‘Knitting metal,’ corrected Daisy. ‘There’s a difference. It’s what your hands already know.’
Fiona stopped listening to her. They were now in front of the plate glass window. Inside, she could see Toots Harrison laughing with Buzz Archer. Anna and Jake Keller shared pancakes with Milo at another booth.
And there, at the third booth from the end, was Abe.
Sitting with Rayna.
Their bodies were leaning in toward each other, their heads tilted downward. Rayna was speaking very seriously, her face intent. Abe’s gaze was direct. Focused. There was no one else in the room for either one.
Daisy was already at the open double doors. ‘Ready?’
Fiona pressed her lips together. She felt a surge of adrenaline in her knees as if she’d caught herself from almost falling. She shook her head just once.
‘I believe in you.’ Daisy’s words rang wide through the street.
A tiny earthquake occurred, not under Fiona’s feet, but within her body. She noticed for the very first time that Daisy’s voice reminded her of her mother’s. Melodic. Beautifully pitched.
The only difference was that Daisy loved her. A mother – a good mother – loved her.
Her father loved her. Gloria did, too.
People in this town loved her.
And maybe bigger than realizing that, full force, was the epiphany that followed just as quickly and earth-shakingly – that she loved them back.
Fiona Lynde, in all her imperfection, loved back whole-heartedly. The way she’d always wondered if she’d be able to. She treated Stephen Lu like a son because she felt maternal toward the man who’d come to her as a boy. She force-fed Daisy and Tabby healthy food because she wanted to take care of them, for them to be healthy, so they would always be near her.
She had a family. She had mothers, a multitude of them.
She was loved. She had already succeeded.
So what if she’d done everything a woman could do to lose forever the man she loved?
Maybe someday her heart would recover, although Fiona doubted it. And it didn’t matter anyway – not in the grand scheme of things. It would have been nice to have realized she was completely, hopelessly, totally in love with Abe Atwell before she exposed his greatest secret and burned down the object he loved the most, but since she hadn’t, there was only one thing she could do now.
She touched Daisy lightly on the shoulder as she passed her.
‘Do it, girl,’ she heard Daisy whisper. ‘You got this.’
At Abe and Rayna’s table, she stopped.
Rayna’s eyes got wide. Her mouth dropped open. ‘Fiona!’
Over the sudden hush in the diner, over the clinks of cutlery and the laughter of the oblivious ranchers in the side room, she could only hear him. She could hear his breathing, caught in his chest, could hear his heart, racing almost as fast as her own.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
Abe stared. The lines at the corners of his eyes were crinkled deeper, as if he’d had little sleep last night.
‘I’m just so sorry. For all of it,’ Fiona said. She knew everyone in the room was listening, rapt. Shirley wasn’t even pretending to move, her now-empty coffee pot still hovering over Abigail MacArthur’s full cup. Toots’s needles in the next booth didn’t even twitch. ‘I’ve never said anything I regret more than what I said on that stage about you and your father. I was reacting to what you said about my mother, which you shouldn’t have said, by the way.’ There, she’d gotten that out. That wasn’t her point, though. ‘The fact is, you took care of your family that night when you swam home. You told me you abandoned your father, but that’s just what you think. What I know is that your father was hurt, saying things that didn’t make sense, and you tried your damndest to help him. When you couldn’t, you saved yourself, because he wanted you to, and in doing so you saved your mother a lifetime of living without either of the men she loved.’
She went on, taking a deep breath in order to keep her heart beating, so she could keep going, keep speaking to the man who stared at her like she was an apparition. ‘You swam toward the lighthouse your father loved. The lighthouse you loved. That night, you swam toward me, Abe. You just didn’t know it.
‘And then I burned it down. There’s no way I can explain that away, and I’m sure you’ve read the papers, so I won’t try. But all I can say is this, with no expectation of any kind, I’m so terribly, awfully sorry. I lost my mother, and I loved her. I never got to say goodbye. I know you loved your father, and the lighthouse, and you didn’t get to say goodbye to them, either.’
