The air was warm and sweet with the fragrance of blooming lilacs, and despite the approaching evening, the sun was still strong and bright, promising long, full of light days and shorter nights soon. Soft rays filtered through the newly greened cottonwood trees, decorating Sawyer and Lacey with dappled shadows and making the deep green conifer branches shine jewel-bright.
Katelyn was lost in thought, and she and Brian walked mostly in silence, while the kids pranced ahead, laughing and pretending they were deer. It was all too easy to pretend everything was perfect and right in her world—and even easier to play make-believe that the four of them were a family. Every so often, however, a breeze kicked up, whispering a warning that rustled through the bushes and touched Katelyn’s bare legs with a shivery chill. They weren’t out of the woods yet. Literally or figuratively. While it seemed that spring had arrived and was shifting into summer early this year, there could still be storms ahead.
Brian noticed her tremble, but misinterpreted it. Or maybe he didn’t. He unzipped his sweatshirt and wrapped it over her shoulders.
“Won’t you be cold?” she protested.
“Nope.”
As they continued on, the forest and the quiet deepened. Then Katelyn spotted a fork in the path. “That’s far enough, guys. Let us catch up,” she called. Both kids stopped like she’d pulled a cord and busied themselves lifting rocks, hoping to find salamanders.
When she and Brian caught up, Brian joined in the reptile search. A bumpy fist-sized toad was discovered, and if anyone had witnessed the scene, they’d have thought someone struck gold by the amount of cheering and sheer delight.
“This place is the best,” Lacey enthused as they left the toad to his wanderings and recommenced their own.
“It really is,” Katelyn agreed, but her happiness in seeing her children enjoy themselves so fully was bittersweet. A throbbing sadness, thick as blood, pulsed through her. River’s Sigh B & B, quirky Spring cabin, and this crazily beautiful property were such a wonderful place to raise kids—but it was all as fleeting as mist. Soon they’d be wedged into some low rent apartment, surrounded by concrete and close neighbors. That was all she’d be able to afford in a bigger city.
There was no help for it. She couldn’t stay here indefinitely. Even staying into the fall was iffy. Lacey needed to return to school in September, so they had to be settled somewhere by then. And there was the issue about the reliability of her car. If she was worried about it on summer roads, there was no way she could trust it in bad weather conditions. And last but not least, there was Steve—her ultimate, insurmountable problem, as always. Yes, he was quiet now, but he wouldn’t remain so for long. He never did. And now she had pushed him by asking for a divorce . . . Her eye twitched and she fought off a fresh jolt of nerves. She needed to break free of him, once and for all. She—they—needed a fresh, safe start. Far away. Soon.
“Turn here,” Brian said, directing them to the right, interrupting her morose thoughts.
“Are we actually headed somewhere specific?” she asked.
“You’ll see,” Brian said, grinning.
The kids galloped away on the straight stretch again. Then suddenly they stopped, staring at something invisible from Katelyn’s vantage point.
“Holy cow!” Lacey yelled, and they both tore off again—then vanished.
“Hey, wait up,” Katelyn called, but this time they didn’t comply. She and Brian jogged to catch up and a second later, she saw what had brought her kids to a standstill and tempted them into ignoring her.
“Oh my goodness . . .” Her whisper trailed off. “It’s . . . beautiful.” But beautiful seemed inadequate. It was mystical. Otherworldly. Magical. Awe-inspiring.
Beside her, Brian inhaled like he was gathering strength for something. “I know, right?”
A meadow of yellow, pink, and purple wildflowers stretched as far as the eye could see, flanked by protective walls of vivid green forest and navy mountains. In the foreground, a lazy creek danced and frothed over massive flat rocks and craggy stones. In the far distance, a weathering house beckoned to her. Deserted before it was finished, it stood silver and proud and somehow expectant in the tangerine glow of the setting sun.
Brian took Katelyn’s hand to help her down a rock strewn four-foot drop—the reason you couldn’t see the meadow from the trail until you were almost on top of it. For a second Katelyn was completely distracted from the view by their skin-to-skin contact. Her pulse thudded.
