We stood together by the fence where I’d once waited for her with bated breath, and I felt something inside me open up, like a flower that had bowed its head and shut its petals when the darkness fell upon it and suddenly felt the warm, unexpected glimmer of a sunbeam.
Slowly, Lia reached out and took my hands in hers, her eyes not leaving mine. For a moment I was confused, not knowing what she was doing. I glanced down at our hands and then back to her. Then she curled her fingers toward her palm to create a loose fist and used her other hand to close mine, bumping our knuckles together once, then twice. She opened her hand and I followed suit, grasping her fingers as she grasped mine.
Oh. It felt as if my heart breathed the word.
Her hands were soft and gentle, and they moved with certainty. I watched as she went through the handshake that I’d had so much trouble remembering. Once and again, and then she let go of me and I did it on my own, imagining her hands were Cole’s, swearing I could hear his laughter drifting to us from the fields, through the breeze, and in the rustling of the leaves above.
I laughed out a strange sort of choking sound. “That’s it.” I nodded. “That’s it.” She knew. She knew because she’d been there, and I recognized the sweet simplicity of the gesture for what it was: a gift.
Our hands dropped, and we looked at each other for a moment and something shifted in the air around us. I didn’t know exactly how to name it, but it caused another spark of yearning to flare within me. “Come over tomorrow, Annalia. Spend Hudson’s birthday with us. Please,” I said, the words falling from my lips.
I didn’t know if there was any chance we could ever wade through the years of miscommunication and loss between us. I had no idea if there was any way to reclaim what we’d once barely begun. But now I knew we both hoped for it, and that seemed like a pretty damn good start.
She watched me for a moment before she nodded, her face breaking into a smile that went straight to my heart. “I’d like that.”
“Me, too, Lia. Me, too.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Annalia
I woke to the sound of rain softly falling on my window. For a minute I didn’t move, just listened to the light, hypnotic drumming, my mind drifting. I thought about the party the day before and turned over, smiling softly at the memory of Hudson in my arms with his birthday hat and cake-smeared grin.
My mind moved to Preston and how we’d stood at the fence and talked, really talked, for the first time in so long. And the way he’d kissed me . . . Do you think there’s a chance for us, Lia? A shiver of hope moved through me, but I was still so wary, so afraid to invest my heart in Preston again. Had I ever really stopped? I sighed. Maybe not. No, be honest, Lia. Definitely not. Oh, but to love him had hurt me so deeply. Could I risk my heart that way again? Should I? Could I even stop myself if I wanted to? My heart, it seemed, knew only how to beat for him, like the wings of a bird soaring through an endless sky. As blue as his eyes and as warm as his touch had once been on my skin.
It was obvious we still had a physical spark. For a time I’d wondered if we’d even lost that. When I’d shown up at Preston’s house with my measly suitcase, his mother had let me in and told me I could take my bag upstairs. I’d passed what I saw was his room, unsure of whether I should put my things in there or not, deciding instead on the room across the hall with the door standing wide open, obviously a guest room by the sparse furnishings and lack of personal items. If Preston wanted me to sleep with him, he could let me know. He hadn’t. And that had hurt. So badly.
No, Preston hadn’t asked me to move into his room, and when I found him looking at me with the same heat in his eyes he’d had for me the night I’d conceived Hudson, he’d look away as if troubled by his own feelings.
At first I’d thought it was the grief . . . and then I’d realized he needed every second of sleep he could get, considering the hours he was working and the physical hardship of trying to keep the farm afloat. Then I’d grown so large with pregnancy I could hardly sleep, and I was glad not to be keeping him awake . . . and then those first few lonely, terrifying months with the baby . . . I’d tried so hard to nurse him, but he had trouble latching on and some nights he’d cry and cry, and I didn’t feel as if I could soothe him. I’d wanted to cry right along with him. I had cried with him.
Preston had been so exhausted from doing the jobs of twenty men after having to lay off most of his workers, and the farm was dry and dead outside our window as if it was a reflection of the parched emptiness of the hearts inside the walls of the farmhouse.
How could I ask him to take over with our wailing infant when I didn’t have to get up and work in the morning like he did?
And then I’d begun having visions of something harming Hudson. I’d clutch him tightly to my chest as pictures of him dropping to the floor, or being burned by the oven flashed in my mind making me feel shaky and anxious. I wanted to ask Mrs. Sawyer about it, but I didn’t dare. She already looked at me with disdain and impatience as if I was a usurper in her home—which I supposed I was.
When I’d moved in, I’d vowed to do everything I could to make her like me. I’d cook, I’d clean, I’d do whatever was necessary to help her heal, and I’d win her over. Only . . . it hadn’t worked. Nothing had worked. Just as it hadn’t with my own mother.
How would Mrs. Sawyer look at me if she knew I was having visions of her grandson being harmed? And what kind of mother did that make me? Some days I still wondered if I could be a good mother to Hudson. I loved him desperately, had yearned for him endlessly, but I still doubted myself.
I hadn’t had much of a role model—my own mother insisted I had the devil in me. Some nights I sat rocking Hudson, feeling so blue and so desolate I wondered if she was right—there was something wrong inside of me. I couldn’t even find joy in my own baby.
The rain continued to fall and my mind continued to wander, backwards to the night I’d left. It had rained that night, too, after months and months of nothing but burning sun and hot, dry wind. Finally, finally the rain had come.
Hudson’s head lay on my shoulder as I filled his bottle with water and shook it to mix in the formula that, even after four months, still felt like a symbol of my failure. I gave him the bottle with a small smile, brushing his dark hair out of his eyes, still damp from his bath. He took it in his chubby hands and began drinking. I leaned in and took a deep breath of the clean little boy smell, letting it fill my lungs and my heart.
I sat down in a chair and held him in the crook of my arm. He was only wearing a diaper and his warm skin stuck to mine as I rocked him slightly, his luminous eyes gazing up at me.