Fiona touched the Formica table that matched the island she’d built in her kitchen. Maybe it could keep her standing for the next, and last, thing she had to say.
‘I love you. And … goodbye.’
Then she spun on the heel of her cowboy boot and ran out of Tillie’s, ran for the filling station as fast as she’d ever run before, ignoring the burning in her weakened lungs and the pain in her broken heart.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The grace of knitting is its forgiveness. The grace of your soul is the same. – E. C.
Abe wondered if he looked as stunned as he felt. Like a fish still on the hook, whomped onto the deck, right before it quit breathing forever.
Rayna brushed her hair off her shoulders and turned in her seat, raising her eyebrows at the crowd of people staring. She waited – pointedly – until everyone had gone back to a semblance of normal conversation. Then she leaned forward. ‘You see?’
‘What?’ Abe had absolutely no idea what to do with anything Fiona had just said. ‘What do I see?’
‘She didn’t mean to.’
He thought back, his mind racing. ‘Did she actually say that?’
‘What does your heart say?’
He closed his eyes briefly. Opened them and took a sip of his coffee. How could he trust his heart? How could anyone do such a foolish thing?
Rayna leaned back, keeping her arms outstretched, palms flat against the tabletop. ‘Did you know Eliza Carpenter?’
‘Through my mother, yeah. I know who she was. I know Cade MacArthur, of course.’
‘So you know Cade was the great-nephew she basically adopted. But did you know she and Joshua couldn’t have children?’
Abe shook his head. This was knitter gossip his mother would have at her fingertips, not him.
‘She asked me once, before she moved, to drive her to see the elephant seals. On our way, she told me the story. They’d tried, for a long time, obviously unsuccessfully. They’d had a happy life. They were more in love on the day Joshua died than when they’d married. But once, many years before he died, a woman told Eliza she thought Joshua might be cheating on her. Sugar Watson had seen him in the living room of Margee Tindall’s place every Tuesday night for a month. Eliza knew that those were the nights he’d said he was working with the pastor, building new pews.’
Abe frowned, failing to see what this had to do with him and Fiona.
‘Eliza didn’t believe the woman. Even though evidence pointed to the contrary, she believed in Joshua.’
‘Did she ask him about it?’
‘She didn’t have to.’
‘Rayna.’ He picked up a piece of bacon and pointed it at her. ‘What’s your point?’
She snatched the bacon out of his hand and took a bite. Around her mouthful, she said, ‘That’s my point. She didn’t doubt Joshua.’
‘But what if he had been screwing around? You can’t trust anyone absolutely.’
‘You think that because you lost faith in yourself. You lost faith in me.’ Rayna looked down at the rest of the bacon. ‘And while women are throwing apologies at you, I don’t believe I ever officially said that I was sorry. I am, you know. Not that I didn’t marry you, because we weren’t right for each other. But I’m so sorry I hurt you.’
‘Holy shit,’ said Abe. ‘I don’t even …’
Rayna sat up straighter and polished off the bac
on. ‘Anyway. She trusted Joshua completely. Eliza listened, then she shooed Sugar away. Two months later, Joshua brought her the stained glass panel Margee had been teaching him to make – an image of Eliza’s favorite sheep, grazing on the hill behind their house. And Eliza wasn’t surprised. That’s the thing. It came up in the car, because I didn’t know then whether I should trust Tommy or not. She told me her story. She knew she never had to doubt Joshua, because she just listened to her heart. I remember being so angry with her for a few weeks, because if I were to follow her advice, I would have left Tommy back then, years ago. I knew he was probably cheating on me then. Or about to.’
‘Leave him,’ said Abe. ‘Rayna. You have to.’
She smiled. ‘I will. I am. I’ll probably need your help. But we’re not talking about me right now. You know whether she meant to hurt you with anything she did.’
