Half Moon Hill (16 page)

When they approached, everyone else already sat or stood around a large wooden picnic table, eating ice cream cones or scoops in a dish. A glimpse of Adam’s hot fudge sundae almost made Rachel want to throw up, so she looked away.

“You want anything?” Mike asked her. Given the state of her stomach lately, he almost seemed to know she didn’t.

“No,” she said quietly, still almost stunned beyond comprehension by what she’d found out at her doctor’s visit today.

“Me neither,” Mike murmured. And Mike
never
passed up ice cream.

When they slid wordlessly into the open spots left on one side of the table, Rachel tried to tune in to what Logan was saying—something about he and Amy still not having picked a wedding date. But as more conversation about that ensued, her mind drifted elsewhere—to worry, and disbelief. She knew she should be thankful; she knew she could have gotten much worse news. And in that way she was relieved, and she knew Mike was, too. She just still couldn’t believe the diagnosis they’d been given.

“Rachel? Are you in there? Hello?”

She flinched, snapping her gaze to Tessa’s.

“You’re not having anything?” her friend asked. “Stomach still bothering you?”

She just nodded, too preoccupied to muster words.

That’s when Lucky spoke up. “Hey, wasn’t today your doctor’s appointment? Did you find out anything?” She supposed some people might consider the question intrusive, but they were family, and really, their whole group of friends were close, so she didn’t mind. Except that the answer was still so shocking to her.

“We did,” she said. Just that.

“And?” Amy asked.

Rachel and Mike exchanged glances. They’d gotten the news just before heading to the park and had, in fact, almost been late for the game, so they’d had no time to digest it, or to discuss telling their friends.

Only now, unfortunately, she could immediately sense that her hesitation was making them worry. Their expressions grew grimmer with every passing second she made them wait. So she knew that even though she and Mike hadn’t made any sort of decision about sharing, she had to tell them. Especially when Amy said, “Well?” sounding almost alarmed.

“Well,” Rachel said, “I’m . . . pregnant.”

“An agonizing silence now reigned . . .”

Gaston Leroux,
The Phantom of the Opera

Nine

A
nna watched Mike and Rachel’s friends react. Cumulatively, their faces were painted with surprise, joy, and confusion. And she was pretty sure the confusion was because both Rachel and Mike appeared so downcast at what most happily married couples would consider good news.

And then there were Jenny and Mick. They sat at the far end of the table, on the other side from Mike and Rachel, their expressions wooden. Mick silently slid his arm around Jenny’s shoulder, as if holding her up through this.

“What amazing news!” the ever-happy Amy said. She appeared to be the only person not tuned in to the fact that Rachel and Mike weren’t beaming with joy. But when no one responded to her happy outburst, her expression changed. Her eyebrows knit as she bent her head slightly to ask, “Isn’t it?”

“Look, we don’t mean to be assholes,” Mike said, “but . . . we just didn’t see this coming. We never even talked about it. Except in a ‘maybe someday’ way.”

“All we wanted was a cat,” Rachel bemoaned, “and he’s handful enough.”

“
I
didn’t even want the cat,” Mike groused. “But I went along with it.”

“And just like the cat, you’ll love your baby,” Sue Ann pointed out, often the voice of reason in the group.

“Of course we will,” Rachel was quick to say. “We just . . .”

“You just what?” Tessa asked when she trailed off.

Rachel hesitated and sounded almost a little ashamed when she replied, “I don’t know if I’ll be a good mother. I mean, what do I know about babies? I know about clothes. I know about advertising.” Anna knew Rachel had been an ad exec in Indy before coming home to Destiny. “But I don’t know anything about babies.”

“And seriously, me as a dad?” Mike asked the crowd at large. “Would any of you want me as a father?”

When they all stayed silent at the question, Anna, to her surprise, felt compelled to speak up. “You’ll be a good dad, Mike,” she said from the end of the table nearest him.

Their eyes met and his registered utter bewilderment, even though she suspected he was trying to hide it. “I will?”

She nodded. “Because you’ll care. A lot.” She knew that from firsthand experience.

