Winter Baby. Kathleen O'Brien

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СКАЧАТЬ wasn’t in uniform. Harry didn’t work on Monday. His days off were Monday and Tuesday, about which he complained bitterly, blaming Parker for designing an unfair schedule. Emma had pointed out once that Parker’s own schedule was even worse—he didn’t even get two days off in a row—but Harry didn’t care. Whenever anything displeased him these days, it was always Parker’s fault.

      Or Emma’s. She looked at Harry’s tight face and wondered why he was still so unhappy. Last year had been so different. Back before Parker had moved home and snagged the job Harry had wanted. Before the other bad news, before they had discovered that they…

      Well, just before. They had been happy then. They had laughed—a lot. Now she couldn’t remember the last time Harry had even smiled.

      And yet, in spite of his frown, he looked so darling today, in that brown suede jacket she’d given him for his birthday, which matched his brown hair perfectly. Her heart did a couple of hot little thumps, thinking how much she loved her husband—and yet how little she seemed to be able to comfort him.

      “I knew I’d find you here,” he said stiffly. “I knew you’d forget I had asked you to come home for lunch.”

      “I didn’t forget,” she said, vowing not to take offense. “I had customers.”

      He looked around the empty store, commenting silently on its emptiness.

      “And then I had an order to proof.” She felt her patience giving out on her. “Come on, Harry. You aren’t always able to get home on time, either. Do I give you this kind of grief about it?”

      He tightened his lips. “I don’t think you can really equate the two, do you? I think enforcing the law might be just a little more significant than sending out invitations to Birthday With Bozo.”

      Emma stared at him helplessly. She wanted to go up to this sour, embittered man and grab him by his suede collar and shake him until he told her what he had done with her real husband. Or else she wanted to go up and kiss him until he thawed, until he remembered that he was special, no matter what had happened to make him feel so insecure. Until he remembered that she loved him, and she always would.

      But she’d already tried those things, more or less. And they hadn’t worked. They’d only driven him deeper into his emotional hole. Apparently he didn’t want to get better. And he didn’t like it that she seemed to be able to move on, to put together a happy life in spite of the grim disappointments they had endured this past year.

      Her strength didn’t sustain him. It only made him feel even more inferior.

      But she wouldn’t be weak just to please him. She wouldn’t drown with him, no matter how much she loved him.

      “Well, we’re together now. How about if I lock the door, and we can have our conversation here? What did you want to talk about?”

      He raked his hand through his hair. “You know what. The poster. I want you to explain to me why you took it down. I want to know why you aren’t willing to campaign for your own husband. I want to know why, when the income from my career supports you, too, you can’t do even that one little thing to help me win.”

      Emma’s heart was beating rapidly. Stalling, she arranged herself on the edge of the nearest table, careful not to dislodge the large sample books of cards and invitations. She took a deep breath and gave Harry a steady look.

      “That’s not a conversation,” she said. “That’s an interrogation.”

      “I don’t care what you call it. I want some answers.”

      “So do I.” She folded her hands in her lap, to help her resist the temptation to choke him. “I want to know why you’d put me in the embarrassing, distressing position of having to choose between my brother and my husband.”

      Harry narrowed his eyes. “And I want to know,” he said, his voice acid, “why that choice should be even the slightest bit difficult.”

      The urge to shake him grew stronger. Was it possible he really didn’t understand this? That his self-absorption had become so complete that he couldn’t imagine what she was feeling?

      “Because I love you both, you idiot. Because you and Parker are the two most important people in the world to me. I can live with the fact that you are competing for the same job. But I will not be forced to take sides.”

      “You’re already taking sides. If you don’t publicly support me, it makes me look bad. Everyone will know what that means.”

      “I disagree,” she said, still striving to be rational. “I think it makes you look good. It shows that you’re not eager to make this campaign any more uncomfortable for your family than it has to be. It makes you look as if you’re sensitive to your wife’s dilemma. Even if you’re not.”

      He made an angry gesture. “Oh, so now I’m not sensitive, either?”

      “Harry, for heaven’s sake—”

      To her dismay, the front door chimed, and a customer walked in. Oh, God, she had forgotten to lock the door. The tension of living with this new Harry was making her absolutely crazy.

      It was a middle-aged woman. A tourist. You could tell by her deep copper suntan, something you never saw on the faces of locals. She was dusting snow from her shoulders, oblivious to the fact that she was shaking it onto the Valentine’s display Emma had just begun to assemble, where it would melt and ruin everything it touched.

      The woman patted her big, teased helmet of preposterous yellow hair, transferred her huge designer purse from one hand to another and scanned the store avidly. “Have you marked down your Christmas cards yet?”

      Emma stood politely. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll show you where they are. Just give me a minute to—”

      But Harry was already gone.

      THE COAT HAD COST her three times what she could afford, but as Sarah trudged up the winding path toward Winter House, which sat at the top of a small, snow-covered hill, she decided it was worth every penny.

      Though it was only about two in the afternoon, the temperature had begun to drop, and the light had taken on a bluish cast, as if twilight were impatiently pressing against the sun. The falling snow was thicker now, and with every step Sarah’s feet sank into several inches of fresh white powder.

      Looking up toward the mansion, Sarah saw that it, too, had been transformed by winter. In that long-ago summer, to the thirteen-year-old Sarah who had harbored here, Winter House had seemed like a happy, honey-colored, sun-kissed castle. The hill it stood on had been kelly-green, and the surrounding lush parkland of oaks had softened the mansion’s asymmetrical lines.

      It was different now, in this stark setting. It was more like some mysterious, silent abbey—dark and complicated and vaguely forbidding. For the first time, she could see that the mansion had been aptly titled. Even if its owners had been named Smith, this would have been Firefly Glen’s Winter House.

      It was a typical nineteenth-century Gothic mansion of fawn-colored stone. Its eccentric, disorderly silhouette of crenellated towers, steeply pointed arches crested with fleur-de-lis, wide oriel windows, turrets, spires and gables stood out boldly against the low, oppressive pewter sky.

      Rising from СКАЧАТЬ