Larkspur Road (37 page)

After putting away her clothes and storing her suitcase in the back of her walk-in closet, Sophie gazed around her small, high-ceilinged room brimming with knickknacks and memories. The familiar lemon scent of Pledge, freshly washed cotton sheets, and fresh air wafting through the open window stirred her senses.

With the soft white lace curtains rustling in the breeze, she realized how little these four walls had changed since she’d left the ranch for college. She was twenty-nine now, single again, and staring at the remnants of innocence and childhood.

From the photographs and posters hung on the walls to the peach and yellow quilt folded neatly over her double bed, the room whisked her back through time, to days when she and her best friends Lissie Tanner and Mia Quinn spent almost every minute together, and if not together, gabbing on the phone.

All of her old stuffed animals from kindergarten through senior year in high school, including the huge stuffed lizard Wes had won her at the state fair, still slouched on the top shelf of her oak bookcase, which took up half a wall, and her creaky old six-drawer dresser occupied the other half.

Her mother had told her at dinner that Lissie—now Lissie Norris—was pregnant. And that Mia was throwing her a baby shower a week from Saturday.

I’ll look for a gift in town tomorrow.

She was thrilled for Lissie and Tommy—they’d been together since high school and had been trying to have a baby for over a year.

But suddenly, the hollowness inside Sophie became a hard, tangible ache in her chest. So many of her friends were pregnant or had babies now. She’d gone to all of their baby showers. Watched them hug and feed and bathe their infants, bundling them into tiny coats and hats, strapping them into strollers and car seats, caring for them with a joy and total intensity that Sophie could only yearn for.

Soon, Ned had told her, over and over. Be patient. We’ll start trying soon. In six months. Then it was another six.

Then a year.

The timing needed to be perfect, according to him. And that meant after his career was firmly on track, rolling along in the ideal groove. After he landed a cable or network job
and could cut his ties with the local affiliate crap Ned felt was so beneath him.

Her ex-husband had been a local news producer on WBBK in San Francisco, and he was good at his job. Damned good. Under his direction, the nightly news ratings had climbed from third place to number one in just under a year. But Ned had wanted more, a whole lot more. He wanted to become executive producer of a cable or network news show, one that was big and important and would get national attention—and that would thrust him into the big time.

With the big budgets,
he’d told Sophie, pacing across the bamboo floor of their Potrero Hill condo, wound up the way he used to get before a final exam in college.
Not to mention big players, big media attention—and big money.

Sophie wasn’t sure exactly when the cute, brown-haired guy with the serious eyes and a cleft in his chin, with the perfect manners and a double major in journalism and business, the guy she’d studied with in the library, gobbled pizza with at Dewey’s, lived with in a tiny studio apartment off campus their senior year, and married ten months later, had morphed into a man with tunnel vision—burrowing straight ahead toward his career goals and forgetting the life and family and home he’d promised to build together with her.

Maybe it was sometime after her own small bakery business, Sweet Sensations, had taken off, becoming as popular as her cinnamon buns, which flew off the shelves every morning and were gone by noon.

Sophie had gradually expanded the offerings in her shop beyond baked goods and coffees. She’d added a couple of soups and a handful of sandwiches and several unique gourmet salads to the menu, and eventually, at the suggestion of her friend Rosa, she’d begun taking on some catering jobs.

Somehow, over the next few years, the orders ratcheted up until she had to add staff and take out a loan for more equipment and supplies.

Sophie Sinclair’s Sweet Sensations soon earned a designation
as one of San Francisco’s top three go-to caterers for upscale corporate events. Her business had grown beyond her most optimistic daydreams. Written up in local gourmet magazines, in newspaper food columns and online reviews, Sweet Sensations had flourished, and the clients had poured in.

But all along, Sophie had been prepared to hire managers and as much staff as were needed to take over, just as soon as she and Ned got pregnant.

She’d been craving a baby ever since she turned twenty-five. Day after day, she’d found herself smiling at every infant and toddler she encountered at the grocery store or the movies, or being swung by the hands by his or her parents down the street, and the ache of wanting a child of her own filled her with a pang that was almost physical.

But things hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped. They’d originally planned to start trying for a family early in their marriage, but Ned had changed his mind, persuading her that they should get more established in their careers first. So they’d put it off.

By Sophie’s twenty-eighth birthday, her biological clock was in full racing mode, turning her yearning for a child into a longing that reached into the deepest parts of her heart.

But by then, Ned’s head—and a lot more of him than that, Sophie reflected bitterly—was fixated elsewhere.

Cassandra Reynard, to be exact.

The vice-president of the cable network that was tops on his list, and that had been considering hiring him for months, was carrying Ned’s child. The baby Sophie had longed for.

And to top it off, Ned was enough of a bastard to blame her for the destruction of their marriage.

“You caused this, Sophie,” he’d had the nerve to tell her on the phone two weeks after she accompanied a pregnant friend to the obstetrician, only to find her own husband seated in the waiting room, holding hands with another woman.

Cassandra Reynard, a red-haired, Julia Roberts look-
alike, had still been nauseous at the beginning of her second trimester.

“All you could think about was what
you
needed—a baby. You couldn’t let up on the pressure, Sophie. You didn’t give a damn about my needs, my goals. Just because your stupid bakery took off like a firecracker, you thought it should be easy for me, too. You have no idea what I’ve been going through to give us a shot at the life we wanted—”

“I definitely know what you’ve been going through, Ned.”

“Don’t—”

“Sleeping your way to the top must be terribly hard work. Pure torture.”

“I was doing this for
us
, Sophie. Things just got out of control. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Sophie, look, I gotta go. Cassandra’s beeping in, I’ll get back to you.”

Her hands were shaking so much as she punched off her cell that she dropped the phone on the floor.

For a moment, she’d struggled to fight back her sobs, then had given in to them and let the tears burst from her. She’d snatched up her leather notebook and a pen as tears streamed down her cheeks, and had sat down to scribble an addition to her list.

Imagine Ned as a football. In the center of the stadium. And it’s kickoff time at the Super Bowl.

A sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob escaped her throat. A counselor at a group divorce session she’d attended at the library a few days before had suggested the participants keep a list of thoughts that made them feel good—or bad—so they could get in touch with their inner selves as a way to relieve stress and deal with anger toward their former spouses.

“How’s that for being in touch?” Sophie had wiped the tears with the back of her hand and shakily stuffed the notebook into her tote bag.

She wasn’t sure how, but somehow she’d held it together through the next few months. Packing up the condo, listing it with a Realtor, meeting with lawyers.

Yesterday, she’d signed her name to a contract officially selling Sweet Sensations to the Cramer Restaurant Group, and faxed it, and her divorce agreement, back to her attorneys.

Then she’d rolled her luggage into the hall and closed the door forever on the chic San Francisco condo where her marriage had begun—and where it had ended.

Catching Ned with Cassandra had shaken her out of the dream that they could somehow save their marriage and have the life she’d thought they’d been building. She’d been fooling herself for much too long, ignoring the truth.

That was over now.

Grabbing an old comfortable hoodie, Sophie hurried into the hall and down the old stairs. Softly, so as not to wake her mother, she eased open the front door and stepped out into the Montana night.