The Bitterroot Inn

by Devney Perry

  Now that my job here was done, it was time to go home.

  Home. A place I hadn’t really had since Mom had died. A place I had now, thanks to Maisy and Coby.

  Smiling at the thought of my family, I pulled my phone from my jeans.

  Me: All done. Coming home.

  Her response was instantaneous.

  Blondie: We’ll be waiting.

  I slid the phone back in my pocket in exchange for my truck keys. Then, for the hundredth time today, I reached into my other pocket. Tucked away at the bottom was the best surprise I’d found all week. Assured that it was safe and secure, I slipped my hand from my jeans and went to my truck.

  Then I went home.

  Maisy

  “I missed you,” I told Hunter for about the thousandth time since he’d stepped foot in his house. Like every time before, he pulled me into his arms and said it back.

  “I missed you too. I’m glad to be home.”

  I kissed his chest over his T-shirt and then let him go to finish cooking our meal.

  Coby and I had come up to Hunter’s house earlier today to get started on cooking a nice dinner. I knew that Hunter would be tired, driving all the way from Grand Rapids by way of Chicago over the last two days, so we’d come here to make sure he had a proper welcome home.

  In the nearly three weeks that had passed since Coby’s kidnapping, I hadn’t let my son out of my sight. At first, he’d clung to me too, but after weeks of watching me clean rooms and fold sheets, he was getting bored. He’d been begging me to take him back to Quail Hollow, but I hadn’t been ready.

  Now that Hunter was back, I could get answers to all of my questions and, hopefully, put that horrible afternoon weeks ago behind us. Maybe if I could make sense of Nell’s actions, I wouldn’t have such a hard time letting Coby go back to his normal routine.

  “So? How did everything go?” I asked.

  Hunter and I hadn’t had a chance to talk much while he’d been gone and I wanted to get more than the details he’d delivered through fast text updates and brief phone calls.

  But before Hunter could tell me about his trip, Coby came flying into the room. “Hunter, look!” Under his arm was the remote-control car that Hunter had brought back as a gift.

  Coby set down the car and stepped back, positioning the remote in his hands. Then he started pressing levers and buttons until the car jolted to life. He hadn’t gotten the hang of driving it yet so it bounced off the fridge and spun in the other direction, and since Coby’s hand was still on the trigger, the car came crashing right into my bare feet.

  “Owie, bud.” I bent down to massage my wounded little toe. “Let’s not run that into people, okay?”

  “Sorry, Mommy.” He came after his car and set it up to go the other way.

  Hunter smiled as Coby raced it through the living room. “That car is perfect for this house.”

  Even with the house fully furnished and décor complete, there was still a ton of wooden floor space for my men’s car races.

  “Anyway.” I nodded for Hunter to tell me about his trip.

  He pulled up a stool and sat at the island, rubbing his tired eyes. “It was a long trip but I’m glad I went. It was the right thing to do.”

  “How did Nell settle into the new place?”

  “Good. Better than I expected. We decided to commit her for three years, and after that, we’ll reevaluate.”

  I sighed. “Good.”

  Nell couldn’t bother us again for three years. She’d be spending that time as the newest resident of Shimmering Waters, a private mental health facility outside Chicago.

  The day she had kidnapped Coby had been the worst day of my life. I’d never felt paralyzing fear like that before. I hoped I’d never feel it again. Only when Hunter had brought Coby back from the airstrip had I snapped out of my trance. Falling to my knees, I’d held my son in my arms as my entire family had converged, surrounding me, Coby and Hunter in an enormous group hug where everyone shed tears of relief.

  When we’d finally broken apart with wet faces, Jess had asked for a moment with Hunter and me to explain our options for dealing with Nell.

  With Coby sitting just outside the conference room with my parents, Hunter had told me what Nell had said when he’d talked to her in the back of the police car.

