on until it turns sad at the end. She noted the passage of time in the lines of his face. His years had cosmically balanced, consistently trading bliss for heartache: being adopted, for the loss of his parents; all-state baseball champ, for back pins after a ladder incident; his first business, for an arson fire; Ibby, for cancer ravaging his beloved wife.
“Perfectly good house, steps away.”
“I thought so. Once.”
Odd coming from her, she supposed. To Jonah, who had courted so much heartache, more than one person should have in a lifetime, Alex must have seemed entitled.
“You must think I’m being dramatic.”
“Nah. You were always the least dramatic person I knew. Always had answers. Had everything figured out.”
“I didn’t figure on this one.”
Jonah nodded.
“You didn’t come over this late just to add logs to my fire.”
“That was meant to soften the news.”
Soften and news in the same sentence made her stomach clench. “You’d be hard-pressed to give me anything worse than I’ve already heard lately.”
“Turns out the junk—as you called it—was hiding more than cosmetic issues. Plumbing. Electrical. Leaky roof. Code violations. You name it.”
“Do you have time to fix it?”
“Isn’t the time so much. I can’t do it for free, Alex. Not this.”
Alex thought back to two cashed-out life insurance policies and a veteran’s spousal death benefit that had barely covered Mama’s funeral expenses. Other funds were tied up in the house—something they had to hold onto for at least three more months. She remembered the account she still shared with Michael. What was the withdrawal amount that balanced a mistress he no longer cared to hide?
“No, yeah. Of course you can’t. I’ll pay.”
“Between the water damage in the office, the problems the upstairs exposed, and the necessity for subcontractors, we’re talking close to ten grand.”
A drop in the jewel-studded Leighton-family coffers. “Do what you have to do. Would’ve come out in the inspection, anyway.”
He held a M-shaped branding iron her father had bought on a trip to visit cousins in Texas. The fact that Jonah knew where her parents kept it all these years, hidden alongside the flagstones in the grass, was a testament to the weave of their lives. He stoked the fire.
Alex’s body flushed with heat.
“Must not seem like much to someone who handles million-dollar corporations.”
“It’s easier to spend other people’s money. Especially when it comes from the pocketbooks of men who spend close to the annual budget for the state legislature on jet trips out to dinner and hair plugs.”
He laughed, clear notes to an old song. Alex once obsessed about making it happen—even marked a smiley face in her journal each time she made him laugh hard enough to clutch his stomach or tear up or break wind. She thought if she could tally his happiness, it might outpace the sadness in his young life. The notes were more reserved now, still satisfying.
“You’ve done good for yourself, Alex. Everyone says so. Best success story to come out of Devon since Raelyn Foster married that NASCAR driver’s brother.”
Alex wondered if Raelyn Foster had a failed marriage, a high-rise apartment with uncomfortable furniture, and a childhood that had proved to be a lie.
“There would’ve been a sign right at the entrance to town if your mom had any say about it,” Jonah said.
“Home of Alexandra March, queen of ultra-boring data systems.”
“Queen of capsized rowboats.”
A smile trickled loose. God, what had it been—four times? She never did step on boats again, more so because Jonah wasn’t there to save her if she fell in. “And doing your homework.”
“And nosebleeds,” he added. “Mostly while making out.”
“That was one time in the art closet.”
“It was dark. I thought it was an extra wet kiss.”
Memories stacked until the warmth flooding her had nothing to do with the fire’s heat. They dissolved into laughter.
“Like tonguing a penny,” said Jonah between chuckles.
The night glistened. A tear squeezed from his eye. She’d have to mark that one in her journal; she couldn’t remember the last time she had been able to draw a smiley face. Years. Decades.
Embers blew, scattered. Light and shadows and silence carried away his amusement. His prodding at the logs became focused.
“Home of Alexandra March. Up and gone.”
The lightness left her as it had come: unexpected. She found her feet in the blanket, set them against flagstone. “I should get inside.”
“Stay. I’m sorry. I just…”
Alex felt exposed, as if she had shed a coat of armor instead of a blanket. Hairs along her neck prickled. She was trapped between the sincerity of his apology and the effort to stand. Why were these damned chairs so low to the ground, anyway? Who thought wood-sanctioned ass-sitting was a good idea?
“Katherine was beautiful. Breathtaking, actually. I used to wake up in the morning beside her and wonder what I’d done to deserve someone so selfless. She used to put notes in the pocket of my jeans after she washed them or write something on the mirror in makeup so I would see it when I shaved. In twelve years, she missed two days—the day Isabel was born and the morning...”
She didn’t wake up. What Mama told Alex.
“Who does that?”
Alex had no answer. Certainly not her. She also had zero desire to hear Katherine’s perfections catalogued, but the night had grown powerfully dense and the inertia to move overwhelmed Alex.
“But for all her spirit and patience and her endless capacity for listening, she wasn’t you. She was never you.”
Alex’s heart slipped to her stomach. “Jonah—”
“One day we were finishing each other’s sentences and the next you were gone. I spent years going over what I must have said or done or didn’t do, thinking I wasn’t enough.”
“Don’t say that, Jonah.”
He shrugged. “When you didn’t come back, I moved out to Sac
ramento, then Phoenix to live with uncles and cousins; took odd jobs in the hope of finding one thing that would make me feel settled.”
“And?”
“Try a little bit of everything, you never really get good at any one thing.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you shouldn’t get away with not knowing.”
Alex rubbed the tension from her brow. “I went to summer school, carried a full load for a double major. Then it was grad school.”
“What about holidays?”
“Internships. Study abroad.”
“Anything to avoid coming home, that it?”
“Yes,” Alex said, honestly. “But it wasn’t you, Jonah. Believe me when I say that it wasn’t you. This place, these people. I wanted more than Devon. I knew if I ever came back, it’d get ahold of me again, and I wouldn’t have the courage to leave.”
It was true—every damned word. But it was also the grandest lie of all. She’d left because staying here at eighteen, to raise Jonah’s child, was never part of her plan. And she left because miscarrying the child he never knew about, the child who’d made her want to stay, required new, flawless plans that wouldn’t disappoint.
“I couldn’t reach my potential here,” said Alex.
“You sound like your father. He said the same thing that first night I couldn’t find you. I found him in the garage, working on that black truck. He barely looked up. Implied that potential and Jonah Dufort could never occupy the same breath.”
“He wanted the best for me. Same as any father.”
“He taught you to run,” said Jonah. “When things get hard, run.”
Gooseflesh raised on her back. Despite the memory of capsule-shaped taillights disappearing around the corner, Mama collapsing on the porch, Alex protested. “That’s not fair. You knew I had a plan.”
“Right. The infamous plan. If it doesn’t make it on a page in Alex’s journal, it never existed.” He stood, his voice loud and dissonant. “Tell me, did I ever make it on a page?”
She thought of the pressed lyreleaf sage that he had once threaded into her hair, now a brittle bookmark, a quote once fresh on his idealistic tongue that she had transferred to the margins of each successive journal: choose, don’t settle. And she thought of the sketch of the ruins, meticulously preserved, juvenile in execution but revered like Renaissance art in a private collection. Jonah wouldn’t understand; she barely understood.
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 7
