The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3)

by Danielle Blair

  Grant’s gaze tracked past Charlotte. His pleasant demeanor slid away as if he was working a calculation in his head and the sum of one and one and one equaled four. As in a four-letter word. As if Grant sensed his gig was up—or that Charlotte had smuggled her long-winded ways along in her purse—he sighed and lowered himself on the front bench.

  “My wife’ll be back in here any minute to look for me,” he said.

  “Then we’re fortunate I can speak ten words a second with gusts to fifty.” As an aside, she added, “Nash’s favorite joke. Tired as the day is long.”

  She redirected her attention to the man on trial.

  “Now, I have known you for some time to be a decent and honorable man who has always done right by my family. But recent events have brought to light that this may not have always been the case. We can pussyfoot around this all you want, Mr. Grant, but we both know you weren’t forthcoming with Alex the other day when she asked you about our Mama, and here, under God and the naked baby angels, we’re giving you a chance to make that right.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We’ll get to your apology in a minute. For now, we need some answers.”

  Charlotte stepped aside and looked to Alex as if to say Target locked! Fire away!

  “They’ll be out of free hotcakes at the Fellowship Hall.” Grant was already sweaty from the injustice.

  “Hotcakes at home will be even harder to come by unless you spill it,” Alex said.

  He hiked up his pant leg then stomped it back down. “What do you want to know?” His tone was flat, resigned, absent his politely patronizing courtroom-speak.

  “Did you have…” Charlotte cast a furtive glance at the closest depiction of Jesus. “…relations with our Mama?”

  Charlotte, queen of pussyfooting.

  He took a fat minute to answer. “Yes.”

  Alex took over the cross-examination. “Indiscretion or affair?”

  “Both.”

  “How long?”

  “A month, six weeks. That was it.”

  “And when our Daddy found out?”

  “It ended. I swear.” Grant glanced up, all sheepish. He seemed to recall whose roof he was under.

  “Why would Daddy come to you to handle his estate papers?” Alex asked.

  “He didn’t. Stella Irene had them redone after his death. His papers were drawn up by an attorney in Jackson.”

  “What did Mama change?”

  “I don’t have to answer that.”

  “Tia and her hotcakes wish you would.”

  Grant looked at Alex as if he wanted to slice and grill her right there. “She had to restructure the documents to incorporate an additional beneficiary.” A sarcastic and theatrical wave of his meaty hand indicated Freesia.

  “So Elias knew nothing about me?” Freesia asked.

  “No.”

  Typical lawyer. Nothing embellished that wasn’t asked. Alex was done, but Charlotte had other ideas.

  “Now would be a good time for that apology,” said Charlotte.

  “Look, I loved Stella. Told her I would do anything, go anywhere. But she loved your Daddy more. She was just in a bad way, losing the baby and all. I’m sorry that people got hurt.”

  Not exactly an apology, but all Charlotte would get.

  “Clem?” A woman’s voice sounded behind them.

  Tia. A few paces out of reach. She glanced around at the three assembled sisters. Her unflattering expression she saved for Alex.

  “Is everything all right?” she said.

  Alex wondered how long Tia had been there, how much she had heard, how much Grant had changed in thirty years. Alex wasn’t exactly in a position to cast morality stones. Grant had been young, unmarried, the ink barely dried on his law degree. Didn’t make it right, but if that was it, he was done, never got in the way again after the affair, Alex could move forward.

  “Everything’s fine, hon.” Clement’s hon was tight, forced.

  True to her nature, even in the face of wrong, Charlotte found a way to set things right.

  “We wanted to express our thanks for your husband’s attention to detail and his understanding during the difficult transition of losing our parents. We couldn’t have gone through this and found out all we did without him.”

  Tia gave a watery smile. “Kind of you to say.”

  Charlotte came up with an excuse for cutting things short—how the boys in the Strickland and Dufort families went powerful hungry after a morning of spiritual gymnastics with the Holy Spirit then remarked on the mayor’s ability to flip a mean pancake when pressed into good Christian service. Small, southern townsfolk really did elevate the art of bullshit. And Charlotte was the queen of bullshit. With gusts to fifty.