  The woman hadn’t been in her right mind. We could have pushed and demanded she spend time in prison, but Hunter hadn’t felt right about having her sent to a place where her mental state would just deteriorate further. She was his family, after all.

  So rather than press criminal charges, we’d taken pity on her and agreed to get Nell into a mental institution. She needed help. Something had broken in her weak mind and she needed professionals with tools to help her put back the pieces—if she ever recovered at all.

  “Are you feeling okay about it?” I asked. “No regrets?”

  He shook his head. “No regrets. This is the best. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. The place she’s at is really nice. Her doctor seems like a good guy and the staff is very professional.”

  “Maybe in a few months, you can go visit. I’m sure she’d like that.”

  He shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  Was I still angry that Nell had taken Coby? Absolutely. But I just couldn’t find it in myself to hate her any longer. She had no one in the world to care for her except Hunter. She’d lost it all: her money, her home and her mind.

  Nell had hurt Hunter so badly by taking Coby; I was just proud that he’d been able to set that pain aside and care for her as a fellow human being. His father would have been proud too. I wasn’t going to push Hunter to see her if he didn’t want to, but I also wouldn’t object if he decided to visit. It was his decision and I’d support him either way.

  “Did you find out why?” I asked.

  The timing of all Nell’s actions was still bothering me. I had no doubt that Everett’s death had been the catalyst for Nell’s mental break, but why now? Everett had been dead for years. Why did she suddenly go crazy this year?

  “It was my fault,” Hunter said. “She snapped because of me.”

  “What do you mea—ouch!”

  Coby’s car slammed into my bare foot again.

  “Sorry, Mommy, sorry!” he called before I could scold him.

  I frowned. “Shoo. Out of the kitchen.”

  He came and scooped up his car, then went rushing out.

  “Okay.” I turned back to Hunter. “Continue. Why is it your fault that Nell snapped?”

  “Because I moved here.”

  My eyebrows knitted together. “I’m not following.”

  “Remember I told you that I was living in the pool house at Dad’s house?”

  I nodded. “During your residency.”

  “Yes, and afterward too. I lived there until I moved here for the first time. Even after I left Chicago, I kept Dad’s old house. Nell had already moved to Grand Rapids but she’d left almost everything in the Chicago house. She spent most of Dad’s life insurance on a new house and new furnishings. All of that stuff, I just left. When I moved back to Chicago after I’d been here the first time, I moved right back into the pool house since most of my stuff was still there.”

  I was still confused at how his moving the second time to Prescott had sent Nell over the brink, but I stayed quiet as Hunter got up from his stool to get a glass of water, then sat back down.

  “When I moved back here, I decided to sell Dad’s house. I left not knowing how long I’d stay here, but . . . call it a feeling. I just knew it was time to clear out all of the stuff and let it go.”

  Hunter shook his head and yanked out his hair band, fixing his bun to trap some of the hairs that had fallen loose.

  The suspense was killing me but I just stood quietly and waited for him to keep explaining. Hunter had stopped keeping secrets, but one thing I had learned about my man was to be patient. When things were hard for him to talk about, he needed some extra time.

 
I could give him all the time in the world.

  I’d give him anything.

  “I hired a company to go through the house and pack it all up,” he said. “Everything got shipped to Nell because I figured she had nothing else to do, she could sort it all out. I took my personal stuff, what I could fit in the truck, and she got the rest.”

  He took another drink of his water and paused his story while Coby came running back in to demonstrate how he’d just learned to do his car in a spinning circle.

  “Good job, buddy,” Hunter said. “Can you go into the living room and play for a sec while Mommy and I finish talking? Then I’ll come in and we can practice it together.”

  “Okay.” Coby smiled and off he ran.

  “Coby?” I called before he disappeared. “I love you.” I’d been saying it as much as I could.

  He kept running. “Love you too! And Hunter!”

  “I missed him,” Hunter said when he disappeared.

  “He missed you too.”

