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“Yeah. Sorry.” He shook his head and gave a rueful smile. “Lots of memories here.”
“Thick as honey,” his father agreed. “More good than bad, though.”
“True.” Even when Jack was going through cancer treatment, the family would end up here, giving each other the strength to keep going. He could almost hear his brother’s laughter and the pain of that memory etched itself onto his soul.
“You’re not the only one who misses him, you know.” His father’s voice was soft, low.
“Sometimes,” Sam admitted on a sigh, “I still expect him to walk into the room laughing, telling me it was all a big mistake.”
“Being here makes it easier and harder all at the same time,” his father said softly. “Because even if I can fool myself at times, when I see his chair at the table sitting empty, I have to acknowledge that’s he’s really gone.”
Sam’s gaze shot to that chair now.
“But the good memories are stronger than the pain and that’s a comfort when you let it be.”
“You think I don’t want to be comforted?” Sam looked at his father.
“I think when Jack died you decided you weren’t allowed to be happy.”
Stunned, Sam didn’t say anything.
“You take too much on yourself, Sam,” Bob said. “You always did.”
As he sipped his beer, Sam considered that and admitted silently that his father was right. About all of it. Maybe what had driven him from home wasn’t only losing Jack and needing to see his twin’s dreams realized—but the fact that he had believed, deep down, that with Jack gone, Sam didn’t deserve to be happy. It was something to consider. Later.
Shaking his head, he said, “About this latest idea...”
Apparently accepting that Sam needed a change of subject, his father nodded. “What’re you thinking?”
“I want to initiate a new beginner’s ski run on the backside of the mountain,” Sam said, jumping right in. “The slope’s gentle, there’re fewer trees and it’s wide enough we could set it up to have two runs operating all the time.”
“Yeah, there’s a problem with that,” Bob said, and took another drink of his beer.
The hesitation in his father’s voice had Sam’s internal radar lighting up. “What?”
“The thing is, that property doesn’t belong to us anymore.”
The radar was now blinking and shrieking inside him. “What’re you talking about?”
“You know Lacy’s family has lived on that slope for years...”
“Yeah...” Sam had the distinct feeling he wasn’t going to like where this was going.
“Well, after you left, Lacy was in a bad way.” Bob frowned as he said it and Sam knew his father was the master of understatement. Guilt pinged around inside him like a wildly ricocheting bullet. “So, your mother and I, we deeded the property to her. Felt like it was the least we could do to try to ease her hurt.”
Sam muffled the groan building in his chest. His decision to leave was now coming back to bite him in so many different ways. Most especially with the woman he still wanted more than his next breath.
“So, if you’re determined to build that beginner run, you’re going to have to deal with Lacy.”
Letting his head hit his chest, Sam realized that dealing with Lacy pretty much summed up his entire life at the moment. He thought about the look in her eyes when he left her cabin the other night. The misery stamped there despite what they’d just shared—hell, maybe because of that.
Leaving here was something he’d had to do. Coming back meant facing the consequences of that decision. It wasn’t getting any easier.
“She never mentioned that you and mom gave her the land,” Sam said.
“Any reason why she should?”
“No.” Shaking his head, Sam took another pull on his beer. He wanted that land. How he was going to get it from Lacy, he didn’t know yet. As things stood between them at the moment, he was sure that she would never sell him that slope. And maybe it’d be best to just forget about getting his hands on it. The land was Lacy’s, and he ought to back off. But for now, there were other things he wanted to talk to his father about. “You know that photo of the lodge in spring? The one hanging over the fireplace here?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“I’d like to use it on the new website I’m having designed so I’ll need to talk to the photographer. I want to show the lodge in all the seasons with photos that rotate out, always changing. The one I’m talking about now, with Mom’s tulips a riot of color and that splash of deep blue sky—the picture really shows the lodge in a great way.”