They followed the crushed grass footpath Sawyer and Lacey had created, and a soft burbling sound like suppressed laughter grew louder.
“Mom, look,” Lacey said, wonderstruck. “There’s even a bridge.”
And there was. A faded boardwalk spanned the creek in a gentle arc, complete with a sturdy, protective railing on either side constructed of gnarled branches. It was both rustic and enchanting, perfect for this forest-fringed fairyland in the middle of nowhere.
As the four of them clomped over the bridge, Sawyer muttered, “Trip, trop, trip, trop,” happily under his breath, obviously relating the bridge to his favorite fairy tale, “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” but equally obviously from his grin, not thinking of the ogre at all.
The bittersweet feeling clamped Katelyn’s heart all the harder. This moment was beyond special. It felt, impossibly and surreally, like some sort of homecoming as the four of them marched together toward this previously abandoned house that waited to be made into the home someone had envisioned once upon a time.
“This land belonged to one of the area’s earliest homesteads,” Brian said. “The site was chosen because of its access to the river and the train tracks that run along it. The original cabin, and later, a larger house, were destroyed by house fires.”
Katelyn gasped at the coincidence—that Brian would find this spot after his own loss.
He shrugged as if hearing but no longer needing her unvoiced sympathy, clearly enjoying his tale. “Then, twenty or so years ago, some distant relation of the original family decided to live here and built this house—but he stopped mid-project and never came back. No one knows why.”
As Brian spoke, Katelyn noticed details that supported his story. Here and there were stumpy remains of burned out fruit trees, black char marks still visible if you looked closely. Beyond them was a pile of river rock and the crumbling remains of a chimney, still standing after all these years.
Lacey bent over something nearby in the long grass. Further digging, prodding and wiping revealed a pretty piece of brass rimmed porcelain—the decorative front plate of a wood cook stove. She held up her prize triumphantly and Brian high fived her with enthusiasm.
“We’re standing in what was once the kitchen,” he explained. “You can still find bits of the old foundation too.”
“It looks like they had a whole orchard,” Katelyn said as she recognized what might have been rows of trees at one time.
“Yep, and there’s a massive patch of strawberry plants and mint that have gone wild too.”
As they got closer to the abandoned building, Katelyn’s awe grew. The house was a classic farmhouse shape and style, which sort of embodied what she’d describe as her dream house if ever asked. It was two stories tall with a bay window off the front of the main floor and two dormer windows on the top floor. Remarkably, all the glass was still intact.
A wide staircase led to a wraparound veranda. Katelyn could practically see a collection of brightly painted rocking chairs lined up for the four of them. She pictured a porch swing in the corner too, like Jo and Callum had, always filled with a cozy quilt to snuggle in while they watched stars light up the evening sky.
Brian shook his head. “It’s such a shame, hey? Imagine building a whole house, complete with glass, doors and a shingled roof—and then just walking away. Callum can’t believe the waste. He figures the builder ran out of money, or had some family tragedy or something.”
Katelyn prodded the first step with one foot, testing it for sturdiness.
“Everything’s still solid,” Brian reassured.
She climbed a few more steps. “Someone has to know the story of this place. Greenridge is a small town.”
“Yeah,” Brian agreed. “Callum just hasn’t found out yet. He didn’t even know it was here. A realtor cold-called him, thinking he and Jo might be interested.”
Katelyn stepped onto the verandah and put her hand on the front door’s knob. It turned easily under her hand, but she released it like she was burned and stepped back.
“What?” Brian asked, alarmed.
“Nothing.” She shook her head, not having the foggiest idea how to articulate the tumult of emotions colliding through her.
“Can we go in?” Sawyer asked eagerly. Katelyn scooped him up and buried her face in his sweet little boy neck. The pain in her heart was spreading through her limbs, poisoning the whole evening. Brian would live and build a home here. She knew it. That was why he was showing it to her, not to gloat, but because he was excited. Maybe he was even thinking of it as a project for him and Naomi—
She cut that thought off. It didn’t matter. It would never be her home with him.