  Naked baby angels smiled down in approval.

  The three sisters exited the church, answers in tow. Though the truth was messy, it belonged to them. No way but through.

  30

  Freesia

  Camille was in and out of awareness. Freesia knew it wouldn’t be long. She lit a lavender candle on the nightstand, watched the flame steady. From the armchair, she climbed up in bed and laid beside her mother, careful to avoid the plastic tubes.

  The bedside clock glowed 8:17. Sunset. Skies baked orange from the day and lifted to gray across the March’s back field, leaving little more than varying shades of blue, not unlike the Rainy Day Freesia.

  At the thought of Jay, Freesia allowed a smile, short-lived as it was, before worry stole back in. She laced her hands across her belly. After Mama, she would find out, for sure. A person could only take so much rain before the floods.

  She settled deeper against her pillow. Someone had taped a photograph to the ceiling.

  “Mama, why is there a young Luther Vandross staring at me?”

  Camille roused, smiled with her eyes. “Helps take away the pain. Charlotte’s idea.”

  Freesia’s mouth quirked in amusement. “Does it work?”

  “Look at the man.”

  Camille’s version of how could it not?

  “We were married once,” Camille said, her words distant, how she’d been all day. Confused. She closed her eyes again.

  “Pretty sure I’d have a whole lot more going on right now if that was the case.” Freesia let some time slip before she rolled her head against the pillow, studied her mother’s face that no longer looked like her mother. “I’m sorry I stayed away so long. Time meant something different than it does now.”

  The lowering skies, the lavender scent that could have been from the sea, the love inherent in climbing up on a ladder to fasten a visual comfort for her mother, conspired to project Freesia in to a moment of perfection. She had never been more at peace with her mother, maybe within. She savored a deep breath.

  “Always wish you’d belonged to him,” said Camille, a mumble, nothing more.

  “Luther?”

  “Eli.”

  Freesia’s heart pinched.

  Nah. She’s confused, Free. Let it go.

  But she couldn’t. Lies or truth, she was lost in the difference.

  “So…sorry…Free.”

  “Sorry for what, Mama?”

  Sleep captured Camille. Morphine now. Freesia watched the suspended drips glimmer in the waning day, bag to IV. She turned, cheek to her pillow, and counted breaths, the rising and falling of her mama’s chest. Rituals of holding on.

  She thought of forgiveness, what Camille had given so freely of late. A hot geyser of grief boiled in her chest. The more she tried to stay it, the stronger it rolled through her. She steepled her hands over her nose and mouth to keep it to herself, independent as she was, but the silence of sobs transferred overwhelming heat from her heart to her cheeks. Releasing, everything, seemed the only way.

  “I forgive you, Mama. It’s okay to go back to that beach. He’s waiting for you.”

  Freesia closed her eyes until they ran dry, her mother’s hand in hers. Marie roused her from sleep past midnight.

 
; Camille was gone.

  Freesia climbed atop her creamsicle-striped bicycle. People would start coming to the house. Would have heard the funeral director, Mason Gladwell, had been at the March’s with his van, pre-dawn. They would come, well-meaning people. Charlotte and Alex. Jay. Oh God, Jay. Stella Irene’s friends.

  But Freesia couldn’t be there. Not one minute more.

  She biked to the repair shop, tried not to think about the seed of doubt her mother had planted. Always wish you’d belonged to him. If true, the greatest lie she’d ever told.

  The makeshift drapes she pulled down, not out of any grand plan for the world to see her designs. She simply needed her fill of light and warmth. At the machine, she settled to finish the wildfire dress, what Charlotte called it—bold and furiously striking, jarring and sophisticated. It was a most complex creation, embers sparked to flame. Fitting, its name: Camille.

