And then she was gone.
And now she was back.
And his head hurt.
Rafe rapped his knuckles on the counter as goodbye, then strolled out of the warm, hipster haven and into the chilly autumn day outside.
Sable. Despite his best efforts not to listen, her name whispered on the breeze. Sable Sutton.
Rafe glanced down Laurel Avenue, towards the outskirts of town. Not the showy bit, with the quaint shops, the faux vintage street lamps, the autumnal trees overhanging the neat footpaths, but the old section. Not that long ago—before the beautification tourist money had poured into the outskirts of the snow fields—people had been hanging on by their fingernails.
His phone chirped. A message from Janie, reading,
Hey bro, you’ll never guess who’s back!
He put his phone away. And when he next breathed in, he could taste it.
Change. A change was coming. And it had nothing to do with the weather.
He shoved his hands deep into the fleece-lined pockets of his coat, turned, and walked the opposite way.
* * *
Sable didn’t bother to knock, for her mother’s front door was open, letting the cold air seep inside. There was also no doorknob, just a hole where a doorknob should be.
Her place in LA—her ex’s place—had deadbolts, security cameras and an alarm. Not much help when the person doing you wrong was on the inside.
Sable lifted her heavy suitcase over the threshold and trundled down the dark hall.
She followed the sound of Bob Dylan to find her mother in the sunroom at the far end of the house, standing on an ancient wooden step stool, hanging bunches of vibrant, dried chillies upside-down by hooks on the ceiling.
“Mercy?”
Her mother’s hands paused, before she looked over her shoulder. “Sable,” Mercy drawled. “What on nature’s green earth are you doing here?”
Missed you too, Mum.
“I’m back. For a visit,” she added quickly, when her mother’s eyes narrowed, making her crow’s feet pop.
“Why?”
“You could at least try to look happy to see me.”
“Of course, I am. I’m just surprised.”
Right.
Mercy exhaled hard, wiping her hands in the length of her flowing skirt as she jumped down from the stool. Then she padded up to Sable, feet bare, ankle bracelets jangling, long auburn hair streaked with silver floating behind her like a fiery cloud.
She stopped a good metre away from her daughter. No hugs. Not even a pat on the arm. “Have you been next door?”
Round one, here we go. Sable nodded.
“Didn’t take you long to go sniffing around that place again.”
The urge to duck her head was potent. It took every bit of courage she had left to fight it. To look her mother in the eye.
Sensitive as a kid, Sable had always tended towards conciliation. Avoiding eye contact, making herself appear smaller than she was, in the effort not to make her mother sad. For she loved her mum, as hard as Mercy made it to do so.
But when it had hit her, a few months back, that she had fallen into the exact same pattern in her relationship with her ex—not rocking the boat, putting his needs, his career first—that had been the real beginning of the end.
First time she’d stood up for herself, in a real way, he’d acted swiftly, brutally unburdening himself of all the secrets and lies she’d allowed herself to simply not see in order to keep the peace.
She was not going to make her own needs appear smaller for someone else’s sake ever again.
Sable lifted her chin a fraction. “I caught up with Janie. And kept any sniffing to a minimum.”
Mercy snorted her response, then slanted her daughter a rare look of respect. Maybe this “standing her ground” thing would work on more levels than she’d imagined.
On that score... “What on earth happened to the old Thorne shack?”
Mercy’s inner battle was written all over her face before she admitted, “He knocked it down.”
“Mr Thorne?”
Mercy shook her head.
“Then who?” Say it, Sable thought. Say his name.
“Rafe Thorne.”
Never one name, always both. Like a serial killer.
“The father finally drank himself to death a few years back. Day after the funeral I woke up to a god-awful racket. Found your boy tearing the place apart. He carried every single piece of the place away until there was nothing left but the footprint. Then he dug that up with an excavator and grassed the lot over.”
Oh. She hadn’t even known Rafe’s father had died, much less the rest. If she had, she would have sent word. Though which words? Sorry didn’t seem quite right. Neither did good riddance.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sable asked. “You know...when I rang and said, ‘Anything exciting happen in town?’”
“It mustn’t have seemed relevant at the time.”
Relevant? Hang on... “Did you think I’d come running home if I knew?”
The glint in her mother’s eyes said it all.
“I wouldn’t have.” Probably. “Just so you know. I wouldn’t have run back. I had a life over there. Just like you always wanted for me.”
Only, in the end, that life hadn’t been for her. And Sable was more than ready to curate one that was.
“Anyway, it’s been a very long couple of days. I’d love to crash, if it’s okay.”
Mercy waved a hand in the direction of the bedrooms. “There’s a couch in one of the rooms. You might have to move a few things.”
Super. Sable spun her suitcase over a knot in the floor before heading back down the hall.
One room was full of nothing but dust motes. Her mother was not a collector of things. Too hard to cut and run. In the front room her mother’s unmade bed with its slew of hand-woven blankets showed through the wide-open door.
The only room left was Sable’s old bedroom.
It was the first room she’d stayed in long enough to tack things on the walls: pictures torn from magazines, drawings, photos she’d shot as her interest in photography had taken off.
That room was why Radiance was the first place that had ever felt like home.
That room and the boy next door.
It took a nudge with her boot to encourage the door open as it caught on a rug that had not been there when she’d left. The desk under the window was a new addition too. And the faux suede couch with bottom-shaped dips in the seat cushions and an escaped spring in the back. In fact, not a single reminder of her had remained.
That was Mercy in a nutshell. Seeing sentimentality as a weakness. Leaving her daughter to feel as if she left pieces of herself behind every place they lived.
Sable sank into the couch with a groan and stared blankly at the bare walls long enough to make out the sun-stained echoes of the pictures that had been stuck there years before.
She imagined she knew how they felt.
Copyright © 2020 by Ally Blake
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ISBN-13: 9781488065187
Bound by the Prince’s Baby
&nbs
p; Copyright © 2020 by Jessica Gilmore
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Bound by the Prince's Baby Page 17