  Coby had asked after Hunter more times in a day than I could count. Now that he was back, the three of us would be spending some quality time together. And I would finally get some sleep. When he was gone, the bed was too cold and empty. I’d been tossing and turning for weeks.

  “Anyway,” Hunter said, continuing his story. “Everett had an old diary in his room. None of us had bothered cleaning out his room because it had been so empty, but when the movers had come to box up all of the stuff, they found an old diary in his closet. They sent it along with everything else.”

  “And Nell found it.”

  He nodded. “It was by her bed in Grand Rapids. When I got to her house, I started packing things up, looking for reasons why she would have flipped and taken Coby, and I found that diary.”

  “What was in it?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “It was filled with page after page of hateful things about her. I had no idea Everett hated her so much but he had written it all down. What an awful mother she had been. How he thought she was ugly. All of this horrible stuff.”

  I’d never heard of a boy keeping a diary before but I guess it wasn’t impossible, especially if he was young. “How old was he when he wrote it?”

  “That’s the crazy part. He was just a kid, an angry pre-teen whose mother had just married a new guy, and he’d gotten a younger brother he hadn’t wanted. A lot of it was how he wanted things to go back to just the two of them.”

  “So Nell found this diary and started to question herself as a mother.”

  “Exactly,” Hunter said. “I think my statement at the custody hearing reinforced some things already going through her head.”

  I knew all about Mommy guilt. If Nell had been reading that diary over and over, I could see how it would have made her crazy. She’d seen Coby as her second chance at motherhood and had taken him to try again.

  “I get it.” I nodded. “I don’t forgive her for taking Coby, but I get it.”

  “Yeah. Me too.” Hunter hung his head. “I wish I had known about that diary. Maybe I could have stopped this from going so far.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I think if Nell had been in her right mind, she could have seen past the diary. I think there was more going on in her head than you’ll ever know.”

  Hunter sighed. “You’re probably right.”

  “Do you think that’s why she filed for custody of Coby? Because of the diary?” At the time, I’d thought it was only a way to punish me for killing Everett, but now, I wasn’t so sure.

  “Partly. I think the things we talked about before are still true. She wanted her revenge. I mean, she wanted him before the diary. Maybe just finding it made her push harder. And then when she actually saw Coby . . .”

  “She snapped.”

  He nodded. “I found an old picture of Everett at her house. They look so much alike at this age, it’s uncanny. I think when she saw him in the café, it was the last straw.”

  Not for the first time, I pitied Nell. She hadn’t been a great mother, but she’d clearly had her regrets, and she’d never get the chance to make amends with Everett.

  “It was so sad going through her stuff.” He’d sold everything of hers in Grand Rapids, other than her personal belongings now stored away. “She really loved Dad. She sent him love letters and kept them all. She kept every birthday, Valentine’s Day or anniversary card he ever gave her. And I think in her own way, she loved Everett too. She was proud. She kept boxes full of his art projects and report cards.”

  “Then why would she be so cold?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s ever really been all there mentally. She put on such a good show of confidence, I think her mind was a lot more broken than any of us ever knew.”

  I sighed. “Then it’s good she’s at Shimmering Waters. Maybe they can help her put the pieces back together.”

  “Maybe.”

  I went back to cooking, filling a pot with some water for gravy. I didn’t know what would happen with Nell after she left the mental institution. I might never forgive her for threatening my child, but thankfully, I didn’t have to make that decision today.

  And if I ever did have to confront Nell, I’d have Hunter by my side. I wouldn’t be fighting battles alone anymore. I wouldn’t be relying on my own strength to move forward. I wouldn’t be the only one finding the courage to forgive.

  Hunter and I would tackle life together.

  “Have you thought about anyone who could move into the loft?” Hunter asked.

  “No. Not yet. Why?”

  He grinned. “I called Beau on the drive back from Michigan and asked him how hard it would be to move Coby’s bunk. He said we could do it tomorrow.”

  The whisk in my hand dropped to the counter. “What?”

