Liz Flaherty - Every Time We Say Goodbye

Title Page Every Time We Say Goodbye Liz Flaherty www.millsandboon.co.uk

About the Author LIZ FLAHERTY retired from the post office and promised to spend at least fifteen minutes a day on housework. Not wanting to overdo things, she’s since pared that down to ten. She spends nonwriting time sewing, quilting and doing whatever else she wants to. She and Duane, her husband of...oh, quite a while...are the parents of three and grandparents of the Magnificent Seven. They live in the old farmhouse in Indiana they moved to in 1977. They’ve talked about moving, but really...thirty-seven years’ worth of stuff? It’s not happening! She’d love to hear from you at lizkflaherty@gmail.com.

Dedication Many thanks go to Jim Walker, who named Lake Miniagua, to the Facebook friends who named Wally and Caruso, and to songwriter Cole Porter, whose song titles made Miniagua such a fun place to write about. A special thanks to Joey Kubesch, who helped put the right names with the right businesses. A few miles from our house, sitting smack in the middle of the cornfields, is a school campus containing grades K–12 plus preschool. It’s where my kids, some of my grandkids, and I all graduated from. It’s where my daughter and son-in-law teach. It is one of the safest, best, most loving places I know. It’s because of what I learned there that I grew up to write books—the best job in the world. So it is to the past and present staff of North Miami Community Schools that this book, with my heartfelt gratitude, is dedicated. Go Warriors!

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

IT HAD BEEN sixteen years since he’d seen Arlie Gallagher. And three months and four days. Not that he was counting.

But he knew, as he stepped out of the rental SUV he’d parked in front of the Come On In hardware store, that the woman standing in front of the tearoom across the street was indeed Arlie. She was dressed in turquoise scrubs and wearing sunglasses that covered half her small, heart-shaped face, but he recognized her compact build, riot of red curls and hey-world-it’s-me movements as though he’d seen her only yesterday. He thought the woman with her, whose dark hair was a perfect foil for the rich copper of Arlie’s, was her stepsister, Holly. He couldn’t look away long enough to be sure.

The coward in him urged him to hustle into the hardware before Arlie looked across Miniagua’s gravelly Main Street and saw him. But that would have meant looking away.

Which he couldn’t have done under penalty of, well, death, he guessed, because that was something he knew. He’d looked away from her once, actually walked away from her, and dying would have been a whole lot easier.

He closed the car door firmly. Sounds carried on the breeze from the lake, and Arlie looked up, meeting his eyes. She raised her arm, then dropped it with the wave unfinished. Her smile, that wide, generous expression that grew like one of those sped-up videos of a rose blooming, started but faded before the rose made it out of bud stage.

He still couldn’t look away. He couldn’t breathe, either, so he just drank in the sight of her. This must be what a person would feel like if he came in from the desert after not having anything to drink for, say, sixteen years. That first glass of water would be wonderful. It would be life-affirming and fresh and would end way too soon.

The brunette, whose brisk, loose walk didn’t give away the fact that her left foot was prosthetic, nodded in his direction. She didn’t smile, though, and he didn’t either, just lifted his chin and let it drop. When the women went into the Seven Pillars Tearoom, he was finally able to turn and walk toward the hardware store’s front door. Mostly without seeing where he was going.

He and his half brother, Tucker, had been raised on the estate that filled a chunk of the frontage property on the south end of Lake Miniagua’s six hundred acres, but Jack Llewellyn seldom came back. When he did, he paid his stiff respects to his grandmother and stood silent and stoic sentinel for an hour in the cemetery beside the Miniagua Community Church. He’d learned to move quickly on these visits, making it on the afternoon flight home so that by midnight, he’d be relaxing in front of the TV with a beer. He wouldn’t have seen anyone but Margaret Llewellyn and her household staff.

This time, he didn’t get off that easily. Not only would he not get back to Vermont today, he wouldn’t make it tomorrow, either. From the looks of his grandmother’s will and her estate, he’d be in Indiana for a good long time settling the estate.

That meant he’d have to see all those people whose lives had been irrevocably changed the night his father drove drunk and failed to stay to the outside on one of the tight curves on Country Club Road. Jack might have to try to explain things for which he had no justification. Things like why he’d left.

He’d known he would see Arlie, whose heart he had broken, but he had wanted—no, needed—time to prepare himself. Sometimes if he was ready, if he tightened his jaw and focused on other matters—any other matters—he could think about her with barely a twinge of the hurt he’d caused them both. Sometimes.

But that was before he saw her across the street. More than a twinge, the pain that ripped sharp and unexpected down the center of him nearly brought him to his knees.

The bell over the hardware store’s door rang when he stepped inside. Sam Phillipy’s voice, the deepest, truest bass the high school choir had ever heard, came from the back of the hardware store. “Can I help you?”

Jack had to catch his breath yet again. Why hadn’t he thought about it longer before coming into the store? Before coming down to Miniagua’s two-block business district at all? He should have known Sam would be here, should have been ready to face the only man who’d ever been as close to him as his brother. There had never been a better friend than Sam Phillipy. Or a worse one than Jack Llewellyn.

“I’ll need a remodeling crew. I figured this would be a good place to start looking.” Jack sauntered back, striving for casual. Hard to do on legs that still felt shaky.

The old wooden floors echoed with the same hollow sound as they had in high school days. He could almost hear the dribbling of basketballs on the boards. It was an indicator of just how small Miniagua was, he reflected, that teenage boys had hung out in the hardware store.

Sam met him in the middle of the store beside the endcap of paint colors. They sized each other up much as they had more than twenty years ago. Sam looked good even with a patch over his left eye. Lasting damage from the prom-night wreck. Jack had to stop himself from flinching. “Sam.”

“Jack.” Sam nodded, not offering his hand. “My condolences on your family’s loss.” If there was a sneer in his voice, Jack couldn’t hear it, but there was no warmth in his old friend’s expression, either. Nor even a hint of welcome.

“Thank you.” Jack shuffled his feet on the worn floor, feeling as he had that first day he’d come to school at Lake Miniagua, the only eighth grader in high-dollar khakis and Italian loafers. Sam had greeted him then, walking through a gaggle of lakers with an outstretched hand and an offer to share his locker. The move had been both curiously adult and a harbinger of what was to come—they’d shared a locker until the day they graduated.