Sugar Pine Trail. RaeAnne Thayne

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      Considering she was the hostess for the gathering, maybe she should be setting a little better example. She dutifully got up to help Roxy pass around the papers, along with pencils from a tin she kept in her kitchen.

      When everyone had a paper and a writing instrument, Julia returned to her seat and gazed down at the paper, not sure what to write.

      For so long, her goals in life had involved taking care of others. Her parents, her library patrons.

      Maksym.

      She wasn’t very good at projects like this. Whenever she was forced to take a good, hard look at her life, she rarely liked what she saw.

      “Can I put something involving Jamie Caine and his pecs?” Sam asked, tilting her head to look at the ceiling as if he might somehow appear there and wink down at them—and perhaps flex said pectorals.

      Julia took another sip of her sangria. The man wasn’t even home, though she didn’t bother telling Sam that. She hadn’t seen his vehicle earlier. When he did get home, he wouldn’t be able to pull into the driveway, as it was filled with the vehicles of her book group friends.

      “Really?” Roxy said. “Is that the first thing that comes to mind when you look at what would bring you joy next year?”

      “Yes,” Sam said emphatically.

      Megan laughed, though Sam’s mother rolled her eyes from across the room.

      “What’s wrong with that?” Samantha said. “You specifically wanted us to think about something missing from our lives. I would have to say that is definitely missing from my life.”

      “Thanks,” Wynona Emmett said with an eye roll of her own. “Now we’re all thinking about Jamie’s pecs.”

      Megan snorted. “Why would you care about that when you have a hot man in uniform waiting for you at home?”

      “Yes. Yes, I do.” Wyn said with the sort of self-satisfied smile that made Julia ache with envy.

      Once, she thought her life would turn out like Wyn’s, married to a man she loved, with children and a home too small to hold in all her happiness.

      Things hadn’t quite turned out that way.

      She gazed down at her paper as all the wasted years seemed to march across the empty whiteness.

      “You can put whatever you want on your list,” Roxy said. “There’s no right or wrong here. It’s your list. Your dreams. But be honest with yourself. Like we learned in the book, you are the chief architect of your life. No one else. I’ll give you ten minutes to finish this.”

      To set the scene, Roxy turned on the music she had brought along, tuned to some kind of new age harp music playing Christmas songs. Julia didn’t find it necessarily very helpful. Between the music and the sangria, now she just wanted to take a nap.

      She stared at her paper for a long moment while a hundred thoughts chased themselves around in her brain. The sad truth was, she didn’t have a problem coming up with things missing in her life. The problem was narrowing the list down so she wasn’t writing a novel about it.

      She took another sip of her drink and finally wrote the first thing that came to mind.

      Drive my new car on the Interstate.

      She had owned the Lexus for a month and so far had avoided any highways or freeways that might require her to put the pedal to the metal. That was fine when she was running around town, but it was becoming apparent to her that she was starting to go out of her way to avoid having to travel too fast. What was the point in owning such a fine vehicle, if she was afraid to drive it?

      And while she was thinking about speed, another lifelong dream popped into her head, and she wrote it down before she had time to think.

      Learn to ski.

      She lived in the mountains, for heaven’s sake, where they could have snow upwards of seven months out of the year. How could she have lived to be thirty-two and not ever have tried the area’s most popular winter sport?

      “Learn to ski. That’s a good one!” Megan said. “Can I use that one, too?”

      Julia fought the urge to cover her paper. “Um, sure. If that’s your dream.”

      “One of many, hon. One of many.”

      “No peeking at each other’s papers,” Roxy said sternly. “You can share later if you choose, but for now I want you to do this on your own.”

      Megan sat back in her chair. “Wow, harsh. Roxy is as bad as Miss Chestnut. Remember her?”

      “Oh, yes,” Julia said. Agatha Chestnut had been the librarian in Haven Point for years. She had a dour, pinched face, a beehive hairdo and cat glasses that magnified her eyes about a hundred times. All the children had been terrified of her.

      “Okay, you should have written down at least half of your list,” Roxy said.

      Julia had exactly two items. She looked down at her list and quickly wrote the next thing that came into her mind.

      Fly in an airplane.

      How humiliating that she even had to write that one down. She had more than three decades on the planet, for heaven’s sake, and a long list of places she wanted to go.

      Her family had taken vacations when she was young, but her father never had much time away from his business, so they usually only traveled places they could drive to in a day.

      She had always dreamed of seeing India, China, Paris.

      The Ukraine.

      She should have gone home with Maksym.

      Old, long-familiar regrets haunted her. How different her life might have been if she had followed the instincts of her twenty-one-year-old heart and chosen love over obligation.

      If only she had taken a chance, once in her life.

      “Okay,” Roxy said. “Only five more minutes. You need to be wrapping things up now.”

      Julia gazed down at her mostly blank paper. She wasn’t writing a stupid novel here. No one else needed to see it. She only needed to write down a few of the many things she longed to do. How hard was that?

      She took a long, fortifying drink of sangria and wrote quickly, forcing herself not to self-edit.

      Try escargot.

      Kiss someone special under the mistletoe.

      Get a puppy.

      That one made her stop. Why didn’t she get a puppy? Her parents had never wanted one when they were alive, but they were gone now. There was nothing really stopping her, was there?

      “Okay, one more minute. You’ve got time to add one, maybe two more things to your list.”

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