  For a girl who was Eshe, the African daughter who gathered fruit at the edge of a jungle, who had always held tight to the tree to keep from dancing to the lion’s drum because she didn’t belong, who had lived her truth among the lies and wove badass clothes from fronds of nothing, Freesia rewrote the story, her way.

  Girl became lion. And she still wove badass clothes.

  Freesia asked for a few minutes alone with her mother. Thought she’d melt, given the hour, the humidity, the absolute leveling of the past few days. After the funeral, Charlotte had herded family and friends to their cars. Freesia stood alone at the top of the cemetery’s hill.

  The sisters thought it fitting, Camille beside Stella Irene. Suggestion had been Alex’s. How about that? From mistress to a place of honor. In their journey to the truth, Elias and Stella Irene and Camille had become inseparable. Three, not unlike the sisters.

  Well…

  The ocean had been her mother’s diversion, a place to be because the love here had been too great. Freesia felt that love now—Alex and Charlotte, their families by extension, Bernice and Taffy and Frances and Hazel. And Jay. Even when she had pushed him away, he had been amazing inside her darkness, what she couldn’t be when details and arrangements and the ability to speak became too much. He was an ally in his intimate knowledge of grief’s selfishness, its complete inability to yield. Having completely undressed her heart, Jay also had the capacity to hurt her.

  But she belonged to none of them.

  Camille’s headstone wouldn’t be there for a bit. Neither would Freesia. Nothing left for her here. Freesia shook the snow globe in her hand, remembered the day she had visited Elias for the first time, when flakes flew and two women watched from the cemetery gates. She would place it on Elias’s headstone, where it belonged.

  “It was a moving ceremony,” said Jay, behind her.

  Despite the heat, he was impeccably dressed: wool-linen suit, silk pocket square, black and white perfection down to his dark sunglasses. Sweat beaded his hairline. No breezes anywhere to be found in Mississippi, a stifling stillness Freesia felt all the way to her core.

  “It was.” The tedium of gratitude fatigued her, but she had to answer for all others had done. “Thank you for the casket spray. I’ve never seen so many flowers in one place.” That was a lie. “Holland, maybe.”

  That Freesia, another lifetime ago.

  “I want to do more,” Jay said.

  Her laugh, one exhale, held no joy. “That’s just it. There is no more.”

  The taxing day, the heat insinuated itself between them.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, after enough of a pause that he wasn’t asking after what she’d said but what she’d meant.

  She squinted at the horizon, wished she was there, or maybe the Atlantic coast near the sand dunes and sea lavender. Anywhere but here. “I know.”

  Jay took a few steps toward her, deeper into the shade of a tall oak. “If I’ve done something…”

  Freesia held up the snow globe, upended it, watched the soap flakes blizzard over the odd skyline. “Elias brought this to my mother as a gift. The last thing he got from his company before they fired him, all he had to offer her, something left behind in his truck. They made up this elaborate story inside this little world, all the places they would go, together—Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, Acropolis, Giza Pyramids, Empire State Building. A fantasy filled with wonderment and possibilities. But it wasn’t real. For my mother, it became a moment in time, frozen, unchanging.”

  She set the snow globe on Elias’s grave marker.

  “Are you saying we aren’t real?”

  “Since our paths crossed, you’ve become a part of my life, of my mother’s life, my family’s life. And from that, I feel love and I love. More than I have in a long time. But I haven’t become a part of your life. Not since I was asked to park under the magnolia shade outside the gate. Not since I was a dalliance and you stirred your mother’s ire.”

  “Freesia—”

  She put her hand up. Before she lost her courage.

  Jay quieted, slipped his hands in his pockets.

  “I’ve pulled you my way and you’ve pulled me none of yours. From that, I feel shame. I waited for you to speak your piece, tell them this life wasn’t you, that you had dreams that your brother’s life didn’t touch, that you’d done far more than he ever would have asked, but you never found your voice, never said a word.” Quieter now, she said, “I don’t want your life, your freedoms and limitations on that life, your privilege or your lottery. I just want that glimpse of a man on that rainy day—not the man who stumbled into my car, lost, but the one who wanted stories, who longed to make his own. Took me a while to realize that you never really got out of that car, Jay.”

