AllFreeNovel
Share Us
God, she’d been beautiful. And so fricking happy. Same as he’d been, even if Juliette’s precipitous appearance hadn’t been in the playbook. Merri, though… She’d been a part of his playbook since they were fifteen.
Juliette’s age, he thought as his daughter appeared in the doorway, her wavy, warm brown hair streaked with some god-awful color. At least it was only chalk, it washed out, but still. Lime-green?
“Um…the others had breakfast, sorta. Cereal, anyway. So…I’m ready to go—?”
“Sure,” Ethan said, smiling. “We’re good.”
Jules came over, standing on tiptoe to give him a hug, a peck on his scratchy cheek. Shaving was strictly optional on the weekends. Then she released him, eyes full of concern, and Ethan’s stung. He didn’t make an issue of the anniversary, so the younger kids were oblivious. But Jules… She knew. In fact, she already had her eye on Merri’s wedding dress, packed up safe in the special heirloom box in Ethan’s closet. Never mind she was already three inches taller than her mother.
“You know, I don’t have to go—”
“It’s only another Saturday, honey. So get outta here,” he said in an exaggerated Jersey accent. “Do your mom proud, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and started off, only to spin around at the door. “I’ll do a real breakfast when I get back. How’s that?”
“Whatever,” Ethan said, loving her so much it hurt. And not only because she was the spitting image of Merri, except for her eyes, more green-blue than purple-blue. But because he’d look at her and think, How’d I luck out to get one this good?
Unlike the twins, he thought on a brief chuckle as the boys bellowed downstairs. Then Isabella had arrived, a surprise after a six-year dry spell, to more than outshine her brothers in the Tasmanian devil department—
Briefly, resentment stabbed that his youngest daughter would never know her mother.
But like always, he shrugged off the memories, the self-pity and anger and—even after all this time—the disbelief as he slowly descended the stairs, his palm lightly raking the dark wood banister’s numerous dings and gouges that long preceded his and Merri’s buying the house four blocks from the high school, right after the twins were born. At the bottom he flexed his knee, willing the ache to subside: coaching peewee football was a lot more physical than high school varsity.
He’d no sooner reached the kitchen than the three remaining kids accosted him about a dozen things needing his immediate attention—hell, even the dog whined to go outside. But Ethan found the bombardment comforting, even reassuring, in its life-as-usual normalcy. So, as he let out the dog and returned the kids’ verbal volleys and poured more milk for Bella and double-checked the schedule on the fridge so they wouldn’t be late for the twins’ game, he gave silent thanks for the day-to-day craziness that kept him sane.
That kept him focused, not on what he’d lost, but on what he still had.
Even when his gaze caught, prominently displayed on the family room wall twenty feet beyond the kitchen, the wedding portrait of those two crazy-in-love twenty-two-year-olds, grinning like they had all the time in the world to figure life out.
Happy anniversary, babe, he silently wished the only woman he’d ever loved.
* * *
Ancient floorboards creaked underfoot in the overheated Queen Anne as Claire Jacobs methodically assessed the leavings from someone’s life. She yanked off her heavy knit hat, shaking her curls free. Poodle hair, her mother had called it. Smiling, Claire lifted a lovely cut-glass bowl to check the price. Only to nearly drop it. This was an estate sale, for cripes’ sake. Not Sotheby’s.
As if reading her mind, some prissy old dude in a tweed jacket squinted at her from several feet away. Ignoring him, Claire replaced the bowl and glanced around at the jumble of furniture and accessories and tchotchkes, all moping like rejected props from Mad Men. And for this she’d dragged her butt out of bed on one of the few mornings she could actually sleep in—?
Wait… She scurried across the room to practically snatch the leaded-glass lamp off the table. Okay, it was hardly Tiffany, not for twenty bucks, but it would look terrific on that little table by her front door—
