Susan Wiggs - Candlelight Christmas

“He’s cheating on you,” Amy had said. “With our mom .”

Darcy’s heart had stumbled. Then, clinging to well-honed denial, she had dismissed the notion out of hand. “Your mom and dad are just friends.”

“Nope, they’re back together. Check his email,” Amy said, a clean blade of triumph sharpening her tone. “In the drafts folder. That’s how they communicate. They never hit Send, just log in to the same account and read the drafts. They’re so stupid about it, though. They don’t delete correctly, so the notes still are all there.”

“Nonsense,” Darcy said. Yet the moment Amy had said those words— He’s cheating on you —her body was telling her to pay attention for once, to listen. Her heart knew the truth before her mind caught on to the situation. The blood in her veins congealed into ice. In that moment, she had felt weirdly detached from her own life, as though entering a different reality. “You shouldn’t be looking at your dad’s email,” she scolded. Classic nagging stepmom, as ineffective as a barkless Chihuahua.

“Neither should you,” Amy shot back. Then the girl had burst into tears and collapsed, sobbing, into Darcy’s lap.

And that, Darcy had realized, had been the first undeniable sign of her failing marriage—not the drafts folder, which of course completely confirmed Amy’s accusation, but the fact that, months earlier, Darcy herself had begun monitoring Huntley’s messages.

He was both careless and unsophisticated about computers. She hadn’t been looking for anything specific. Just...looking. For answers. For the reason she couldn’t feel the love from him anymore. For the reason he had emotionally left the building, like a traveler checking out of a motel he never planned to return to.

It was said that there are no winners in a divorce, but Darcy discovered that wasn’t true in her case. She had lost a husband, a family, a way of life. She had lost half her assets, her home and her belief in her own judgment when it came to men. Huntley had lost, too; the fling with his ex had flamed out, and these days, as far as she knew, he was alone. But there were winners—the crafty Amy and her brother, Orion. They had not wanted a stepmother, and now she was gone, vanished from their lives.

And here was a surprise. She missed them. She had managed to stop loving Huntley. That was easy enough, crushing her feelings for someone who had crushed her heart with the most intimate of betrayals. She couldn’t simply turn off her feelings for the kids, though. When she’d married Huntley, they were eight and ten, filling her with joy. Five years later, they were teenagers, challenging her at every turn. Yet even at their most manipulative and obnoxious, they were children to whom she had given herself entirely. Even now she couldn’t stop remembering how it felt to be a family, swept up in the busy days of their lives together. Knowing she couldn’t see them, could never hold or touch them again was a special kind of hell.

In the Fitzgerald family, Darcy herself had been the daughter most likely to procreate. After all, she had married a man with children, and she’d made no secret of wanting more. She’d loved being a stepmom to Amy and Orion—until everything had changed. The special, knife-sharp hurt of their campaign against her had caused a fundamental shift deep inside Darcy. She’d gone from being a woman who thought she could have it all to a woman who wanted none of it.

“I’m not ready to meet anyone,” she said to India. “It seems like only yesterday, I considered myself a happily married woman.”

“Now you’ll be happily single.”

“And determined to stay that way. Not only do I want to stay away from guys, but I want to stay away from guys with kids. So quit trying to throw me together with your yummy brother.”

“You think he’s yummy?”

“Don’t you dare tell him I said that.”

“I was just going to send him a text. Jeez, what do you take me for? The idea of ‘brother’ and ‘yummy’ do not compute in my mind. Ew.”

“Spoken like a true sister.”

“I’m trying to help here, Darcy. Look at it this way—you got your starter marriage over early.”

“It was supposed to be forever.”

“The next one will be. Just you wait.”

“Exactly. I’m waiting . Forever is worth waiting for. So don’t be trying to fix me up with your brother.”

They rounded a bend in the road, and the main square of Avalon came into view. Gilded by sunset, the little lakeside village had the kind of charm seen in tourist brochures, touting the wonders of the Catskills—glorious rolling hills clad in end-of-summer excess, colorful painted cottages along the lake, catboats flying their white sails on the water, out for an evening sail. The sight was so pretty, it took her breath away for a moment—the deep purple of twilight reflected in the still water, the stars sprinkled above the distant hills, the fairy lights of the town.

The bucolic allure of scenery and serenity tugged at her heart. She’d been living in Manhattan for too long. It was good to get out into nature for a while, to see the sky above and the scenery all around her.

“Okay,” Darcy said, “you’re forgiven. It’s beautiful here. A nice change from the sock warehouse out my window in the city.”

“Agreed. We should come up to see Logan more often.”

“He said he moved here to be near Charlie.”

“That’s right. Charlie was born the summer after they got out of high school.”

“So young,” Darcy mused.

“Never underestimate the power of a teenager to do dumb things. I worry constantly about my boys. Logan definitely had a wild streak in high school. Daisy—that’s Charlie’s mom—came here to be with her family. She thought she’d be raising the baby alone, but Logan surprised everyone, including our parents. He got his act together, moved up here to be near Charlie, and turned himself into an awesome dad. Put himself through college and started a solid business. I adore him for turning his life around, but the path he took still makes our parents mental.”

“You can’t be serious. Aren’t they proud of him?”

“Yes, but they had other plans for him. He was supposed to go to an Ivy League school like all good O’Donnells, and then he was supposed to take over the reins of the family business. Instead, he wound up here, running an insurance office and being Charlie’s dad. I guess our folks have made their peace with it, but they still think he took a wrong turn.”

“Parents,” Darcy mused, gazing out the window at the play of light on the water. “What is it with parents, projecting all their expectations on their kids? I’ve been in violation of my folks’ expectations since the moment I was born a girl instead of a boy.”

“Yes, how dare you?” said India.

“Such a burden, having five daughters,” said Darcy. “And now only one of us is decently married. Lydia and the oh-so-perfect Badgley Collins.”

“Huntley’s older brother. How is everyone handling that?” asked India.

“We’re all so terribly civilized about it. My folks and the Collinses go way back to their college days. We are meant to get along no matter what.”

Darcy had not been able to bring herself to tell her family about the cheating. They had no idea how hard it was for her to simply grit her teeth and pretend she had smoothly moved on with her life, to pretend that the Collinses’ son Huntley had not shredded her heart into irreparable bits. “I’m already dreading the holidays,” she confessed. “Our families have been swapping host duties for decades. My mom and Rachel Collins are already planning the usual joint celebration at Thanksgiving.”

“You could spend the holidays with us,” India said.