Mariah Stewart - Coming Home

He leaned back in the chair and stretched his long legs. “What kind of things did you hear?”

“Oh, that she put spells on people.”

“Good spells or bad spells?”

“I guess it depended on whether you were a friend or a foe.” Vanessa dried her hands and turned around. “I’m thinking that might be why she had so many herbs planted out back, so she could use them in her spells.”

“My, don’t we have an active imagination.” He smiled for the first time since they left the restaurant.

“A lot of people believe that certain herbs have certain powers.”

“Are you one of them?”

“Maybe.” She sat across from him at the table, trying to keep her distance. Something had changed between them over the course of the evening, and she wasn’t sure what it was. “I found some books that belonged to Miss Ridgeway in the living-room bookcase and I started to read them a few weeks ago, then we got busy with the shop and with the wedding and I had to put them aside for a while.”

“Maybe your Miss Ridgeway was a witch.”

“I don’t believe in witches.”

“Where are the books now?”

“Back on the shelf in the living room. Why? Did you want to see them?”

“Yeah. Let’s take a look.”

She turned off the kitchen lights and followed Grady into the living room. He sat on the floor in front of the sofa while she opened the glass doors in front of the bookcase and removed several volumes.

“These look pretty old.” He picked one up and turned to the title page. “This one was copyrighted in 1921.” He opened a second book. “And this one is even older: 1894.”

He paged through them slowly. “This is about the uses for different herbs. Medicinal uses, mostly.” He closed the book and handed it to her. “No spells.”

“Is that what you were hoping to find? A book of spells?”

“It could be interesting.”

She sat on the sofa, her legs curled up under her, and he stayed on the floor. Finally, she sighed and asked point-blank, “Are you angry with me?”

“With you?” He seemed puzzled by the question. “No. Why should I be angry with you?”

Vanessa shrugged. “Since we left the restaurant, you’ve been… I don’t know. Quiet, I guess.”

For a moment, she thought he was going to let that pass and not reply at all, which led her to believe he was in fact annoyed about something. She sighed. It must have been her big mouth back there on the bench, telling him what he should do about the baggage he was dragging around. He probably couldn’t care less about her opinion of his wife or on his life.

“Was your first husband really thirty when you married him?” he asked.

Surprised by his question, she nodded. “That was one of the dumbest things I ever did.”

“Did you love him?”

“I think mostly, I was just flattered that someone older, someone smoother than the boys I knew in high school, wanted to be with me. When he asked me to marry him, though, it was kind of exciting. I thought I’d look like a stupid little schoolgirl if I said no.” She looked up at him and added, “I really was hoping my mom would put her foot down. I was surprised when she didn’t.”

“Were you really such a handful back then?”

Vanessa nodded. “I suppose. But understand, Maggie and I have always had a somewhat fractious relationship. When I got to high school, it only got worse. Her men friends started looking at me the way they looked at her, and I guess she didn’t like that very much. I had wanted my mother to intervene and forbid me to get married, but when she didn’t, I figured she was just happy to be rid of me. Like, I’d be someone else’s responsibility and she wouldn’t have to bother anymore.”

“I didn’t get that impression from her today.”

“She’s looking at herself in her own rearview mirror and she’s seeing what she wants to see.” Vanessa couldn’t mask her irritation. “Maggie is finding herself alone for the first time in a long while and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She’s hoping to snare Hal again so she’ll have a home and someone to take care of her.”

“So you don’t think she’s really trying to patch things up with you?”

“I think she thinks she’s really trying. I don’t know what I feel.” She thought for a minute, then said, “That’s what you’re angry about, then. That I didn’t tell you about Craig.”

“I’m not angry with you, and whether or not you want to tell me something about your life, that’s your choice.” His face softened. “But I have to admit that it pisses me off that these things happened and there was no one there to stand up for you.”

“You mean you’re not mad at me,” she said thoughtfully, “you’re mad for me?” The thought that someone might be angry on her behalf had never occurred to Vanessa.

“Something like that, yes. And I think Hal was, too. As much as he cares about Maggie-and I think that’s a given-I could tell he wasn’t happy that she hadn’t stepped in there for you.”

“I don’t like to think back on that time,” she told him frankly. “It just makes me angry with her and angry with myself. Maybe she’s right and I would have blown off anything she might have said to try to dissuade me, but she didn’t even try, and that makes me see red every time I think about it. But I was stupid for going through with a wedding with someone I knew I wasn’t in love with-that’s all on me. I shouldn’t have had to depend on her to tell me no. I just wish that she had.”

“How many times had Maggie been married by then?”

“Oh, three times, maybe. But she’d had a bunch of live-ins, too.”

“Maybe you didn’t take the whole thing-marriage-as seriously as you should have because you’d never seen it portrayed as a serious pursuit. Maybe in your house it seemed more like a more casual arrangement.”

She smiled. “You have the funniest way of putting things.” Before he could ask what she meant, she added, “When you got married, did you think of it as a ‘serious pursuit’?”

“Sure. Marriage is a big deal in my family. It really bothered me a lot that Missy didn’t want my family at the wedding, that she didn’t even want them to know we’d gotten married. She said it was because the fewer people who knew, the less likely the person who had threatened her would find out where she was. In retrospect, I think it was because she knew it was a sham. The only person she needed to think we were married was Brendan, and she made sure he knew.”

“You really think she played you?”

“It’s hard not to, when you take an honest look at the facts.”

“Did you love her? When you married her, did you think it would last forever?”

“Yes, and yes.”

“Me, too. Oh, maybe not so much the first time. It didn’t take me long to figure out what Craig really liked was having a young wife he could show off to his drinking buddies. I didn’t know much, but I knew that wasn’t going to last.”

“Were you disappointed?”

She shook her head. “I just wanted out. Craig had become verbally abusive, and it was awhile before he let me leave. By the time I was able to go, it was with great relief because the bad stuff was escalating. So when this good-looking guy with a pretty car and a nice apartment and a good job came along and wanted to sweep me off my feet, I let him.” She looked up at Grady and fixed a stare. “I’m going to tell you something I never admitted to anyone. But you can’t ever tell anyone else.”

“Okay.”

“When I was a little girl, I believed in fairy tales. I believed in happy endings. I believed in romance before I ever heard the word. I believed it was all real, would be real, and if I could find the right prince, we’d live happily ever after.” She grimaced. “Fat lot I knew.”