“LOOK,” CODY CALLED. “All you have to do, Allie, is hold the kite. Throw it up in the air when I tell you. Unca, you run!”
Cody was six. His three-year-old sturdiness had given way to knobby knees and ribs that showed, no matter how much they fed him. Today, he was wearing a suit. It looked as if he had already lost the bow tie, and the shirt was rumpled where it was untucked from his pants. Sam felt just a little gleeful about a six-year-old’s innate ability to thwart anyone’s vision of perfection.
Sam did as he was told. He ran.
“Faster, Unca, faster.”
Sam did not think he would ever stop marveling at Cody’s voice: strong, sure, light-filled.
“Okay, Allie, throw it!”
Sam turned to see the kite lift, then nosedive toward the earth. When he turned to run again—hoping to make the kite catch the wind—he lost his footing and fell headlong in the sand. He twisted into a roll, hoping Allie would admire his graceful athleticism. He turned to look at her, and felt the breath whoosh out of him more than it had when he fell.
Honestly? The baby was due any day. She should have looked like a leprechaun explosion in that tent of a jade green dress she was wearing. Instead, she looked gorgeous.
“I think you may have ruined the kite. You’re definitely ruining your clothes!” she called to him, as if she hadn’t noticed his brilliant recovery from his tumble at all.
Sam felt annoyed—again—at his mother-in-law. A beachfront wedding. So close to Allie’s due date that she could have the baby out there on the beach. But there was no talking any sense to Professor Cook, Priscilla. She was bossy and controlling and easily the world’s most annoying person. Sam was only sucking it up for Allie’s sake.
He stopped his thoughts from going too far down that route, and gave himself over to the pureness of this moment, the joy shimmering in the air between the three of them, his family.
Three years.
Sam contemplated that, in the context of the brilliant light he felt he was standing in, despite the grayness of the day, despite Pricilla’s aggravating wedding plans. He stood up and brushed off his pants, found the handle for the kite string as Cody and Allie fussed over the kite.
Time, he had heard over and over, healed all wounds.
This, he had found to be false. It was love, not time, that healed all wounds. Love, like the love he had experienced from his sister, Sue, and his friend and brother-in-law, Adam, making him ready when he had been blissfully unaware he would ever need readiness.
It was their love that had made him ready to say and do whatever love asked him to do.
The healing came from the love Allie gave him every day. And Cody.
Cody declared the kite flight worthy and ran toward him. “You have to run a little faster, Unca. Then it will go.”
Sam looked back at the kite Allie was clutching, nearly said something and then didn’t. Instead, with Cody trying breathlessly to keep up, he raced down the sand again.
Despite the fact they could have bought a dozen kites, or a hundred, or a thousand, Allie had insisted they make the kite themselves, following instructions they had found on the internet. Sam had carefully inspected their finished efforts last night. The kite was a thing of beauty, but the rainbow of colors on the hand-painted brown paper did not make it any more air-worthy. He had broken the truth to them as gently as he could. It would never fly.
And yet here he was running his heart out for it.
It was spring, the kind of blustery day that kept people off the beaches. It was a poor day for a beachfront wedding, and he could see, down the beach, the way he had come, the pagoda was already looking a bit bedraggled. He couldn’t help but feel just a little happy about that.
For heaven’s sake, it was a beach wedding. Why all the formality?
Beyond the pagoda was their Soul’s Retreat. They had added the second floor to the cottage last year when they’d found out their news. It just wasn’t going to be big enough for four of them as it was.
They’d renovated the first floor, too, taking down walls and adding windows, but somehow remaining faithful to the simplicity of the place, the soul of it.
Which was the love that lived there.
Still, the miracle of that love wasn’t in the love he’d received in such generous abundance, both before and after the accident that had taken Sue and Adam—it was the love he had learned to give.
It was learning to be selfless in that giving—to put the needs of others ahead of his own, not resentfully and not reluctantly, but fully and generously—that had restored his heart.
He would do anything to have his sister back. And Adam.
And yet, sometimes, just for a second, when Cody tilted his head a certain way, there was Sue. And when he laughed, there was Adam. Going on.
So there was the basic truth: from Sam’s darkest time had come his greatest lessons, from his darkest hours had come the reliance within himself that made him worthy of what Allie and Cody gave him every day.
And what Bill and Kathy, and Nicole and Bryan gave him. They would be here, soon, for the wedding, part of this crazy thing called family that Sam found himself totally immersed in.
What he and Allie’s new baby would give him.
