by Linda Seed
Her mother had taught her to seek a good value, and she’d done that. Everything she’d chosen was reasonably priced and of good quality. It wasn’t like she’d walked into a furniture showroom and had begun throwing hundred-dollar bills at the salespeople.
Still, it had been fun choosing the contents of her new home: sofas, beds, dressers, and a big, butcher block kitchen table that reminded her of the one she’d gathered around at the ranch for three meals a day since the time she’d been big enough to sit in a chair on her own.
The appliances were already in place—that had been part of the renovation—but the rest of the house was a series of open spaces waiting to be filled.
“I’d better get over there,” she told her mother after breakfast a few days after Jake had announced the house’s completion. “The beds are coming at ten. Or, during a window of time that begins at ten. I really hope I’m not over there all day waiting for the guy to show up.”
“Well, I don’t imagine it’s going to be much of a hardship spending time in that house,” Sandra observed. “She’s a beauty, all right.”
“She really is.”
Sandra and Orin had gone to see the house the same day it had been finished. Orin had looked pinched and had made a lot of fussy noises and complaints. The content varied, but it amounted to him not understanding why Breanna and the kids needed to leave a perfectly good house where they’d been happy enough for quite some time. But Sandra, to Breanna’s gratitude and relief, had understood.
“Now, Orin, a woman’s got to have a place of her own. A place where she can be the queen bee without having to defer to her mama.” She grunted with the satisfaction of having made an airtight argument. “Why, your daughter’s been a help to me, all right, but I suspect she wants to start making her own decisions on how to do things instead of always having me tell her what to do.”
Breanna appreciated her mother’s validation, but she also felt the need to reassure both of her parents about her reasons for moving out.
“It’s not that I haven’t loved staying with you,” she said as the three of them stood in the empty living room of the Moonstone Beach house, sunlight streaming through the windows. “If I hadn’t had you two after Brian died, if I hadn’t had our house to come home to …” She hesitated, because emotion was choking her voice. “I’m just ready, that’s all. I’m ready to be on my own. I’m ready to move on.”
“Just not with Jake Travis, is that it?” Sandra inquired.
“Mom …”
“I’m just saying, if you were all that ready to get on with your life, you might not have tossed that man to the curb, where someone else might pick him up and take him home.”
“What’s Breanna’s contractor got to do with this?” Orin asked, looking uncomfortable and rubbing the back of his neck as though ants might have gathered there. “How’d she toss him to the curb? He finished the work, didn’t he? Did a good job, too, far as I can see.”
It seemed that Breanna’s attempts to keep her relationship with Jake low key had worked on only one person in her household—her father.
“Now, you never mind about it, Orin,” Sandra said.
Orin, looking relieved to have been let off the hook on this particular subject, went into the kitchen to inspect the appliances.
“I didn’t kick him to the curb,” Breanna protested when her father had left the room. “I just don’t like ultimatums.”
“Issued an ultimatum, did he?” Sandra asked.
“Well … yes. Sort of.”
“Well, that’s clear as mud,” Sandra quipped.
Breanna turned to her mother, exasperated. “He was talking about … about making commitments. Going out with the kids. And marriage!”
“Horrors, girl. That’s some kind of monster you’ve got there.”
“Mom, you’re not helping.” Breanna fixed her mother with the kind of withering look she used on the boys.
Sandra propped her hands on her narrow hips. “Well, I’d apologize, but I guess I don’t see what’s so wrong about a man wanting to take you and your boys out on the damned town. Though I’ll admit the marriage thing is a little fast.”
“He didn’t actually mention marriage to me. He mentioned it to Michael. Which is another thing I’m unhappy about.” She explained that Jake had told Michael he wanted marriage and children eventually, presumably with Breanna. The fact that he had told all of that to Michael had gone against Breanna’s clear and specific wishes to keep the children out of her dating life.
“It wasn’t his business to talk to Michael about those things,” Breanna said. “I wanted the kids to be protected from this. I wanted them to be kept out of it.”
Sandra looked appraisingly at Breanna for a long while.
“You’ve got opinions,” Breanna concluded.
“Well, I’d say so.”
“You might as well just say them. You know you’re going to anyway.”
“All right.” Sandra counted out her arguments on her fingers. “One: It makes no damned sense that you want to protect your boys from something that ought to be their business. If a man stands half a chance of being involved in your life long term, I’d think the boys deserve their say. Two: I’d say it speaks well of Jake that he talks to Michael like a man. You ought to consider trying it yourself. Three: You ask me, Jake ought to be taking things to the next level at this point. I’d be suspicious of him if he didn’t. Yet you seem to consider it some kind of crime. And four: It hurts a man’s pride to told that his woman wants to keep her options open. I’m not surprised he decided to cut his losses.”
Breanna didn’t know which argument to refute first, so she simply sputtered, “I … I’m not his woman!”
“Hmph,” Sandra grumbled. “I don’t expect that’s going to change anytime soon with that attitude of yours.”
