Truth and Solace (Love at Solace Lake Book 3)

by Jana Richards

  “Would you like more coffee, Maggie?”

  She blinked and looked up at Phyllis in confusion, her face as hot as her thoughts. “Um, no thanks, Phyllis. We should probably leave for work.”

  Luke folded the newspaper. “I’ll start the truck.”

  Phyllis put her hand on his arm, preventing him from rising from his chair. “Reese phoned me early this morning. He said Abby wants to speak privately with Maggie today.”

  He exchanged a startled glance with Maggie. “Privately? Did he say why?”

  Phyllis turned to Maggie. “Only that Abby wants to continue the story about her mother.”

  Luke turned to her. “The story about your mother?”

  “Yes. Abby’s been telling me things she knows about my mother and her first love, someone she knew before my father. We haven’t had a chance to talk since before Christmas, but it seems important to her, so I want to hear what she has to say.”

  “Of course,” Luke said with a decisive nod. “You can use my truck to drive into town.”

  “Thanks.” She turned to Phyllis. “Did Reese say when I should come?”

  “The usual, about one in the afternoon. That seems to be a good time for Abby.”

  Later, they said goodbye to Phyllis and got in the truck. As he turned the ignition, Luke asked, “What’s this about your mother’s old boyfriend?”

  Maggie brought him up to speed on everything Abby had told her so far. “I don’t know why Abby wants to tell me these stories.”

  “Mom usually has a reason for the things she does. Maybe today she’ll let you know what it is.”

  A shiver of unease coursed through Maggie’s bones. “Yeah. Maybe today.”

  The morning flew by in preparations for the Grand Opening. Around twelve-thirty, Maggie removed her white jacket and prepared to leave, frowning as she looked at the dirty lunch dishes lining the counters. “I’m sorry to leave you with this mess.”

  Celeste waved her hand. “Don’t worry about it. Go see Abby. That’s more important.”

  Maggie nodded and gave her a brief hug. Celeste was fast becoming her best friend. “I’ll make it up to you tonight. I’ll do all the clean up.”

  “It’s a deal. I can hardly wait until the rest of the kitchen staff starts working, especially the dishwashers.”

  “In a couple of days,” Maggie said as she headed to the door. “Just before the grand opening.”

  “It’s gonna get crazy in here,” Celeste said with a grin. “Drive safely.”

  “I will.”

  The roads were covered with a fresh layer of snow, but Luke’s truck navigated them without a problem. She stopped in front of Abby and Reese’s house and turned off the ignition. She gripped the door handle and for a moment, concentrated on calmly breathing in and out. Watching Abby’s continued deterioration was more and more difficult, and today would be especially hard being on her own. In the past month, she’d visited Abby often, but always with Luke.

  With one final deep breath, she left the truck and walked up the sidewalk to the door. Reese greeted her with a smile.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said, as he closed the door behind her.

  “Phyllis said Abby wanted to see me alone today.”

  He nodded and hung her coat in the front hall closet. “She’s in her room, waiting for you. Paula and I will be out here if you need us.”

  In the privacy of the hallway, Maggie closed her eyes and let out a breath, one hand on the knob. Then she forced herself to smile and opened the bedroom door. The head of Abby’s hospital bed had been raised so that she was in almost a sitting position. She opened her eyes as Maggie approached.

  “Hello, sweetheart.”

  “Hello.” Maggie intertwined her fingers with Abby’s and kissed her cheek. Her face was gaunt, the cheeks sunken, but her eyes were bright. “How are you feeling today?”

  Abby lifted her free hand in a feeble wave. “I’m training to run in the next Boston marathon. How ’bout you?”

  Maggie laughed, struggling to keep from dissolving into tears.

  “What? You’re not doing the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii?”

  “Not this year.” She let go of Maggie’s hand and patted the empty spot next to her on the bed. “Sit beside me, sweetheart.”