And when still he and everyone else stayed speechless, she decided it was time to inject a little lightheartedness into the conversation. “Now, Aunt Anna might need to lecture you on not being too overbearing—especially if, God help you, it’s a girl—but I know you’ll be a good dad to your kid. Just like you keep trying to be to me.” And she ended on a wink that made Mike’s eyes soften a little, even if he didn’t quite smile.

“And you’ll be a great mom, too, Rachel,” she went on. “With Sue Ann to give you pointers, and Amy to give you cat-themed baby stuff, and Edna to whip you into shape if you need it, how can you go wrong?”

And again, though a smile didn’t quite make it to Rachel’s face, Anna could see in her sister-in-law’s eyes that her words were appreciated.

And that’s when a huge revelation hit Anna square in the face. She’d known for a long time that she loved both her brothers, but maybe it had taken this long for her to . . . begin to let her defenses down. With them, with the girls, with the whole town. After the colossal lie her “other mother” had perpetrated her whole life, maybe she’d just had a hard time . . . letting herself depend on anyone, trust in anyone. But the small bit of kindness she’d just doled out to her big brother made her realize—
I trust him now. To take me as I am. To not bail on me. To be there for me. I’m starting to trust them all, bit by bit, step by step.
And every day it got a little easier.

“It’ll all be fine,” Tessa was saying reassuringly to Rachel when Anna came out of her reverie. And Anna heard it in a different way, almost like . . . a voice from above.
It’ll all be fine.

“Even if you guys are the two most ill-equipped people to have a baby that I’ve ever met,” Logan added on a laugh that everyone joined in on—even Mike and Rachel a little.

Well, everyone except Jenny. And Anna’s heart broke for her.

But at the same time, she was still basking in what she’d just figured out. Trusting in people was hard, especially after someone hurt you. Yet she thought life was a lot happier when you found the people who made you brave enough to believe in them.

A
sweet evening breeze blew in through windows Anna had opened wide a few hours earlier, carrying the soft scent of honeysuckle. Temperatures were predicted to be cooler over the coming few days, and now that the sun had dipped behind the trees beyond the backyard, she could already feel more pleasant weather setting in.

Curled up in a loveseat in the small room she’d started calling the library, despite the modest number of books she’d amassed here so far, she sat reading Cathy’s diary.

Before starting, though, she’d balanced several of the old record albums on the spindle in the center of the ancient record player, the kind that held a stack and let them drop one at a time. There was something in the simplicity of that, the old-fashioned mechanics of it, that appealed to her. Or maybe it was just the sense of being swept back to a simpler time.

As if to make the scene complete, on the trip to the attic to get more records, she’d also carried down the copy of
The Phantom of the Opera
, placing it on one of the room’s built-in shelves. She wasn’t sure she’d leave it there—mainly because she wasn’t sure she would trust the average inn guest to realize how special a book it was and take care of it properly—but she’d also decided she probably wouldn’t give it to Amy now. She wished she could, yet as she began to feel closer to Cathy—and to the house itself through Cathy’s written memories—she now felt the book belonged here, within the walls where Cathy had held it in her hands and surely cherished it.

The day after she’d had sex with Duke, she’d worked at Under the Covers and then gone to the softball game, not returning until after dark, and other than that brief meeting on the porch, she hadn’t seen him that day.

The next day, she’d worked a shift from ten to three at the bookstore, and when she’d gotten home, she’d heard a hammer banging on the far side of the house, but she’d made a point to just go inside and keep to herself. She’d done a little cleaning and paid some bills. She’d thought more about Rachel’s news and Jenny’s reaction to it. She sympathized with them both, just in different ways. It didn’t seem fair that one person should get what another wanted so badly, especially when that person didn’t want it at all, but Anna had come to understand better than most that we didn’t always get to choose our fate, only how we reacted to it. And she hoped both Jenny and Rachel would be considerate of each other’s position going forward.

Since then, she’d seen more of Duke, but not a lot. A couple more half day shifts at the bookshop had kept her away from home part of the time. And when she was here, she’d asked him if he needed her help with anything and he’d mostly declined.