Slowly, Abe shook his head. ‘She didn’t.’
‘Of course not. Anyone could look at her and tell that.’ Rayna gripped his hand and squeezed. ‘You just had to figure that out yourself. Now, what are you going to do?’
Abe moved his plate out of the way and briefly rested his forehead on the table.
What was he going to do?
When he lifted his head, he looked right at Rayna. ‘I’m going to get her what she wants. I’ve got to go.’ He threw money on the table and dropped a kiss on Rayna’s upturned cheek. ‘Thanks, Ray. For everything.’
Phone in hand at the marina office, Abe knew exactly who to call. Officer Moss owed him a favor from a year back when he’d run his wife’s boat aground in the estuary. Abe had hauled him out and blamed a fast-running tide when it was really Moss’s not watching where he was going that got him in the pickle.
Moss gave him the number he needed for the state of California, a friend who owed him a favor.
After three more phone calls, all chockfull of testosterone-driven who-do-you-know posturing, Abe learned what he’d set to find out. But it was the wrong damn answer.
Fiona’s mother was dead. Years and years before, she’d died, the very same year she’d left. A bad year for Cypress Hollow kids to lose parents, apparently.
Dammit. What did he do now?
How did a man show the woman he loved that he believed in her? You sure as hell didn’t take her that kind of bad news.
But now he’d have to tell her, because he couldn’t not.
He needed to bring her something else, too. Something good.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Love through everything. – E. C.
‘No,’ said Gloria kindly, as she took the plate out of Fiona’s hands. ‘We can’t. It’s the principle.’
‘You can’t sleep in a house? Period? Or just my house?’
Gloria shook her head and her long silver earrings, the very first pair of snowflake earrings Fiona had finished, glittered above her gauzy green scarf. ‘We promised each other.’
Tinker, sharpening a pencil with a knife – to keep his hand in – nodded. ‘While we have a house on wheels, we sleep with each other, in our own bed.’
‘You have a tin can on wheels. What happens when you fight?’
Fiona almost expected them to say something annoying like We never fight, but her father said, ‘It’s awful.’
Gloria nodded. ‘Terrible. You should hear us rage.’
They did fight? For all the unhappiness of her parents’ marriage, Fiona had never heard them fight. The anger and tension was always just there, under the surface of every word, like heat rising from sun baked asphalt.
‘She screams like a witch on a bad acid trip.’ Tinker gave Gloria an affectionate pat on the rump.
‘He forgets English! He uses made-up words!’
Fiona started. Was that where she got it from?
Gloria went on, ‘We fight until we’re done fighting. No one in the bed till it’s over.’
Tinker dried the plate Gloria handed him. They were still treating her as if she was breakable. She was, just not in the way they thought. ‘What if your fight lasts three days?’
Tinker shook his head. ‘I can’t do more than two days without sleep. So we patch things up quick.’
Gloria patted her own cheek with a wet hand. ‘Darlin’, I need my beauty sleep. I make him tell me I’m right.’
‘Even if she’s not.’
‘Works for me.’ Gloria shrugged and handed him another glass. ‘Go lie down in the living room, honey.’
Tinker said, ‘Okay.’
‘Not you. Your daughter. You stay and help me finish these dishes.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right.’
‘I’m really okay, you two.’
Gloria gave Fiona a gentle push. ‘Take your knitting. I’ll bring you a glass of wine. Make me happy. Go lie down and watch the window. They said it might snow.’
Fiona snorted. Snow. ‘That doesn’t happen here.’
Tinker dropped a fork into the drawer with a thunk. ‘Did in 1983!’
‘So I’ve heard.’
‘Go,’ said Gloria.
Fiona went. It was a cold night, colder than it had been all week. The fire crackled in the fireplace, and she pulled a blanket over herself on the couch. She flipped on the outside lights so she could see into the garden and picked up her needles. Strangely enough, since knitting the wire snowflake earrings for Gloria, she’d understood how to knit with fiber. Her fingers had just gotten it, finally. Now she was working on a pair of lacy snowflake earrings made out of fine gauge white merino. She figured she could sell them next to the harder, sparklier, metal jewelry at the station.