“Yes, shall we?” Brian said.
“No,” she said. “I can’t.” She knew she was being confusing and weird, to her kids and to Brian, but it was unavoidable. She couldn’t cross that threshold with Brian, couldn’t go room to room with him and the kids, imagining them, their things . . .
“Please,” Lacey wheedled.
“I said no.” Katelyn carried Sawyer down the stairs, in a hurry to retrace their steps and retreat the way they’d come.
Brian’s hand on her shoulder stopped her. She turned reluctantly to face him.
He lifted Sawyer from her and placed him on the ground. “Why don’t you guys see if you can find a few strawberries? It’s early yet, but there might be one or two ripe ones.”
“Can we, Mom?” Lacey asked.
She nodded wordlessly and the kids sprinted away, excited and eager. Watching them, her heart ached and her throat burned. There was so much she wanted to give them—and so much she’d probably never manage to.
The light was starting to fail, and Katelyn was skeptical about the possibility of them finding any berries. It was merely a ploy to keep them busy, so Brian could talk to her alone. She crossed her arms over her chest and Brian’s brow creased.
“Will you please tell me what’s wrong?” he asked softly.
“Just . . . everything.” She uncrossed an arm long enough to wave at the property as a whole, then wrapped it tightly around herself again.
“I don’t understand.”
She shrugged.
“Talk to me. That’s our thing. What we do.” In the deepening dusk, Brian looked as miserable as she felt. He reached out and traced her jaw with his fingers. “Are you upset about Naomi? If so, I need to clarify something. We’re not dating, let alone going to live together. She only meant I was moving in with her as a renter. When you got the wrong idea, I thought it might be—”
“Easier for us to maintain some distance if I thought you had a girlfriend out of the blue?” Katelyn finished the sentence for him and knew she was right. It was immediately obvious to her, and equally clear that she’d only jumped to conclusions in the first place because she was as desperate as he was to try to put something, anything, between them.
Brian nodded.
“Our efforts to keep away from each other and our attempts to let our feelings die down don’t work very well for us, do they?”
Brian shook his head exaggeratedly, which made her smile. She motioned toward the house once more. “It wasn’t misunderstanding about Naomi that made me twitchy back there—or if it was, it was only part of it. Why did you want to show me this place?”
Brian shifted his weight from foot to foot. “It was supposed to be me running it past you, like asking if I’m nuts to even be considering buying it, fixing it up—but,” he shook his head, “now that we’re here, I realize exactly what’s freaking you out.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said matter-of-factly. “What I was really doing is showing you our house, the place we’re supposed to make a home. Together.”
“But we’ve already established this so many times: I can’t, Brian. I can’t.”
He nodded. “And I wouldn’t have dragged you here, except I didn’t consciously realize what I was doing. Then we arrived and I saw the longing in your face as you looked around, and I realized what I was hoping for.”
“Mom!” Lacey’s indignant shriek pierced the quiet. “Sawyer’s picking green berries.”
“That’s okay—”
“No, it’s not! That means there won’t be any red ones later and that’s not fair!”
Katelyn sighed and shot Brian an apologetic look. He smiled, but his eyes were pensive. “We should get them home anyway. To be continued?”
Katelyn nodded, but she felt afraid. She knew where she wanted the conversation to go. She knew where—and what—she wanted to be continued. But was it fair to Brian to lead him on when she couldn’t stay? It was clearer than ever that he saw himself in Greenridge long term. No matter how they felt about each other, they had no future.
But you asked Steve for a divorce precisely for this reason, to start clearing a way for you and Brian to be together, her inner voice lectured as Brian lifted Lacey to his shoulders, distracting her from her outrage at her brother.
And look what that’s gotten me! a different part shrilled back. Steve is furious. I should never have entertained the daydream. It’s too dangerous. For me. For Sawyer and Lacey. And for Brian.