“How does it feel?” he had asked her the other night, his hand resting gently on the barrel-tightness of her tummy, the baby kicking furiously within.
“Like a miracle,” she’d said.
“How does it feel that it’s your own child?” he had asked softly.
She had stared at him, then blinked, as if the question was absurd. “They’re all my children,” she had said.
All her children.
The first Christmas they were together, she had made the kids of their family—Cody, Nicole and Bryan—a disc of all their favorite songs. And she had put in some of her own originals, including the never-before-heard “Pooperman’s Cape.”
When Bill had heard her music, he had sent it to his friend in Australia, the one who was a record producer.
Within a year, “Pooperman’s Cape” was the number-one-selling children’s song in Australia.
And then in Canada, and then and then and then...last year, she had made more money than him.
And yet she remained hilariously cheap. She wanted to make her own kites, and sew the new quilts for the beds.
Because she understood, perhaps better than most, it wasn’t about the money.
Allie had found the part of herself that had been lost in that crazy world she had entered a long time ago. A world that had promised fame and fortune and acceptance, on the condition she sell her soul for it, on the condition she pretend to be someone and something that she was not.
They had all loved her—including her own mother—for someone she was not.
Some part of her had known the price was too high. Some part of her had retreated instead of moving forward.
But when she found herself, she was never letting go again of what she had found. That somehow the secret of life was not in having stuff—in fact, maybe all that stuff could overwhelm what was important—but in having moments. Experiences. Connections.
And she had connections. Now, they were all her children. The ones she visited in hospitals, the ones whose letters she always answered, the one out there flying the kite with her, the one she carried under her heart.
They were all her children.
And he had been given the amazing privilege of being there to watch her love unfold, of being the one who had helped her be brave enough. To see herself. To be herself.
Once, it seemed a long, long time ago, he had called her a liar when she had said she was strong. Independent. Self-reliant.
But then she had waded into the fire to get him. Was there really any strength, compared to that one? The absolute bravery of saying yes to what love asked of you?
She constantly taught him new things about love. She had asked Ryan, whose star had plummeted as quickly as it had risen, to be on one of the albums with her.
Sam had disagreed—vehemently—with that decision.
But she had explained to him, so patiently, that she and Ryan had both been so young, so easily manipulated by the promises of American Singing Star.
“They found what we both wanted most, and played it,” she said. “He wanted recognition.”
“And you?”
“I wanted love.”
And now, finally, she had found it. And love had made her this: full and forgiving, able to share the bounty of it with others, even those Sam would have found unworthy. Ryan, who had thrown her under the bus, and Priscilla, who was not exactly a candidate for Mother of the Year.
According to Allie, love made you more than you were before, not less.
Other truths had come to him over these years, truths he might not have seen if tragedy did not backlight them.
Time was a gift that could never be taken lightly.
Love was a gift that could never be taken lightly.
They had learned, together, he and Allie, to treat those things with the awed reverence they deserved.
And they had learned, together, the most important lesson of all.
When love beckoned you, followed it.
Soon, Priscilla would arrive. And Allie’s father, Jim, a quiet, retired professor and lover of music, just like Allie. He and her mother had reunited on social media a few months ago.
And even Priscilla seemed to know, finally, after a lifetime of the loneliness, of always being the one who was right, that when love beckoned, you followed it.
Priscilla and Jim were getting married on the beach today—rain or shine, Priscilla had proclaimed, and it looked like it would be rain—and settling here in California, so they could be near the grandkids.
Honestly, this messy thing called family gave Sam a headache sometimes. A headache, he realized, that he wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.
“Now, Allie, throw it in the air now!”
Sam turned, breathless, just as Allie lifted that rainbow-colored kite high, and then tossed it in the air.
And that kite, the one Sam told them would never fly, defied all the odds. Just as his own life had defied all the odds, that kite suddenly found the wind, and lifted and lifted and lifted.
Until it danced with heaven.
Cody and Allie shrieked their delight, clapped their hands, lifted their faces to the sky. The wind blew her long hair around her face.
“Oh!” Allie cried. “Oh, what a perfect moment!”
It was, Sam thought, letting his gaze drift back to the kite, tugging, yanking, pulling, like a wild horse that wanted to be free, as close to a perfect moment as any person could ever expect on this earth.
If you enjoyed this story, check out these other great reads from Cara Colter
Cinderella’s Prince Under the Mistletoe
His Convenient Royal Bride
Snowbound with the Single Dad
Swept into the Tycoon’s World
All available now!
Keep reading for an excerpt from The Maid, the Millionaire and the Baby by Michelle Douglas.