32
If Sandra didn’t approve of the breakup with Jake, then neither did Breanna’s own heart.
Here she was moving into her own gorgeous, beachfront, freshly renovated house, and all she could think about was how lonely the place felt without Jake inside it.
He was too intricately involved in the creation of this place, that was the problem. He’d built much of the interior with his own hands. How could she ever separate the house from the man who’d put his own heart and soul into it?
These were some of the things going through her head as she, the boys, Liam, and Ryan all worked to transfer box after box from Liam’s truck into the new house.
The morning sky was clear, and the air was warm. The crash of the waves served as background music, and the scent of saltwater permeated the air. Insects buzzed in the high grass of the yard. She had plans for the landscaping, but that would come later.
“Seems like you ought to be happier than this, Bree,” Ryan remarked over the box he was holding in his arms. “You’ve been waiting for this for a while.”
“I’m happy,” she protested. “I’m just … busy, that’s all.”
“Uh huh.” He said it in that skeptical way that suggested he was agreeing with her just to humor her.
“I have a lot to think about, that’s all!” she insisted. “The move, and the boys, and the living room sofa hasn’t even been delivered yet, and … and I don’t know what I’m going to do with the guest house!”
“That’s a lot, I guess,” Ryan agreed mildly. His deep brown eyes were filled with concern for his sister, and that infuriated Breanna. How was it that he could read her so well? She didn’t want to be read, didn’t want to be transparent. All she wanted was to get on with her life.
“Are you going to stand there, or are you going to take that inside?” she said irritably.
“Well, all right.” Ryan walked past her to climb the front porch steps.
“What’s gotten into you?” Liam was coming back the other way, leaving the house empty-handed to get another box from the truck. “Yelling at Ryan’s like kicking a damned puppy. One of those cute little cocker spa
niel ones with the ears and the big eyes.”
“Don’t you start,” Breanna warned him.
“You break up with that Travis guy, and now you’re acting like you’ve got sand in your underpants.” Liam shook his head sadly. “If you’re this miserable without the guy, there’s a reason. Something to think about.” He moved toward the truck before she could lay into him.
Breanna hadn’t asked for relationship advice or personal counseling. All she’d asked for was some help moving boxes. What made her brothers think they had a right to butt in? What made them think this was any of their business?
Of course, if Breanna were being honest, she would have to admit that she’d offered unsolicited relationship advice to her brothers on more than one occasion. And she’d done it out of love.
Hefting a box from the back of the truck, Breanna resolved to get her mood in order. She had a beautiful new home. She had her healthy, wonderful sons. She had brothers who cared about her.
The least she could do was try to ignore the metaphorical sand in her underpants.
“Ryan?” she said the next time he passed her. “I appreciate your help with the move. Really.”
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “What else would I be doing?” he asked.
It was that simple, really. When she needed something, there was nowhere else he would even consider being than right here, helping her.
Which made it that much more puzzling that she felt so alone.
* * *
Jake filled his days with work and other things that he thought might get his mind off Breanna.
He started a new job across town, a tear-down of a nineteenth-century log cabin to make way for new construction. He walked Sam and took him to the dog park. He did handyman jobs around his own house, which had been needing a little TLC, having been neglected in favor of all the other things he had to do. He called his mom, who was still down in Los Angeles. And he hung out with Mark, who’d originally just been a guy to spend time with, but who was quickly becoming a real friend.
The two of them were jogging on the Harmony Headlands trail south of Cambria on a warm morning. Up ahead, a lizard scurried across the trail in front of them. Red-winged blackbirds perched in the trees, and nameless creatures rustled in the underbrush to the side of the path.
They’d gone a couple of miles, and they were both working hard and sweating a little, muscles warm as their shoes crunched on the dirt trail.
“I don’t know, man,” Jake said as they crested a low hill. “I should be over it by now.”
“This is Breanna again, right?” Mark asked, reminding Jake that he might be talking about this issue a little too much.
“Breanna, yeah.” As he ran, he thought about how to articulate his feelings—which wasn’t easy, being a guy. Growing up, he’d never learned to talk about his feelings. He’d learned to suppress them. He liked to think he’d evolved above that, though. “She’s probably moved into the house by now.”
“It’s a great house,” Mark said.
“Yeah.”
“And you thought you were going to be living in it with her,” Mark prompted him.
“Well …” To say that he had presumed such a thing would be going too far. But the thought had occurred to him. Of course he’d imagined that their relationship might progress, and if it did, that they might eventually live together in the house she’d chosen and that he’d revived from the dead. It had made perfect sense. There’d been a symmetry to the idea, a certain fated, it-was-meant-to-be kind of quality. “Is that such a crazy idea?” he asked.
“Well, no,” Mark admitted. “But it kind of only works if the woman’s on board.”
Jake scowled and focused on the trail, his breathing, the strain of his muscles. But Breanna kept nudging her way back into his head.
“I don’t give a crap about the house,” he said. “I mean, it’s a great house. But it’s just a house.”
