Freddie gathered the folds of her silk robe in her hand and followed her up the stairs. “Spill.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Alana said as she opened the door to her childhood bedroom. A midnight blue dress hung from the back of the door to the bathroom. She set her bag down and looked at the dress so she didn’t have to look at her sister. It had a fitted bodice and a gorgeous raw silk skirt. “It’s lovely, Freddie,” she said. “Where’s Toby?”
“Halfway between Sao Paolo and London.”
“So you’ll meet up with him again in Mumbai?”
“Lannie,” Freddie said quietly. “Talk to me.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Alana said. “We should be talking about your wedding. You can get Westminster Abbey if you want it. The bishop’s secretary was very accommodating—”
“Alana.”
Her sister never called her by her first name. Never. Alana looked at her, and swallowed hard. She wouldn’t cry over this. She wouldn’t. “Okay. I got entangled.”
“What’s his name?”
“Let’s see. There’s Cody Burton. He’s seventeen, and he’s got three younger brothers he’s helping his mom raise, and an older brother who’s going back to jail for breaking and entering and stealing Gunther Jensen’s dead wife’s engagement ring.”
“He’s seventeen?” Freddie said, for once shocked into looking up from her phone.
“Or do you mean Mrs. Battle? She’s seventy-seven, and she’s got macular degeneration, and her kids all left Walkers Ford, so she doesn’t have anyone to drive her to doctors’ appointments. She taught English and physics at the high school for forty years. She’s amazing.”
Freddie’s lips shaped into a soft Oh.
“Then there’s Tanya. She’s addicted to prescription painkillers, and she’s probably also an alcoholic. She needs rehab, but we both know you can’t make someone go to rehab.”
Freddie backed up to Alana’s brass bed and sat down on the edge. “Go on.”
“There’s Carlene, and the moms with their kids who come into the library for the backpacks, and the home-schoolers who need extra resources, and . . .”
“And?”
“And Lucas Ridgeway. He’s the chief of police.”
“Your landlord?”
Her landlord, her lover. Her everything. “He’s renovating the kitchen in the house I rented, and he’s got this dog, and he’s just . . . he’s just . . .”
Hot and distant and wounded and willing to keep her secrets and possessive and not at all interested in telling her who or what she should be. He let her just be.
“That blush says it all,” Freddie said.
“He liked the way I blushed,” Alana said. She sat down on the floor with her back to the closet door. “He liked me.”
Freddie held her tongue. More important, she dropped her phone on the bed behind her. “Of course, he did. You’re very likable.”
“David didn’t actually like me. David saw me as a fixer-upper.”
“David is a brown-nosing ass,” Freddie said. “Anyway, you didn’t see yourself that way.”
“No,” she agreed. “I didn’t really see myself any particular way. But after the marriage proposal debacle, I realized that if I didn’t, someone else would always define me. Mother or David or someone like him.”
Freddie studied her. “You’re not a pushover, Lannie. You stand your ground when it matters most. Especially when it matters most. You didn’t say yes to David.”
“It’s not enough to know what I don’t want,” she said. “I need to know what I do want. You know what you want.”
“Sure,” Freddie said as she leaned back, lifted her feet, and studied her pedicure. “But that’s easy because what I want fits in with what the family needs and can use.”
“Me, too,” Alana said automatically.
“I call bullshit,” Freddie sang out. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit . . .”
“Oh, God,” Alana said. “Stop that. Mother will have a fit if she hears you.”
Freddie lowered her voice but continued to sing. A knock came on her bedroom door. “Alana? I don’t hear the water running.”
“I’m starting it now,” Alana said. She clambered to her feet and turned on the shower in the bathroom.
“What do you think of the dress?” her mother called.
She looked at it while Freddie continued to sing bullshit to the Barney song sotto voce.
“Stop it,” she hissed at Freddie. “It’s gorgeous. The embroidery is exquisite.” Now that she looked, she could see delicate vines of roses in a thread only slightly lighter than the blue of the dress. They clustered deeply around the hem, then curled around the skirt to coil and burst into bloom at the edge of the bodice.
Roses. She shook her head. Never again would she be able to look at a rose without thinking of Lucas, of gleaming walnut and old-fashioned roller shades, of everything she’d left behind to come home.