RaeAnne Thayne - Wild Iris Ridge

“It’s fine,” she answered.

“Okay,” Faith decided. “Then I would like to see, too.”

She tried not to overspend on the children, though she had to check herself at times. She had been paid an exorbitant salary at NexGen, far exceeding her needs and her investments, and had few people to spend it on—a number that had dwindled in the past two years with Jessie’s and Annabelle’s deaths.

Her father, her stepmother, her half sister, Crystal, and the children. That was about the size of it.

She wanted to spoil Carter and Faith with trinkets and treasures but knew the things she gave them paled in comparison to actually making the effort to have contact with them through email, Skype and phone calls.

To that end, these gifts were small, but Carter adored the clever magnetic shapes that could be put together to form all kinds of structures, and Faith gave an adorable gasp of delight at the little elastic band bracelet loom and the supply of bands that came along with it.

“Oh! I’ve been wanting one of these to make bracelets for my friends,” she exclaimed.

“Great. We can figure it out together. The woman at the toy store showed me how, and it looks simple enough.”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Faith said.

“I am, too, sweetheart,” she answered—and to her surprise, it wasn’t completely a lie, at least not when she was with the children.

She pulled out the heavy box she had carried down from Iris House. “The real treasure is in here, though.”

“What is it?” Carter asked. “Can I open it?”

“You both can.”

The children knelt on either side of the box and worked together to pull back the cardboard flaps.

“Books.”

They both said the word at the same time, Carter with disgust and Faith in a reverent tone.

“Yes. Books. I found them up at Iris House. These were all your mom and my favorites when we were children—The BFG, Charlotte’s Web, Nancy Drew, Jack London, The Hobbit.”

“Hey, I saw that movie,” Carter exclaimed.

“You need to read the book now.”

“Only I can’t read chapter books,” he answered in a duh sort of tone.

“It’s only a matter of time, kid. You’ll be reading chapter books before you know it and then you’ll want to read some of these books, I promise.”

She pulled a boxed collection from the bottom of the box and held it out to Faith, who looked dazed with delight at the literary bounty. “And look at this. My very favorite. Anne of Green Gables. One summer when I came to stay with Annabelle for a few weeks, your mom and I made a pact to read the whole series by the time school started again. I think I was thirteen.”

She actually knew she had been thirteen. It was the summer her father had left them, she remembered, when she had been lost and frightened, emotionally traumatized by a lifetime of being caught in the crosshairs on the battlefield of a horrible marriage.

When her mother—seeking attention, as always—made a halfhearted suicide attempt and was subsequently committed to the psychiatric treatment unit at the local hospital, Robert Drake had once more shrugged off responsibility for her.

How could he possibly be expected to take in a frightened girl? He had just moved in with his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, and Pam wasn’t at all prepared to handle that kind of responsibility. Besides, they just didn’t have room. She would have so much more fun staying at Annabelle’s, where her favorite cousin, Jessica, was living with her recently widowed mother.

For Robert, it had been the perfect solution. For Lucy, it was just another betrayal, made bearable only by Annabelle and Jessica and the magical escape she found that summer in books.

When her mother was released, she moved back to Denver with Betsy but she’d never forgotten those treasured hours reading on the shaded porch swing on hot July afternoons or under the big maple tree out back.

“You’ve read them, right?” she asked Faith now.

The girl shook her head. “Not yet. I’ve been wanting to but I never started.”

She was not quite eight, much younger than Lucy had been when she’d read them. Maybe she wouldn’t enjoy them as much.

Despite her worry, Faith looked delighted and picked the first book out of the collection and opened it up right there in the living room.

“What about me?” Carter asked, not to be outdone. “Which one should I read?”

She looked through the collection and pulled out Charlotte’s Web.

“Have you read this? It’s one of my favorites.”

“Is that the one about the spider and the pig?” he asked.

“The very one.”

“Daddy checked it out of the library for us once but we were reading something else and never had time for that one before we had to return it.”

“Now you have your own copy and don’t have to take it back to the library. Why don’t we start it tonight?”

“Okay!”

“Faith, do you want to stay out here and read your book or come into Carter’s room and listen to Charlotte’s Web?”

“I’ll come with you.”

Carter led the way back to his room, still decorated the way Jessie had left it, with a Western Americana theme: red, white and blue, with horseshoes holding up some shelves and a trail of stars stenciled around the ceiling.

It was a cute room for a boy, perfect for an active kid like Carter.

The sharpness of loss clutched at her chest again. Jessie had loved her family, being a mother, making a comfortable home for them. Of all the gross inequities in the world, Lucy considered it so unfair that this loving young mother with her life ahead of her would be taken from her family by a health condition nobody could have anticipated.

The room had two twin beds, maybe in anticipation for the day when Carter would have shared this room with his brother, who had been too gestationally immature to survive outside the womb after Jess went into cardiac arrest so suddenly.

Carter jumped onto one of the beds, and Lucy forced herself to push the sadness away.

“Daddy usually reads to me from the other one. You can do that, too.”

She eased down onto the bed, and Faith curled up at her feet, pulling a throw over herself and listening raptly while Lucy began reading the story about a runt piglet and the spider who was a very brave friend—and a good writer, too.

By the time she finished the first chapter, Carter’s eyelids were drooping. Judging by his energy level every time she saw him, she completely understood why. An object in constant motion eventually had to run out of steam. She didn’t know if that was an actual physics principle, but it definitely applied to five-year-old boys.

He closed his eyes at the same moment she marked her page and closed the book. She slid off the bed and pulled his blanket up over his shoulders, awash with tenderness for this funny little man.

“You got through a whole chapter. That’s great. My dad usually falls asleep after about two pages while he’s reading to Carter,” Faith confided in a whisper.

Like his son, Brendan put in a long, busy day, as well.

“I guess it’s lucky for both of us I made it this far. Shall we go into your room and read about Anne coming to know Matthew and Marilla?”

“Yes!”

Together, they walked down the hall to Faith’s room, all pink and lavender and yellow, sweet as Faith herself.

“Oh. Look at that! That’s the chair you told me about on the phone a few months ago. I’d forgotten about it, but it’s just as lovely as you said.”

It was a slim Queen Anne recliner with curvy lines and a pretty material that seemed to bring together all the colors of the room.

“Dad said somebody who liked to read as much as I do needed a comfortable reading nook. He bought me the light and everything. And it wasn’t even my birthday. It was a just-because present. Those are the best.”