“It’s what the house represented,” Mark said, sounding a lot more enlightened than he should have, given his bear-like stature and his fashion choices—the man was wearing a SpongeBob T-shirt. “You wanted the family, the kids … the home. The whole bit. I get it.”
Somehow, being fully understood irritated Jake when it should have soothed him. “It’s not like I thought it was going to happen right away,” he said in his own defense. “I just thought … eventually.”
“Sure.”
“It’s not like I wanted to drag her back to my cave by the hair.”
“You didn’t exactly want to let her come to the cave under her own power, though,” Mark pointed out.
At that observation, Jake stopped jogging and stood with his hands on his hips, breathing hard. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Mark stopped and leaned forward to catch his breath, his hands on his knees. His face was red and sweaty. “Don’t lose your shit, man. I’m just saying that you rushed her. You stand here telling me, It’s all good, there was no hurry, I thought it would happen eventually”—he did a high-pitched imitation of Jake’s voice, if Jake were a little girl—“but in reality, when it didn’t happen on your timeline, you cut bait and ran.” He gave Jake a pointed look, eyebrows raised and mouth pursed in righteousness, and then started to run again, leaving Jake standing there.
“That’s … I didn’t cut bait!” Jake had to sprint to catch up with him. By the time he got there, he was sputtering with indignation.
“You cut bait,” Mark said.
“That’s bullshit. There’s only so many times you can get told that she’s not ready before you decide that hey, maybe she’s never going to be ready. Or maybe she’s ready for something, just not for you.”
They followed the trail up a hill until it broke into a wide-open view of the rugged coastline.
“You dated what, a few months?” Mark pointed out.
“Yeah, but that’s long enough for things to go somewhere. Not marriage, maybe—if I even want that—but somewhere. But all I ever heard was no. No taking me home to dinner with her family. No spending time with her kids as a couple. No … well … anything.”
Mark did a little double-take as they ran. “Does that anything mean what I think it means?”
Jake realized that he’d given away more information than he’d intended. He waved Mark away. “Nah, that’s … Shut up.”
“Dude,” Mark said, shaking his head sadly as he ran, “if no anything means no anything, then I totally get why you cut bait.”
“I didn’t cut bait.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re sure as hell not fishing.”
33
Breanna had been in the new house for three days when she found the journal.
Things were coming together; most of the new furniture had arrived and had been placed, and she was slowly making her way through the boxes she’d brought from the ranch.
Early on a Saturday morning while the boys were still in bed, she was going through the contents of one of the boxes when she found an unfamiliar item: a book with an old, worn, leather-bound cover.
She’d never seen it before, so she opened it. She found page after page of her uncle’s familiar scrawl, black ink on white paper.
It was her uncle Redmond’s journal from the year he’d died.
Breanna sank down onto the cushions of her new sofa, the journal in her hand.
How had the book gotten into her box? There was no telling how these things happened. There had been so many things to deal with, so many random belongings. Breanna must have picked up the book and packed it without noticing that it wasn’t hers.
She wondered for a moment about the moral and ethical implications of reading it. The book wasn’t hers, and the words inside weren’t meant for her. But Redmond was gone. Surely there would be no harm in it now.
Part of her said she should close the book and return it to the ranch—give it to Orin, or maybe to Redmond’s son, Drew.
But she missed Redmond—had missed him so much since
his passing. The allure of the book pulled at her. If she could read his words, know his thoughts, it might make her feel close to him again, just for a while.
She told herself that she would read just a page, just an entry. But one entry led to another, and before she’d consciously made a decision to do so, she was devouring page after page of the book, the unpacking forgotten.
Redmond, in life, had been stoic and reticent. He’d tended toward one- or two-word sentences: “Yep.” “Nope.” “I suppose.” His presence every day at the ranch, and every day in Breanna’s life, had been solid and comforting, but his thoughts had been his own.
At first, the journal entries mirrored that stoicism, that stolid silence.
Rain today. We need it. The herd looks good. Two calves born this morning.
It was about what Breanna had expected from Redmond: clear, fact-based observations about the workings of the ranch and the world around him.
Breakfast at the vet’s hall. Pancakes and bacon. Spoke to Earl Walters about his new grandson.
Occasionally, a longer entry appeared, with Redmond’s thoughts about the various members of the Delaney family. In clear, economical script, he offered his thoughts on Liam’s tendency to get into bar fights; Ryan’s marriage, which he considered to be a positive development; Colin’s decision to live away from the rest of the family at their ranch in Montana.
There were entries about his own life and how much he regretted having decided not to pursue his true love, Drew’s mother. He’d walked away from that relationship decades before because the woman was married. Mostly, he knew that had been the right thing, he wrote. But there wasn’t a day when he didn’t miss her, when he didn’t feel the loneliness of a life in which he’d never loved again, had never found another partner.
And, of course, there were observations about Breanna. She’d known there would be. With a mix of fascination and trepidation, she tucked her legs up under her on the sofa and began to read.
