Даниэла Стил - Finding Ashley [calibre]

“You can’t cut yourself off from everyone!” Carson had warned her after Robbie died, but she had. She had survived the worst that life could dole out to her, losing her only child. She wasn’t the same person anymore, but she was still standing and functioning. She used to love to laugh. Hattie had been livelier and more mischievous as a child, but Melissa had a good sense of humor. There had been no sign of it since Robbie got sick. The immensity of the loss had changed her.

She rose early every morning and watched the sun come up, and then got busy with her day, doing whatever work was at hand, and she often went to bed soon after dark. She read at times, and liked to sit by the fire relaxing and lost in thought, but the memories snuck up on her then. She didn’t like giving herself time to think and drift back to the past, and avoided it. She was living in the present, and her present was the house she had restored, mostly by the work of her own hands. She was proud of the results and what she had achieved. The house was living proof of how far she had come since she had bought it, and a symbol of her survival. No one in the area knew how hard she had fought to cling to life and not give up when she’d lost the person she loved most. Working on the house had brought part of her back to life, and kept her busy, happy, and fulfilled for four years. It was her therapy and had become one of the handsomest homes in the Berkshire mountains, with exquisite handcrafted workmanship. In its own way, it was a work of art. To Melissa, the house was alive, a living being to be cherished and embellished, and had become her reason for staying alive.

She let herself think of her sister, Hattie, sometimes, with her fiery red hair and huge green eyes, like a pixie when she was a child. Her copper hair was hidden under her nun’s veil now. She had been a tomboy, and then blossomed into a beautiful young woman with a natural, striking beauty men were drawn to. Boys pursued her even when she was a teenager. Melissa, with dark hair and blue eyes, had a cooler beauty and seemed less approachable. When Melissa went to Columbia, she was more concerned with taking care of her sister than meeting men. She never dated until her junior year.

When Melissa graduated from college and got a job, Hattie was sixteen and a beautiful, voluptuous young woman by then. All the boys at the school she went to in New York were crazy about her, which made it all seem even more absurd when Hattie decided to become a nun. She had always been the boy-magnet of the two of them and loved to flirt. Melissa was more reserved. Hattie was fun-loving, gregarious, and at ease with everyone. The idea of her being sequestered from the world seemed a criminal waste to Melissa. She was sure her sister would fly back out of the convent in six months, it was all a whim, but she hadn’t. She had stayed for eighteen years, faithful to a vocation Melissa couldn’t understand, and had never accepted, although she knew their mother would have loved it.

They had shared an apartment until Hattie joined the order. Melissa met Carson around that time, before she published her first book, right after she wrote it. He sold it, and a year later they were married and she gave up their old apartment. She hated being there once Hattie was gone. It was silent and lonely, but she didn’t feel that way about her house in Massachusetts now. She was never lonely there, and had made peace with the solitude she’d chosen. It was a relief to be alone when she and Carson had separated in New York. They’d lived in Tribeca, and their marriage felt so dead to her by then that it was painful being with him, and she was grateful for her freedom when he left.

She’d started looking for a house immediately, and had found the right one quickly. It was a merciful release when she left New York and started fresh. She didn’t have to look at Robbie’s empty room anymore. It was the end of the happiest time in her life, when Robbie was alive, which was nothing but a memory by the time she moved to Massachusetts.

When Melissa went upstairs that night, after sanding the door all morning, she glanced at a photograph of Hattie in a frame on the desk in the small den off her bedroom. The photo was of Hattie dressed for her senior prom at her high school in New York. She was wearing a pale blue dress, with her bright red hair pulled back and swept up in a mass of curls. She looked sexy and gorgeous and was beaming in the picture. Melissa perfectly remembered the moment when she took the snapshot. She had helped her sister pick the dress. There were no photographs anywhere in the house of her dressed as a nun, only a few from their childhood and youth, which was how Melissa still thought of her. Her sister’s habit was a costume that made no sense to her.

Melissa smiled briefly at the photograph of Hattie as she sat down at her desk and signed some checks, and then she went to bed to read for a while, before falling asleep. She always slept with the light on, to keep the memories at bay. She had gotten good at it over the years, and had learned to live with the loss. It was part of her now, like everything else that had happened to her, her marriage to Carson and the divorce, the career that was an unexpected, startling success that she walked away from, the people she no longer saw, the sister who betrayed her by becoming a nun and was a stranger now, the father who had died of alcoholism, and the mother who changed Melissa’s life forever and then died with none of their issues resolved, especially the most serious ones. As Melissa slipped into her comfortable bed, she had so much to forget. The ghosts of the past would haunt her if she let them, but she had become an expert at avoiding them. She looked around the bedroom and smiled. All that mattered to her was in the present. The past was buried and almost forgotten, a dim memory now. She was at peace in the silent house. She reminded herself that the past was gone, and she was happy now. She almost believed it, as she got under the covers and fell asleep, exhausted from the hard work she’d done all day. She had learned that pushing herself to her limits physically was the only way to escape the ghosts that still waited for her in the silent room at night.

Chapter 2

The day after Melissa had sanded the first door, she carefully took another one off its hinges. She carried it outside, put it on sawhorses, examined the work to be done in the bright sunlight, and got to it. Within half an hour, there was sweat pouring down her neck and back. The summer sun was blazing, and it was even hotter than the day before.

An hour after she began, she picked up the door, leaned it against a tree, and moved the sawhorses. It was too hot to work beyond the shade. The air was still and she could hear crickets all around her. The sanding was painstaking work, but she enjoyed it. She ran out of sandpaper at noon, and pulled a T-shirt over the bikini top she’d been working in. There was no one around. It was a Saturday. There were groundskeepers working at the edge of the property, clearing away brush on the perimeter, and boys picking apples in the orchard to take to the farmer’s market. It was the hottest summer she’d experienced since she’d lived there. It had been hot and dry since April.

Melissa drank a tall glass of water in the kitchen, and then went to get her bag and car keys. She had a list of things she needed at the hardware store, and it was only a ten-minute drive to the village. It was a small, quaint town, and at this time of year, the area was full of summer renters, families who came to spend the summer there with their children, as well as residents who lived there year-round like Melissa. She usually stayed out of the village as much as possible in the summer. She preferred the area in the off months when it was less populated.