RaeAnne Thayne - Sweet Laurel Falls

“Okay. I’ll see you then. Shall we go, Sage?”

“Yeah.” She pressed her cheek to her mother’s. “I’m still furious you didn’t tell me about my father. I probably will be for a while. But I still love you and I will forever and ever.”

“Back at you,” Maura said, a catch in her voice that she quickly cleared away.

“Do you think she’ll be okay?” Sage asked him after they walked through the bookstore and the lightly falling snow to the SUV, which he had rented what seemed a lifetime ago at the Denver airport before his lecture.

“You would know that better than I do.”

“I thought I knew my mother. We’re best friends. I still can’t believe she would keep this huge secret from me.”

He wondered at Maura’s reasons for that. Why didn’t she tell Sage? Why didn’t she tell him? Surely in the years since he’d left, she could have found some way to tell him about his child.

The idea of it was still overwhelming as hell.

“You’ll have to give me directions to your place,” he said after she fastened her seat belt.

“Oh. Right. We live on Mountain Laurel Road. Do you remember where that is?”

“I think so.” If he remembered correctly, it was just past Sweet Laurel Falls, one of his favorite places in town. The falls had been one of their secret rendezvous points. Why he should remember that right now, he had no idea. “I know the general direction, anyway. Be sure to tell me if I start to head off course.”

Traffic was busier than he expected as he drove through Hope’s Crossing with the wipers beating back the falling snow. He hardly recognized the downtown. When he had lived here, many of these storefronts had been empty or had housed businesses that barely survived on the margin. Now trendy restaurants, bustling bars catering to tourists and boutiques with elegant holiday window displays seemed to jostle for space.

Some of the historic buildings were still there, but he could see new buildings as well. Much to his surprise, some faction in town had apparently made an effort to keep the town’s historic flavor, even among the new developments. Instead of a modern hodgepodge of architectural styles that would be jarring and unpleasant with the mountain grandeur surrounding the town, it looked as if restrictions had been enacted to require strict adherence to building codes. Even in the few strip-mall-type developments they passed with pizza places, frozen yogurt shops and fast-food places that might appeal to tourists, the buildings had cedar-shake roofs and no flashy signage to jar with the setting.

As he drove up the hill toward Mountain Laurel Road, the surroundings seemed more familiar, even after twenty years. In his day, this area of town had been called Old Hope, a neighborhood of smaller, wood-framed houses, some of them dating back to the town’s past as a rough and rugged mining town. A few of the houses had been torn down and small condominium units or more modern homes built in their place, and many had obviously been rehabbed.

He could easily tell which were vacation homes—they invariably had some sort of kitschy decoration on the exterior, like a crossed pair of old wooden skis or snowshoes, or some other kind of cabin-chic decoration. He saw a couple of carved wooden bears and even a wooden moose head on a garage.

“Turn here,” Sage said. “Our house is the small brick-and-tan house on the right, three houses from the corner.”

From what he had just seen in town, Maura ran a prosperous business in Hope’s Crossing. According to the information he had gleaned from Sage over the past few days, she had been married for five years to Chris Parker, frontman for Pendragon, a band even Jack had heard of before.

She must have received a healthy alimony and child support settlement from the guy when their marriage broke up. So why was she living in a small Craftsman bungalow that looked as though it couldn’t be more than nine hundred square feet?

Despite its small size, the house appeared cozy and warm nestled here in the mountains. Snow drifted down to settle on the wide, deep porch, and a brightly lit Christmas tree blazed from the double windows in front. The lot was roomy, giving her plenty of space for an attached garage that looked as if it had been added to the main house later.

He glimpsed movement by the side of the house and spied a couple of cold and hungry mule deer trying to browse off the shrubs, which looked as if they had been wrapped to avoid just such an eventuality. The deer looked up when Jack’s headlights pulled into the driveway, then it turned and bounded away, jumping over a low cedar fence to her neighbor’s property. Its mate followed suit and disappeared in a flash of white hindquarters.

Now, there was an encounter that brought back memories. When he was a kid and lived up Silver Strike Canyon, he and his mother would often take walks to look for deer. She would even sometimes wake him up if a big buck would wander through their yard.

“Thanks for the ride. I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I can walk you in. Help you with your bag and your laundry.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

He hadn’t been given the chance to do anything to help his daughter in nearly twenty years. Carrying in her bags was a small gesture, but at least it was something . He didn’t bother arguing with her; he only climbed out of the SUV and reached into the backseat for the wicker laundry basket she’d loaded up at her apartment in Boulder, hefted it under one arm and picked her suitcase up with the other.

Sage made a sound of frustration, but followed him up the four steps to the porch and unlocked the house with a set of keys she pulled from her backpack. Warmth washed over them as Sage pushed open the door to let him inside, and the house smelled of cinnamon and clove and evergreen branches from the garlands draped around.

Jack found himself more interested than he probably should have been in Maura’s house. He took in the built-in bookshelves, the exposed rafters, the extensive woodwork, all softened by colorful textiles and art-glass light fixtures.

“Looks like Mom went all out with the Christmas decorations. A tree and everything.”

He glanced at his daughter. His daughter . Would he ever get used to that particular phrase? “You sound surprised.”

“I thought this year she wouldn’t really be in the mood for Christmas. Usually it’s her favorite time of year but, you know. Everything is different now.”

He didn’t want to feel this sympathy. For the past three days, he had simmered in his anger that she had kept this cataclysmic thing from him all these years. Being here in Hope’s Crossing, being confronted with the reality of her life and her pain and the difficult choices she must have faced as a seventeen-year-old girl, everything seemed different.

He felt deflated somehow and didn’t quite know what to do with his anger.

Sage fingered an ornament on the tree that looked as if it was glued-together Popsicle sticks. The tree was covered in similar handmade ornaments, and he wondered which Sage had made and which had been crafted by her younger sister.

“I hope Grandma and the aunts helped her and she didn’t have to do it by herself,” Sage fretted. “That would have been so hard for her, taking out all these old ornaments and everything on her own.”

Sage’s compassion for her mother, despite everything, touched a chord deep inside him. There was a tight bond between the two of them. Had it always been there, or had their shared loss this year only heightened it?

He spied a cluster of photographs on the wall, dominated by one of Sage and Maura on a mountain trail somewhere, lit by perfect evening light amid the ghostly trunks of an aspen grove. They had their arms around each other, as well as a younger girl with purple highlights in her hair and a triple row of earrings.