Fiona’s fingers stilled, and she looked outside. What did Abe’s cat Digit do on a night like this? Did Abe have a fireplace on his houseboat? Or a stove? She couldn’t remember. Maybe they curled up together, two grumpy males, stuck together out of habit and stubborn affection.
The thought physically ached, low in her chest.
She hadn’t expected him to call. Not after what had happened this morning, not after what she’d said. She hadn’t expected forgiveness.
Still, facing the fact that she’d never see hide nor hair of the man again – unless he was pumping his gas, facing the water – hurt more than breathing the heated gas in the keeper’s house had.
Maybe she’d get a cat. Would it eat Tamale? Because that would be unacceptable, but it would be nice to have another warm-blooded creature in the house.
Something drifted by the window, catching her eye. Something white and small.
A powder of some kind?
More of it floated down, spinning in front of the geraniums and jasmine, falling gently to the ground.
‘Snow!’
Fiona jumped up and pressed her hands to the windows. Snow, snow, snow! Right outside. Floating. Falling.
Snow being snow right outside her house.
‘Gloria! Dad! Snow! It’s snowing!’
They didn’t come rushing in. They must not have heard her. Fiona let herself enjoy watching the glorious stuff drifting down for a moment. She’d go outside into it, yes. Of course. But for this moment, she let herself just watch.
Her mother would have loved this.
That didn’t mean she couldn’t love it, too.
A raucous, welcome joy in her heart, Fiona pulled on her thrift-store sweater, pushed her hat onto her head, and went into the yard.
Out here, though, it looked different.
The snow drifted down, but really only over the window. And when she tracked the drifting to where it started, it seemed to be coming from … well, it didn’t make sense. It was flying up from behind a tall oleander and then falling again in front of the house.
And there was a noise, a low rumble, like a gigantic fan.
Fake.
It was fake snow.
What the hell?
‘Hello?’ Fiona followed the path of whatever it was that was falling – it felt cold – to behind the oleander.
Abe stood behind the large hedge, with what
appeared to be a snow machine next to him. The white fluff was being pumped up and over.
Fiona couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. ‘You brought me snow?’
He took one step toward her.
With all her heart, Fiona wanted to rush toward him. But not yet. ‘Why?’
‘I wanted to bring you the one thing you wanted. But I couldn’t do that.’
Him, she wanted him. He couldn’t give her that. This was his way of telling her?
‘So I decided to bring you what your mother would have wanted.’
‘My mother is dead,’ Fiona blurted.
Abe’s mouth opened and closed. Then he said, incredibly, ‘I know.’
‘You know?’
He pushed his fingers through his night-black hair. ‘After we talked this morning …’
They hadn’t talked. Fiona knew she had just talked at him.
‘After we talked, I tried to find her.’
It was more than she’d done in all the years Bunny had been gone.
‘I got the answer from a coroner’s assistant, a little ways up north. I’m so sorry, love.’
The word fell from his lips naturally, and again Fiona wanted nothing more than to be in his arms.
But not yet. Not yet.
‘Dad told me. He just told me. I haven’t figured out what to do with knowing yet.’
‘Let me help.’ His words fell like the snow, softly, beautifully.
‘You brought me snow.’
‘I would bring you the moon if you asked.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ She couldn’t say it enough. Ever.
‘Don’t.’ He held up a hand. ‘I wasn’t there for you.’
‘What are you talking about? I sabotaged you at city hall.’
‘I don’t care about the lighthouse. It never mattered,’ Abe said, his voice low. Strong. ‘I thought it did, but it didn’t. What mattered was being on the boat, looking up at the lighthouse and seeing you there.’
‘What?’
‘I saw everything. I saw you burn the papers, I saw the grass catch.’
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