Till it defined her.
And if that wasn’t a life lesson to be gentle with yourself, to forgive and nurture and let yourself grow beyond your follies, Sable didn’t know what was.
Feeling a rare moment of connectedness with her mother, Sable pushed back her chair, moved around the kitchen bench and leaned in to kiss Mercy on her cool cheek. Her mother leaned in to accept it. A bare quarter inch, but it was something.
“Dinner’s in ten minutes,” Mercy grumbled. “Come sit with me even if you’re not eating.”
“Okay, Mum.”
Mercy sent Sable a tight smile.
Back in her room Sable saw that the rug had buckled when she’d fallen in through the window. She gave it a yank, only to expose a slat of old wood a different colour from the rest. A slat with a missing nail.
She crouched, and jimmied the thing loose. And below the floorboards she found a small tin box. Inside it a treasure trove of memories, sentimental things her mother would have thrown away in a heartbeat.
A pure white feather. A smooth pink stone. A postcard Sable had once found among the junk mail her mother had dumped on the bench.
It was from Greece, the return address a scrawl she could barely make out. When Sable had brought it to her mother, Mercy had taken one look, her face brightening, then crumpling, before she’d thrown the card in the bin. Sable had fished it out later that night, stuck it back together, spinning tales in her head that it might have been from her father. Kidnapped by pirates and sending secret messages so her mother knew she was not forgotten.
But the card wasn’t what she was hoping to find inside the little tin box.
There, having slid down beneath everything else, a thin, gold-plated chain, the clasp of which was held together with a slim arrow half the width of her wrist. The bracelet Rafe had given her for her seventeenth birthday. The same night she’d pushed him up against a hay bale in the loft of his father’s barn and told him he loved her and it was time to stop pretending otherwise.
As her thumb ran over the dainty curves of the arrow, she remembered opening the gift. And Rafe’s voice came to her as clear as if he were whispering the words in her ear.
“You cast your spell on me the moment you looked at me, lying on the banks of the river, your witch eyes drinking me in. You shot an arrow through my heart. Also, I hope and pray the arrow magically infuses you with some small sense of direction, as yours is a shocker.”
He’d been nineteen and magnificent as a cloudless midnight sky. She’d loved him for years, so fiercely she’d feared it might cleave her in half. The thought of spending a day apart, much less years, would have been unimaginable.
But if she’d stayed... What was the likelihood they’d still be together?
If she’d stayed, would Rafe have had the gumption, the time, the drive to buy Stan out? Would he have been as driven to make something of himself, to create the big life he now led? The life that had mellowed him, given him purpose. Or would he have poured every ounce of that energy into loving her?
Her mother had wanted her to leave. To protect her. And to forge her.
But Sable now knew leaving was the best thing she could have done for him.
Early the next morning Rafe hooked a left from his driveway, about to head to the airport, when he found himself pulling up outside the house next door.
He noted the broken shingles over the front door. The gutters in need of a clean out. He’d get on to that for Mercy. But that wasn’t why he’d stopped.
“Just go,” he said.
The car said nothing back.
Swearing beneath his breath, Rafe switched off the engine, and got out. Clueless as to what excuse he’d make for knocking on the door. Asking after her bumps and bruises following her fall through the window? Suggesting she check in on Janie if she was bored?
Or to tell Sable, now, so it was done, that while he’d heard her last night, while her words had made him see how serious she was, his answer had to be no.
And not for the reason he would ever have imagined.
Yes, growing up, “family” had been a dirty word. Just because someone was blood, did not mean there would be love, or any instinct to care, no matter what. It was a choice. One that you had to decide to make every day.
But the reason that had kept swimming through his head as he’d tried to fall asleep the night before? If he said yes, and if by some miracle Sable actually had his child, he could not imagine a world in which that child did not know who he was.
It was the “her”.
When Sable had innocently let that slip, it had knocked him sideways. Leaving a crack through which a vision had slipped. The vision of a little girl.
Not dark like Janie, but fair like Sable. With her hazel eyes and his curls. He pictured himself, clear as if it were a real memory, holding her tiny hand as he helped her navigate the stones across the river. The same stones he’d used dozens of times, with her mother.
Picturing that little girl, out there in the world, knowing he’d agreed not to be a part of her life? He’d never agree to that. For he knew what it felt to be that child. To have a parent know him, and still turn their back on him. That wasn’t the kind of man he was.
Rafe glanced down the side of the house.