  “I’ll tell them. Right now. I’ll cut ties.”

  “Your family loves you.” What Camille had told Elias. “Running, loving—two things that don’t happen in the same life.”

  “I’ll give it all away if I have to.”

  The ground opened up beneath her. No one had offered so much as a changed airline ticket for her before. That he was willing to give up his ties, his stability, his life, to please another was no different than what he had done with Jack. Resentment had no place in a lasting relationship.

  “For me? That’s crazy. But for you? Now you’re talking.” She walked close, felt her heels dig into the earth, take her stand, even as her heart crumbled at her feet. “I need people in my life who’ll walk in my storm and I’ll walk in theirs because life is messy. No more fantasies filled with wonderment and possibilities, nothing frozen and unchanging. You and me, Jay. Real. Remember?”

  Beneath his glasses, muscles in his jaw flexed. He swallowed, hard, his green eyes greener behind an extra sheen of moisture

  Men strong enough to show emotion were her weakness. She had seen his soggy lashes once, on a remote road. If she didn’t walk away now, she never would.

  Freesia kissed his cheek. His scent lifted in the heat, colluded with his nearness that addled her brain to keep her there. Her throat squeezed. Breathing became an exercise, a choice. Her voice would be strangled. Still, she forced the words.

  “I’ll be in New York. Making new stories.”

  She descended the hill, joined Charlotte in her waiting car, and disintegrated under the greater guise of a grieving daughter.

  31

  Charlotte

  Charlotte and Alex roamed the shop, turning off lights and locking up after the day’s business. At the display window, Charlotte reached for the switch.

  “Leave it,” said Alex.

  In the evening’s waning light, they stood side by side, took it all in.

  Charlotte had nicknamed Freesia’s dress ‘wildfire.’ She guessed the term caught on, because the gown’s photo and the headline, Empowerment Designer Ignites Women’s Couture, made for a scorching front page of the Living and Arts section of the Jackson paper and was picked up on the Associated Press newswire. And darned if it wasn’t the most god-awful selection for a bride to wear to a wedding—unless your betrothed was fond of
the whole “Devil’s cupcake” pet name—but no one in Devon much cared that the wildfire dress, alone, graced a bridal shop’s display window.

  The gown was spellbinding.

  Natalie and Allison went full-Hollywood with their dystopian-themed display. Jonah and Nash had crafted a dais with fans and orange silk cut to look like flames and fairy lights from above to look like rising embers. Alex had called in a favor with an old corporate publicist friend who steered some dress love toward the right people in the fashion industry. And Charlotte had played matchmaker to Elliot Davis, Devon Daily’s surly resident newspaper reporter: a blind date in exchange for a front-page story. A surprising abundance of single ladies in the form of bridesmaids came through the shop daily, dreaming of love.

  Freesia needed a win. Truth be told, after saying goodbye to Camille, they all did. Pulling together to give Freesia a buzzy start for when she reached New York gave everyone purpose, movement. Charlotte was sad that Freesia wasn’t around to enjoy the ballyhoo.

  Grief had her largely absent.

  “She once told me that women tell a story, each time they dress,” Alex said. “This dress tells some story.”

  Charlotte tilted her head, enjoyed the play of lights. “Mama would be proud that it’s in her window.”

  “I’m having trouble forgiving her.” Alex confessed, her voice singed at the edges. “If only she had turned to Daddy, told him she was lost…”

  Charlotte reached an arm around her sister, pulled her close. Alex leaned in and hugged back. Eighteen months ago it would have been impossible. Now it was as natural to them as breathing.

  “Then we wouldn’t be standing here, looking at this magnificent dress,” Charlotte said.

  And look they did. Until Charlotte was all but lost in it and a sound brought her back from all the emotional places they had been, together.

  Both their phones chimed in union. A text from Freesia.

  Meet me at the trailer.