“Don’t forget the tablets,” her father added, pleased to be of help.
Her mother shot him a look.
Jessica saw, between them, in that look of exasperated affection, everything she had always wanted. Comfort, companionship, love that had survived many tests and challenges, a deep knowing of another human being.
Her parents, she knew, from their stories, had been just like Jessica and Devon: lifelong companions, soul mates who had grown up next door to each other.
But in New York, Jessica had glimpsed something far more terrifying than their steady love, something that burned brighter and hotter.
There was that fear again, flitting around the edges of her mind. She shoved it away.
“What your mother is trying to say is that we would never want you to put off an opportunity out of a sense of obligation to us.”
“Yes, that is exactly what I wanted to say. Just think! We could visit you in NYC. It’s on my bucket list.”
They were both looking at her so hopefully, wanting so desperately to fix anything that was wrong in her world.
Jessica could feel tears forming in her eyes. Her parents were setting her free, giving her their blessing. But in her heart, she knew it wasn’t a sense of obligation to her parents holding her back.
That was just one of her many excuses.
“Thank you,” she told them softly.
Her father took that as a signal to leap up from his chair and get away from a conversation that was not about an old car, so therefore was uncomfortable.
“I have to work on that lock thing,” he said, and hauled his phone out of his pocket. “Look, Jessica, I can lock the doors of the house from here. I’m trying to hook up the bookstore for you, but—”
Her mother gave him a nudge and a warning look.
“But I can do it myself!” he said. “No need for you to help, Jessica. At all.”
After they left, she looked at the clock. There was time, before dark, to go to the Falls. She had told Jamie that she always went there when she needed an answer, but she had been making the hike almost daily, and still no answers came.
New York had shown her an uncomfortable truth. Jessica had outgrown her hometown. Now what? Obviously, New York had not worked out, but should she be actively seeking out other opportunities? Thinking of selling her bookstore? Moving on?
She might have normally sounded out these ideas on Aubrey and Daisy. She had come to trust their judgment deeply. They were definitely her “go-to” when she needed to share a confidence.
But this time, they were in a tizzy of excitement over the shocking gifts they had been given.
Neither of them would entertain the notion that their gifts—Daisy, a villa in Italy, and Aubrey, funds to go on a grand adventure—were very different than hers. Neither of their gifts was directed at their professional competency. While their gifts seemed only to reflect the generosity of the giver, seemed to be only about embracing fun, Jessica felt the weight of a judgment in the gift of a job opportunity, as if Viv had sniffed out a failure, as if the opportunity she had directed toward Jessica was based in pity.
Aubrey had scoffed at the idea, and Daisy had been silent when Jessica had said it, which Jessica assumed was disagreement. So, she had gone quiet online, feeling, not quite betrayed by her two friends, but not understood, either.
Suddenly, she had the feeling. They knew.
Aubrey and Daisy knew that Jessica’s feelings of upheaval may have been precipitated by the unexpected job offer, but they had not been caused by it.
Indeed, it might have all brought her to this place she most needed to be.
Facing the fear that was at the core of her being, and that directed every single other thing in her life.
Jamie swatted at a mosquito. He felt as if he had been on the longest journey of his life, and it had brought him to the very edges of the earth.
Timber Falls was not an easy place to reach. It had taken nearly two days to get here, including the flight and renting a car from the nearest airport. After driving through a wilderness of towering trees and soaring mountains—country so endless and magnificent it made a man feel small and lost—his GPS had finally delivered him to Timber Falls.
It was a town out of a postcard: against a backdrop of ragged-edged mountains and deep green forests, was a wide valley that held neat and tidy streets, lined with pastel-painted cottages and Victorian houses in historical colors. There were shady porches, with swings on them, fenced yards with patches of lush green grass that begged for bare toes to wiggle in it. He caught glimpses of garden plots with neat rows of furry green growth poking up through rich black soil. Everywhere were lilac trees, in full blooms of white, lavender, deep purple. The summer air was perfumed with their scent.
He passed two churches, small boxes of buildings with soaring spires, and a water park where children squealed as they squirted each other with cannon-like guns and as a bucket on a post filled and then spilled over on top of them. The elementary school and the high school shared grounds, the soccer fields and baseball diamonds empty, the swings in the play yard deserted for the summer.
The outlying neighborhoods gave way to a quaint main street, baskets overflowing with colorful petunias hanging from old-fashioned streetlight standards. At two stories, the tallest buildings were the town hall, and the Royal Bank.
It was all exactly as Jamie had pictured the town Jessica would come from.
He drove slowly, passing the hardware store, a restaurant, a bakery, a hair salon. And there it was. Sandwiched in between a false-fronted ice cream store and a sandstone art gallery was a narrow old house that had been converted into a bookstore.
The plate glass window had a graphic in Baskerville Old Face that declared it was Jessica’s
