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“That doesn’t even make sense.” Lacy paused outside the cupcake shop to stare wistfully at a rainbow confetti cupcake. Normally, she would have gone in and bought herself one. Or a dozen. Today, though, it didn’t seem like a good idea to feed her already-iffy stomach that much sugar. Just the pizza she’d eaten, she told herself. She’d be fine in a day or two.
“Sure it does. Mom says you were at the house a couple days ago, visiting Dad. And when Sam showed up you left so fast there were sparks coming up from your boot heels.”
Lacy sighed. “Your mom’s great but she exaggerates.”
“I’ve seen those sparks, too, when you’re in full retreat.” Kristi gave her a friendly arm bump as they walked. “I know it’s probably hardest on you, Sam being back and everything. But I thought you were over him. You said you were over him.”
“I exaggerate, too,” Lacy mumbled and stopped at the corner, waiting for a green light to cross the street. Her gaze swept along the street.
One of the things she liked best about Ogden was that it protected its history. Relished it. The buildings were updated to be safe, but the heart and soul of them remained to give the downtown area a sense of the past even as it embraced the future.
At the end of the street stood the Ogden train station. Restored to its beautiful Spanish Colonial Revival style, it boasted a gorgeous clock tower in the center of the building. Inside, she knew, were polished wood, high-beamed ceilings and wall murals done by the same artist who did the Ellis Island murals in the 1930s.
Today there was an arts-and-crafts fair going on inside, and she and Kristi were headed there to check out the booths and see how Lacy’s photographs were selling.
“I knew you weren’t over him,” Kristi said with just a touch of a smug smile. “I told you. You still love him.”
“No. I won’t.” Lacy stopped, took a breath. “I mean I don’t.” She wanted to mean it, even as she felt herself weakening. What kind of an idiot, after all, would she be to deliberately set herself up to get run over again? The light turned green and both women crossed the street.
“Any decent self-help book would tell you that what you just said has flags flying all over it.” Still smug, Kristi gave Lacy a smile and took another drink of her latte. “You’re trying so hard, but it’s hopeless. You do love him—you just don’t want to love him. Or forgive him. And I so get that.” Shaking her head, Kristi added, “Tony keeps telling me that I’ve got to let it go. Accept that Sam did what he had to do just like we did. We all stayed and he had to go. Simple.”
“Doesn’t it just figure that a guy would defend another guy?”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Kristi admitted. “But in a way, he has a point.”
Lacy snorted. “Hard to believe that Sam had to leave.”
“Yeah,” Kristi said on a sigh, and crossed the street, matching her strides to Lacy’s. “That urge to bolt out of a hard situation was really more Jack than Sam. Jack never could stand any really deep emotional thing. If a woman cried around him, he’d vanish in a blink.”
“I remember,” Lacy said wistfully. Hadn’t they all teased Jack about his inability to handle any relationship that looked deeper than a puddle?
“I love both of my brothers,” Kristi told her, “but I always knew that Sam was the dependable one. Jack was fun—God, he was fun!” Her smile was wide for a split second, then faded. “But you never knew if he’d be home for dinner or if he’d be on his way to Austria for the skiing instead.”
Kristi was right. Sam had always been the responsible one. The one you could count on, Lacy thought. Which had made his leaving all that much harder to understand. To accept. As for forgiving, how did you forgive someone you had trusted above everyone else for breaking their word and your heart along with it?
“I kind of hate to admit it, but Tony may be right,” Kristi was saying. “I mean, I’m still mad at Sam, but when I see him with Dad, it makes it harder to stay mad, you know?”
“Yeah, I do.” That was part of her problem, Lacy thought. She so wanted to keep her sense of righteous anger burning bright, but every time she saw Sam with his father, she softened a little. When she watched him out on the slopes just yesterday, helping a little boy figure out how to make a parallel turn. When she saw him standing in the wind, talking future plans with the contractor. All of these images were fresh and new and starting to whittle away at the fury she had once been sure would be with her forever.