  Maggie did as she asked. “Reese said you wanted to talk about my mother again.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you want Luke to come?”

  “You should hear the story first.”

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve told him the story so far.”

  “No, I don’t mind at all.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “You love him, don’t you?”

  There was no point lying to Abby, especially now. “Yes.”

  “Good. You two need each other. I don’t want my boy to be alone. Or you.”

  Maggie nodded, for a moment unable to speak around the lump in her throat. Letting Abby believe they’d be together might be a lie, but if it made her happy, what did it matter?

  She cleared her throat. “You were going to continue the story.”

  “Right. We should get started before I’m too tired.”

  Abby’s waking and lucid hours were steadily decreasing. Maggie squeezed her hand in encouragement and waited.

  “Did I tell you how Miranda met her old boyfriend again one summer, and he fell in love all over?”

  “Yeah. That’s where you ended. What happened next?”

  “At the end of the summer, her old boyfriend begged her to leave her husband. He wanted her and the girls to live with him. Once she was divorced, they would marry.

  “Miranda wanted to, but she was scared. After all, he’d left her once before. Would he do it again? Would she break up her family, tear her daughters away from their father and everything familiar to them, only to find herself alone again? She had a good life with Robert. Though she didn’t have the passion she had with her old boyfriend, she couldn’t ruin her daughters’ lives for passion’s sake. So, at the end of the summer, she went back to Robert.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “So, she went back to my father and they had me nine months later.”

  Abby inhaled a shaking breath, expelled it, and then lifted her gaze to Maggie’s. “Not exactly, sweetheart. Soon after she went back to Robert, she realized she was pregnant. They both knew the baby couldn’t be his.”

  Maggie stared at her, her powers of speech temporarily deserting her. She shook her head. “No, that can’t be right. Robert is my father.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but he’s not. Miranda’s boyfriend is. He was the love of her life.”

  Maggie shook her head. “No.”

  Abby gripped her hand. “Your mother and Robert tried to reconcile, but the evidence of her infidelity was in front of him every time he looked at you, and he couldn’t get past it. They knew they couldn’t make their marriage work any longer. And Miranda was still desperately in love with your father. She contacted her boyfriend to tell him you were his and then she brought you three girls to the lodge. The plan was for the four of you to stay there while her boyfriend found a place to live. And then Robert showed up at the lodge. Even though he agreed to a divorce, I think he must have changed his mind and wanted Miranda back.”

  “No!”

  She let go of Abby’s hand and slid off the bed. Everything she believed about herself was a lie. “No, this can’t be right.”

  “It’s the truth, Maggie. I swear.”

  “No!” She covered her ears with her hands as if that would stop Abby’s confession. “No! I have to go!”

  She fumbled for the door and wrenched it open. Blindly, she ran down the hall, needing to escape. Reese met her at the front door.

  “Maggie? What’s wrong?”

  “I have to go.” She grabbed her jacket from the closet and shoved her arms through the sleeves. “I can’t…I can’t stay.”

  “Don’t go. Not like this. Let’s talk about it.”

  Sh
e shook her head and reached for the doorknob. She couldn’t talk, couldn’t think. She had to get away.

  He touched her arm. “Maggie—”

  She didn’t wait to hear what he had to say. She threw open the door and ran to Luke’s truck. Turning the ignition, she stepped on the gas and raced out of town. She swiped angrily at her tears. No more tears. She was done crying.

  They’d lied to her. The people who should have loved her best had lied to her – Abby, her grandparents. Was anything about her life true? Had her sisters known?

  Her sisters. Dear God, were they really her sisters?

  Maggie stepped on the gas and fishtailed on the icy road.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  When Luke’s phone rang and he saw that Reese was calling, his heart fell into his stomach. God. Reese calling could only mean… He hesitated, unwilling to hear the words that his mother was gone. The phone rang again and he reluctantly hit the talk button. “Hello?”

  “Luke, is Maggie there?”

