AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“More or less. Actually, that’s exactly what she was doing. The night before, she’d found the receipt for the engagement ring Eddie had bought me, and she knew what was going to happen. I took the ring off its chain and said I’d throw it into the deal. Gave her the diamond, I kept the chain.” Faith reached under her collar and pulled out a pretty little gold chain. “I always wear it to remind me of Eddie and what might have been.”
“What you escaped,” Amy said.
“So how much did she give you?” Zoë asked.
“We put the money in a revolving account. She’d support me for the seven years I figured I needed to get the plants to a good size, and of course I had to buy land. In the end, it was quite a lot of money, but she’s been repaid many times over.”
“What happened in your personal life in California?” Amy asked.
“I met a man who I hadn’t spent my childhood with and who I didn’t mother. We got married, started Indigo, and along the way I had six children.”
“Six!” Zoë said in horror.
“Six,” Amy said in envy.
“We live in a beautiful house in the Napa Valley,” Faith said, “and it’s surrounded by acres of the Balm of Gilead. I’ve given the plant back to the Holy Lands,” she added as though it meant nothing, even though it had been the happiest day of her life when she’d presented plants to their country of origin.
“What happened to Tyler?” Amy asked.
“He got married a few years after I left and he became a successful contractor. He built some very nice houses.”
“Children?”
“Three,” Faith said.
“And did you see him again?” Amy asked.
“Many times. My family and I visited my hometown often and we always saw him and Eddie and my mother. You won’t believe this, but Eddie’s mother and I became friends. She was great at business. I thought all her money came from her late husband, but I found out that that shrewd old woman was a whiz at the stock market. She’s stayed at my house in Napa a dozen times. My kids love her.”
Faith paused for a moment, then looked up. “One evening we were sharing a bottle of wine and she told me she wished she’d had a daughter-in-law like me.”
“Did you strangle her?” Zoë asked.
“No, actually, her words made me cry. She didn’t remember it, but I’d spent years working myself to death to try to make her like me, but she hadn’t. But when I stopped trying, it happened.”
“Too bad you could never tell Ty that you’d saved his life,” Zoë said.
“I nearly forgot!” Faith said. “At my mother’s funeral, he told a story that sent chills down my spine. He volunteered to give the eulogy and he told how my mother had saved his life. A few days after he crawled through my window—”
“And you weren’t there,” Amy said.
“Yes, by that time I’d already made my deal with Mrs. Wellman and I was getting ready to leave for California.”
“How did Eddie and Tyler take your news that you were leaving town?” Zoë asked.
Faith shook her head. “Very well. In fact, they took it too well for my taste.”
“As long as neither one of them got you,” Amy said.
“You’re right! I think I was the bone those two dogs had fought over for most of their lives, and as long as neither of them won, they were okay. I don’t like to think this, but in some ways I think they were relieved when I said I wasn’t going to marry either of them.”
“So what was your creepy funeral story?” Zoë asked. “How had your mom saved Tyler’s life?”
“Ty said he went out to the cliffs as we used to call the local make-out place. I look back on it and I’d panic if my kids went there. It was really dangerous. There was a turnaround that was on the edge of a huge drop-off. We used to dare one another to look over beca
use there were three cars at the bottom. It must have been a thousand feet down. Really scary.”
Faith looked at Amy. “Ty got too close to the edge and fell over. He said it was the middle of the day, nobody was there, and he was hanging on to the edge with his fingertips. By a one-in-a-million chance, my mother showed up there. He yelled and she used a rope and Ty’s truck to haul him up.”