But in those moments when their paths crossed, when they spoke to each other, Anna suffered a thick, almost desperate desire for him. The weather had gotten even hotter, and that didn’t help. At times she’d been forced to ask herself:
Is it the heat making me feel so breathless or is it Duke?
And she wasn’t sure of the answer. She only knew that in his presence, now her whole body felt heavy, needy. And with every second they were together she found herself remembering details of their sex: his powerful erection in her grip, her own cries of pleasure when he’d made her come, the way he’d licked and suckled her breasts so thoroughly, the way he’d pounded into her body with such relentless vigor. God, how could she
not
be breathless when being constantly barraged with such memories?

Did he feel any of that, too? She couldn’t tell. Did he sense her thinking about it, feel the tension rolling off her in waves? She didn’t know that, either. Was Duke just an expert at showing no emotion when he chose not to—or did he really feel as little about their sex as it seemed?

Since she was off from the bookstore today, she’d felt almost obligated to do some work on the house. Because yes, she was paying him, but she hadn’t expected him to accomplish the entire job single-handed. So when she’d insisted on helping, he’d found jobs for her to do. He’d set her to sanding some pieces of wood he’d cut to repair some of the delicate gingerbread trim in the house’s eaves. He’d shown her two different types of spindles he’d bought for the porch and asked her which one she wanted to use. He’d discussed with her the merits of covering the house with vinyl clapboard versus repainting it. The vinyl would be attractive, came in lots of colors, and would require little maintenance—while sticking with wood added value to a historic home and allowed for color changes down the road, but would require painting and other repairs every few years to stay looking good. She’d thanked him for the information, took a brochure of vinyl colors he’d picked up at the Home Depot in Crestview, and said she’d think about it and let him know.

And all the while, every second with him—for her anyway—had been fraught with sexual tension. That same need, that same hunger, that same sense of being incredibly drawn to him—and it multiplied at every small, incidental touch that came with something as simple as taking the brochure from his hand into hers.
Does he really not feel it? Is it only me?

She still didn’t know the answer and had simply been flip-flopping between wild need and trying her damnedest to be cool and let that go, between still feeling attached to him and reminding herself she couldn’t be, that there just wasn’t any future in letting herself feel that way for a man who’d openly told her what they’d shared was only sex.

Now he was gone—when it had suddenly grown quiet outside, she’d stepped out the front door and taken a cautious stroll all the way around the house to find sawhorses empty and tools put away for the day; all was blessedly still and she was alone. Funny, just after they’d had sex, she hadn’t wanted him to leave her alone, but now that she understood the situation and had begun to accept it, she kind of did. At least right now, anyway. Maybe things would normalize in a few days, but for now she still felt awkward. And tense. And hurt. Which was perhaps stupid given that she had almost no history with him, but it was how she felt. So for tonight, it was easier to be alone. And curling up with Cathy’s thoughts and records felt like a sweet and romantic little escape from real life at the moment. More romantic than her real life anyway.

Unlike earlier reading sessions, now Cathy mentioned Robert almost every day, even if only in small ways.

I watched Robert hoe weeds from the garden again today. Just from that, my heart beats faster.

Today is Sunday, the one day of the week when Robert doesn’t work for us. Even Daddy believes it’s wrong to labor on the Lord’s day. But I wonder what Robert does all day out in that little cabin all by himself.

One glimpse of Robert out a window and he stays on my mind all day. Sometimes it doesn’t even require the glimpse.

It all made Anna’s heart beat faster, too, feeling Cathy’s emotions and letting them carry her back to her youth, to first crushes and first kisses and first love. Was anything in the world ever as poignant as that brand new, blossoming passion?

And then she turned the page and things began to get
really
good.

It’s Saturday, and despite Daddy’s insistence on keeping me away from Robert, I got to sit next to him in our old farm truck, all the way into town and back. Daddy and Robert were heading to the hardware store on town square for some new garden tools, and Mother insisted Daddy take me along to buy some sewing notions she needed. I wore my yellow gingham—it’s pretty and bright, without making me feel I looked like I was trying too hard.