  “Maggie?” Relief poured through him. Then Reese’s words registered in his brain. “I thought she was with you and Mom this afternoon.”

  “She left. There was some…upset, and she ran off. Can you check whether she made it back to the lodge all right? I’ve phoned Phyllis and she’s not at her house.”

  Luke pushed his chair away from the desk and got to his feet, frightened by the alarm he heard in his stepfather’s voice. “What happened? What kind of upset?”

  Reese hesitated. “I think it’s best if you talk to Maggie. Please, Luke. Check if she’s there and phone me back right away. If I don’t hear from you in ten minutes, I’m going out to look for her.”

  “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  He ended the call and stuck his phone in his pocket. He ran to the front entry to see if his truck was in the parking lot, but there was no sign of it.

  He ran to the kitchen, where he found Celeste icing a cake. “Celeste, have you heard from Maggie?”

  “No, not since she left to go to your mother’s house. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure. My stepfather says she left after some sort of argument. I’ve got to find her. If you see her or hear from her, call my cell right away.”

  “I will.”

  He hurried back to the office for his jacket. Please, please, please don’t let anything bad happen to Maggie.

  He needed a vehicle, fast. Harper was working in the dining room, but he didn’t want to alarm her, at least not until he knew what was going on. He found Ethan shovelling snow off the front step.

  “I need to borrow your truck. It’s an emergency.” He gave him a brief account of his conversation with Reese.

  Ethan stuck his hand into the pocket of his parka, pulled out a set of keys and tossed them to him. “Find out what’s going on. Call me as soon as you can.”

  Luke nodded and sprinted to Ethan’s truck.

  Once he reached the main road, he didn’t know which way to turn. Would she be somewhere between the lodge and Minnewasta? Or had she passed the lodge and continued up the road?

  Something told him she’d need time to think through whatever his mother had said. He turned left, taking the road going away from Minnewasta, deeper into the forest and lake country. As he sped away, he hoped to hell his intuition was right.

  His heart slowed its frantic pace when he found his truck parked in a lookout spot at the top of a hill overlooking a lake. The view of the lake was obscured since snowplows used the small parking lot as a snow dump. He pulled up beside her. Maggie was behind the wheel staring at the snowbank in front of her, the ignition turned off.

  He called both Reese and Ethan to tell them he’d found her, then left Ethan’s truck and slipped into the passenger seat of his truck. Maggie acknowledged his presence with a brief turn of her head. Then, she stared straight ahead once more.

  “They lied to me, Luke. Everyone lied to me. Why would they do that?”

  “Who lied, Maggie? What happened?”

  She turned back to him, her eyes bleak. “Your mother, my grandparents, everyone who knew the truth. I don’t know who I am anymore. Who am I, Luke?”

  “Sweetheart, you’re not making sense. Tell me what happened.”

  “Apparently, my father is not who I thought he was my whole life. Abby told me I was born of an affair my mother had with an old flame of hers. She says he was the love of Miranda’s life.” She gave a bitter laugh, the sound angry. “You want to know the funny part? Miranda and her boyfriend began their affair when she was fourteen and he was eighteen. Sound familiar?”

  Luke’s head whirled with this news. No wonder she was upset. “Yeah.”

  “My grandparents did their best to keep them apart. I’ll bet they couldn’t believe their bad luck when the same exact scenario happened with us. How fascinating that my story so echoed my mother’s. I might have appreciated the irony if I’d known.”

  “I’m sorry, Maggie.” He didn’t know what else to say.

  Her mouth twisted. “You know what else is similar? This so-called love of her life left her at one point. Isn’t that amazing? Talk about history repeating itself.”

  Luke couldn’t move and barely breathed. He was afraid to speak. Afraid that whatever came out of his mouth would be wrong. Afraid she would demand to know the truth, a truth she had every right to know.

  “For ten years, I’ve wondered what I did to make you go away.” She took a shuddering breath, her hands gripping the steering wheel. “You were everything to me. When I found you with that girl, and you told me you didn’t want me, my heart was ripped from my chest. A part of me died that day.”

