“Hey. How’s she doing?” Max tiptoed into the pink-and-green nursery the following Christmas Eve. “She seemed sniffly when I left this morning.”
“Oh, she’s fine,” Jenny told him. She lifted the baby to her shoulder and snuggled her close. “Babies get sniffly for no good reason just because everything about them is miniaturized.”
“Hard to believe it’s been a year since I came back,” Max whispered. “So much has happened...”
His mother’s eyes filled instantly, remembering. “The way of life, isn’t it? The good Lord gives and He takes away.”
Max sank onto the window seat beside the glider rocker. “I’m glad Dad got to meet her.”
Jenny’s nod said she agreed wholeheartedly. “He was thrilled to have a namesake.”
Mixed emotions tightened Max’s throat. “Charlotte Grace Campbell.”
“Charlie.” His mother smiled up at him through her tears. “And if your dad saw what you did with this year’s light show, he’d be pleased as punch, Max.”
“You learned from the best,” Tina said as she crept into the room, bent and kissed Jenny’s cheek, then did the same to Charlie’s. “And as she grows up, we’ll fill her with stories and pictures and beautiful memories of the grandfather that made all of this possible. And how God’s timing worked so perfectly, bringing you home.” She smiled up at Max and touched a finger to his cheek. “Bringing us together...”
“I think his patience might have been tried just a little on that part,” Max drawled, meeting his wife’s gaze.
She blushed. “Okay, that was all me, but then bringing Charlie just in time to meet her grandpa.” She smiled up at Jenny and didn’t try to hide the tears in her eyes. “That meant the world to me. To see him hold her. Talk to her. I might have been stubborn about going my own way before—”
Max cleared his throat to show he wasn’t about to disagree.
She acknowledged that with a slight grimace of guilt, then added, “But for the first time in my life I saw God’s hand in all of this. Giving me the family I always longed for, bringing me Max and Charlie, even in losing big Charlie.” She raised her shoulders and touched the baby’s soft-as-silk cheek. “As hard as that is, somehow it seemed like we’d all be okay because God gave us one another as He called Dad home.”
Max’s heart went tight, then soft.
They’d lost so much when they said their final goodbyes to Charlie, but when he looked around this room...
His daughter’s bedroom, with his mother holding her ninth grandchild and the nighttime candle glowing in the window...
He saw Tina’s words come alive.
God had given and God had taken away, but he was blessed with so much more this year. A home, a family, a new life in Kirkwood Lake...
And a series of tomorrows, blessed by God.
He bent and kissed his mother’s cheek, then his wife’s, before he went downstairs to heat up the famous Martinelli red sauce. Thirty years ago he’d been a dirt-streaked kid dumped on Social Services four days before Christmas.
Now?
He was part of one of the best families on earth and despite life’s ups and downs, Max Campbell couldn’t be happier.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from SUGAR PLUM SEASON by Mia Ross.