Nice To Come Home To. Liz Flaherty

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СКАЧАТЬ visits to the orchard and the year in the lake house had saved her sanity on more sleepless nights than she wanted to contemplate.

      Royce’s expression was both disbelieving and disdainful. “Come on, Sister Smart One. You were married. You didn’t have to follow Dad all over the world with the army and make new friends every couple of years. There had to be some happiness in there somewhere. You had a life. You had choices.”

      “I did my share of Dad-following, too, but I did have a life. You’re right. Let me change what I said. The year on the lake was the happiest I’ve ever been.” She’d had choices, too, and she’d too often made the wrong ones. She hoped this move wasn’t one of those.

      “You chose to divorce Tony and let him keep most of everything you guys had.”

      “It’s called a prenup.” And she’d given up more than she had to, just because she thought it had somehow all been her fault, but Royce probably wouldn’t understand that. Cass wasn’t sure she understood it, either.

      “My mother told Dad he should come and help you, but he wouldn’t. He said you’d made your bed and you could lie in it.”

      “She has always been very kind to me.” This couldn’t be said about all of Cass’s stepmothers. The one after her own mother had been determined to marry an army officer, regardless of the cost to anyone else. She’d had a handsy son who had made life difficult for the pubescent Cass. The next one had borne shocking similarities to all the stereotypes ascribed to a Barbie doll, a fact made worse by the fact that her given name was Barbara Ann and Cass’s father’s name was Kenneth.

      Royce’s mother, Damaris, came into the picture when Cass was eighteen and married to Tony Moretti, and had been a friend from the very beginning—even more so after she divorced Cass’s father. That Damaris and Cass’s mother had become friends as well had made them into a quirky but workable family.

      Royce snorted. “Until she foisted me off on you, right?”

      “She’s deployed to Afghanistan. Not exactly her choice. Would you rather have stayed with Dad?” Cass heard the exasperation that laced her voice. Royce’s smirk said her sister heard it, too.

      She supposed this was the good side to why she and Tony hadn’t had children. If they had, their progeny would be about the age of Royce, give or take a few years. Divorce had been bad enough as it was, when there hadn’t even been pets to decide the custody of. How would Cass have handled Tony’s defection and a harrowing battle with breast cancer at the same time if grumpy teenagers had been added to the mix?

      She rubbed her arm absently. It didn’t hurt much anymore, but less than a year past chemo and radiation, she still expected it to.

      “Are you all right?”

      The solicitude in Royce’s question surprised her. It was nice to hear. “Yeah. Thanks.”

      “Where will we live?”

      “I’ve told you that already, several times.” Cass kept her voice even with an effort. Had she been like this at sixteen when her parents, in a rare mutual decision, had sent her to stay with her grandparents? Probably. “We have a cottage on the lake called Little Dream for two weeks. Many businesses and a lot of houses in Miniagua use Cole Porter titles—or parts of them—as their names.” She raised a quelling hand. “If you ask me one more time who Cole Porter is, I’m going to stop the car and make you walk.”

      “I know, I know. He’s a really famous songwriter who grew up close to this lake of yours. You sang ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ halfway across Kansas to punish me for asking the last time.”

      Cass laughed and, to her profound pleasure, so did her sister.

      “What about after the two weeks? Will we go home?” Royce sounded wistful, and Cass stared into the eastern sky as she drove toward the lake. Her heart ached.

      Home. To Royce, that was California because that’s where her friends were. It’s where the duplex was that she shared with her mother. Their father, retired somewhere in Idaho, paid her no more attention than he had Cass, but Damaris had given her daughter all the security she could within the bounds of what the US Army decreed. They’d been in California for five years. Royce had a California driver’s permit, which to a sixteen-year-old meant permanence.

      “I don’t know,” Cass admitted. But I hope not. I don’t want to go back. I was happy here once. I want to try to find it again.

      “I don’t want to start school at your lake if we’re not staying.” That she didn’t want to stay there at all was patently obvious, but she was enough of a military brat not to bother saying so.

      Cass nodded. There was still another few weeks before school started in either place and the sky wouldn’t fall if she started late—she was a good student. However, she didn’t blame Royce for wanting to know if she was going to have to start all over again. Get another learner’s permit if that was what Indiana required.

      Was she doing to her little sister all the things that had been done to her when she was sixteen that she’d never truly forgiven her parents for? Moving her all over the place with no regard for her emotional needs. Making uncertainty a major part of every day.

      “We’ll know soon,” she said, and then made a promise she hoped she could keep. “I won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to.”

      “So, who’s the other owner?” Royce grinned, hiking her pretty young knees up onto the seat and twirling a lock of her shiny dark brown hair. “And I haven’t asked you that because it wasn’t my business. It’s still not, I guess, but I’m curious. Maybe he’ll be some hunk, and you and he will fight over apples until you meet up over the Golden Delicious and the Honeycrisp and fall in love forever.”

      “I’m impressed. You can tell apples apart.”

      “Only those two. They’re the ones Mom buys when she’s on a health kick and the ones your mother always had in that green glass bowl in the middle of the dining room table. I never saw her eat them, but they were always there.”

      “I understand the health kick thing. I’ve always thought apple dumplings with ice cream should qualify as fruit and dairy in the daily food pyramid.” Cass smiled with the memory her sister’s words had called forth—part of it, anyway. “Even when I was your age, Mother had that bowl in the middle of the table. I still have it somewhere.”

      Cass took the exit that put them on the first two-lane road they’d been on since they left California. “Oh, to answer your question, his name is Lucas Rossiter. Apparently he bought Aunt Zoey’s portion a few years ago and would like to buy mine, too. I imagine that’s how it will work out, but I wanted to see it first.” She sighed. Sometimes life was heavy. “I wanted to come back to the lake.”

      * * *

      “I DON’T GET IT. This is your orchard.” Seth Rossiter looked down from the ladder propped against a tree in the back field of Keep Cold Orchard.

      “Half of it is,” Luke corrected, hefting a box of Earligolds onto the back of the flatbed and handing an empty bag up to his younger brother. “Half of it belongs to the woman who’s coming today, Cass Gentry.”

      “Why’s she coming? What does she want?”

      “I СКАЧАТЬ