“Okay…well, I love you.”
“Love you too, honey.”
They ended the call. Hope felt a little lighter. Her daughter would be okay. It was strange to think of your parents as people with lives, dreams, and disappointments. And for so long, she’d done all she could to ensure her kids had the lives they deserved.
She’d given that to them. Now it was time to give it to herself.
ChapterFifteen
Hope
She’d put together a salad from fresh lettuce she’d bought from the farms she’d visited, added a goat cheese she’d found from a local vendor, and whipped up her shallot vinaigrette to take to Libby’s this evening.
She was looking forward to hanging out with the girls. Hope had mom friends. She had clients. She even had food competition buddies. But she didn’t have a group like this. Friends who remembered who she was, her history, and who, after all this time, clicked back into place like no time had gone by. Maybe that was the gift of her midlife, time to simply be with people she loved, even more than the chance at the restaurant.
Hope pulled the top knot she’d been sporting all day and ran her fingers through her hair at her scalp. The hair hurt, if that was possible, from being bound up all day. She looked in the mirror and added a little mascara and lip gloss.
Not too terrible for fifty, she thought.
She liked her white streak, was grateful for the thick hair she used to try to thin with flat irons, and there were wrinkles, to be sure, but she was getting used to them.
Hope opened the screen door to leave, and a flurry of feathers and screeching burst in through the door and into the cottage.
Hope Venerable prided herself on keeping an even keel. She was a full-grown, not hysterical adult. But as it registered in her brain that two birds had burst into the cottage and were frantically batting their wings against each other and every surface of the place, she screamed. The birds also screamed or screeched or whatever birds do.
Her heart felt like it might explode with the sudden shock of the melee. She needed a tennis racket or a net or something.
Hope flapped her arms. “Go, shoo, get out of here!”
The windows all had screens. There was no way to usher the birds that way. They needed to go out the way they came in. Through the door.
“Here! Here!!” She yelled at them as though they spoke English.
“Miss, are you okay in there?” a male voice called into the cottage.
She didn’t have time for that. What? Was she okay? “No!”
The screen door opened, and a shirtless man in faded jeans appeared. He slammed the screen door open, bursting in almost as dramatically as the birds had entered.
She saw he had a sidearm on his belt. She saw taught muscle and sinew coiled for action.
What was happening? Was she being robbed?
“Holy crap!”
He must have seen her eyes bug at the site of the firearm.
“I’m a police officer. Are you in danger?”
“No, um, unless they have the bird flu. Ahhh!”
The two birds swooped from the ceiling and grazed her head. She swatted them and turned in a circle.
“I need to get them out of here.”
“Hang on!”
The shirtless stranger ran out the same way he came in. Hope watched the birds careen around, squawk, and panic, realizing they were trapped—worse, trapped together!