  “I called Michael too. It turns out that Alana really wants to move out of her parents’ basement. I guess Michael is getting sick of sneaking in and out at night.” His eyebrows waggled and I faked a gag. “Alana could take the loft.”

  My heart raced when I realized what he was saying, but I tried to play it cool by tapping my chin. “Where on earth are Coby and I going to live?”

  He chuckled. “I’ve got an idea.”

  I lost control of my smile and it stretched wide. “Are you sure you want us here?”

  “I’m sure I want you here.”

  “Okay.” Easy as that. Now we all lived here together.

  A sexy, wide grin split his face. “I’m going to tell Coby.” Hunter slid off his chair and winked at me before walking into the living room.

  My fingers scrambled for my phone so I could immediately text all of my friends to tell them that Hunter had just asked us to move into his home. When the dings started to chime back with Yay!, Congratulations! and Gigi’s I’m totally going to win our bet. He’s going to ask you to get married way before Michael and Alana, I giggled.

  My laugh was cut short when Coby’s car came crashing back right into my foot.

  “Gah! Coby,” I growled. “We’re taking a timeout from this ca—” I bent to pick up the car and stopped mid-sentence.

  Tied to the car’s antenna was a ring.

  A ring that had not been there before and was definitely not something that could have mistakenly come from the toy store.

  I stood, car in hand, as Hunter and Coby peeked out from behind the couch.

  “Mommy, will you marry Hunter?”

  Hunter slapped a hand over Coby’s laughing mouth. “I told you, I was going to ask, you little monster!” He started tickling my son—no, our son—until tears ran down Coby’s cheeks and he begged Hunter to stop.

  Tears were running down my face too. Because Hunter asking me to marry him through Coby?

  Best. Proposal. Ever.

  With Coby still laughing on the floor, Hunter stood and came into the kitchen. His jeans hung perfectly down his legs—legs I would tangle with mine every night. His T-shirt was stretched across his wide chest—the chest I would us
e as my favorite pillow. His heels thumped on the floor as he padded toward me with bare feet—feet that would keep mine warm when they got cold.

  My fiancé.

  “What do you say, Blondie?” Hunter took the car from me and set it on the counter. Then he framed my face with his hands. “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes.”

  His lips were on mine before the word had time to even settle in our ears. We kissed, using our mouths and tongues and teeth, until Coby broke us apart.

  “You guys,” he groaned. “Can I have my car back?”

  I laughed into Hunter’s mouth as he chuckled into mine.

  “Sure, buddy.” Hunter broke us apart to untie the ring from Coby’s toy. “This was my mom’s ring. I didn’t think Nell had kept it, but she had a whole box of Mom’s jewelry stashed away in Grand Rapids.”

  Breathing in choppy gulps, I fought to rein in my happy tears as he slid the ring onto my finger. The diamond was no more than a carat and the gold band was simple. Bracketing the diamond solitaire were two ovals, each inlaid with another small diamond. It was a classic ring. It was unassuming.

  It was just right.

  Hunter stepped closer, pulling me back into his arms as my eyes stayed locked on my ring.

  It meant the world to me that it had been Hunter’s mother’s, and I would wear it with pride until the end of my days. If Hunter ever offered an upgrade for an anniversary or birthday, I would politely refuse. This ring was the only one I’d ever wear on my left hand.

  “Hey! Give me back my car!” Coby shouted, trying to squeeze between us to get his toy. Hunter and I both started laughing as Coby yanked the car off the island and took it back into the living room.

  Smiling, I pressed my cheek into Hunter’s chest and wrapped him up tight. “I love you.”

  His soft lips brushed against my hair. “I love you too.”

  We held on to one another for as long as Coby let us, finally breaking apart when he demanded Hunter play with him and grumbled about being hungry.

  While they raced the car around the furniture, I went back to cooking dinner, texting my friends an update between mashing potatoes, microwaving peas and whisking gravy.