  Her anguish hit him like a physical blow. “I’m sorry, Maggie. I never wanted to hurt you.”

  “But you did. Why? And what are we doing now? Am I a convenient bed warmer until something better comes along?”

  “No! You’re everything to me, too.” He caressed her cheek. “I love you, Maggie. I always have.”

  She pushed his hand away. “You love me? You’ve always loved me? How am I supposed to believe that? You tell me you don’t want anything to do with me and then I don’t hear from you for ten years. Not a word. No explanation, no ‘How are you doing?’ Nothing.”

  “I wanted to talk to you, to hear your voice. You don’t know how many times I picked up the phone those first couple of years.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  Luke closed his eyes in surrender. He couldn’t evade the truth any longer. She deserved to know. “You were right when you said history repeated itself with us. Your grandparents did their best to keep us apart, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After your grandfather found us together, he told me if I didn’t leave you alone, he was going to have me charged with rape. You were underage and it didn’t matter that the love we made was consensual.”

  She averted her eyes. “So you left for California.”

  “No. I told him if I left, you would follow me. You’d never believe I would abandon you.”

  Maggie lifted her gaze to his, her brow furrowing in confusion. “But you left. I don’t understand.”

  “Your grandfather knew as well as I did that you wouldn’t leave me, even if he sent me to jail. I was scared, but I stood my ground. I told him if he sent me to jail, you’d never forgive him.”

  “You’re right. I wouldn’t have,” she whispered.

  “Bill understood that, too. So, he dangled a carrot.”

  Her eyes turned wary. “What did he do?”

  Luke swallowed, his throat closing. This was the hardest part. “He made me a deal. He said if I made you believe I wasn’t interested in you anymore, he’d pay for me to go to school in California.” Luke swallowed again. Aside from leaving Maggie, confessing the reason he’d left was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. “I took the deal.”

  “You what?”

  “I took the deal. I accepted money from your grandfather so I cou
ld get away from Minnewasta. So I could have a life.”

  She stared at him, first in disbelief, and gradually in revulsion as the truth sank in. “You sold me out.”

  “You know how it was for me here. If I’d stayed, I would have been Jerry Field’s bastard son for the rest of my life. The bastard son of a bastard son. I needed to make a life for myself.”

  “So you sacrificed me to get it.”

  “I couldn’t see any other way out!” Even as he said the words, he knew she was right. No matter how often he’d told himself they were both too young and he’d done the only thing he could, he knew he’d sacrificed her to get the life he wanted.

  Except, the life he’d created had been empty without her.

  She turned away from him, her hands dropping from the steering wheel into her lap where she clutched them tightly together. “I think you should go. I’ll bring your truck back to the lodge as soon as I get my things from Phyllis’ house. I’ll stay with Harper and Ethan until I can find a place of my own.”

  “Don’t do this. Don’t hurt my grandmother because of me.”

  She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply as if holding back a torrent of emotion. “I’ll talk to Phyllis. Once you’re gone, perhaps we can be roommates again. All I know is I can’t stay at her house while you’re there.”

  He grabbed her arm, desperate for her to listen, to forgive. “Please, can’t we talk about this?”

  She jerked her arm away as if she couldn’t stand his touch. “There’s nothing to talk about. Please go, Luke.”

  The sting of her rejection cut deep. He watched her profile as she stared out the windshield, her expression as cold as the snowbank in front of his truck. She wasn’t going to get over this. He squeezed his eyes shut, as if that could stop his world from crumbling at his feet.

  “I’m sorry, Maggie.”

  There wasn’t anything more to say. He opened the door and pushed himself out of the cab. Numbly, he opened the driver’s side door of Ethan’s truck and slid behind the wheel. He watched as Maggie put his truck into reverse and sped out of the parking lot.

  Luke rested his head against the steering wheel. It was over.