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Hopefully the money she sent to Mrs. Lana, her gram’s friend, and the woman that her gram promised her would help her get her shop back up and running or at least fixed up enough that she could stay in it without getting wet when it rained, would be enough to get her started until she was making money on her own.
If this didn’t work out, she had no idea what she was going to do.
Lord, I need You. I know in the past I’ve had a tendency to walk away from You when I thought I had everything under control. Although having everything under control is just an illusion. I know that now. I need You to help me. I have to provide for my children, I have to...survive. Somehow. Please.
She wished that she had been smarter, wiser, when she had been younger. She would have ditched the idea of being a rodeo queen and embraced the idea of having a solid home and all the things that she now wished she’d been working toward. A job. An education. An ability to support herself.
No point in looking back.
“Mom. I really have to pee.”
She pulled herself from thoughts of the past and tried to focus on the present.
“All right. We’re here. Just wait until I dig up the key, and we’ll go to the bathroom right away.” She hadn’t wanted to stop a half an hour ago when Rachel first said she needed to use the restroom. They were almost there, and she hadn’t wanted to make one more stop. Not that there had been any places to use other than just stopping along the side of the road.
Maybe part of her hoped that Ryan was in town. But most of her dreaded the idea of meeting him again.
He was probably married with a couple of kids of his own and living somewhere out west, not in Michigan. Hopefully. Since he was just one more thing she didn’t want to have to face.
But part of being an adult was facing a whole pile of things that she didn’t want to. She’d figured that much out, anyway.
“All right. You guys can hop out, and I’ll dig out the key, and we’ll go in and check out our new place.”
“This is it?” Rachel asked, sounding like she hoped it wasn’t.
“It is. You can even see the lake from here.” She remembered that about her childhood. She had the spare bedroom on the second floor, and she’d spent more than one night watching the moonlight play on the water.
And most of her days running along the shores of Lake Michigan and riding horses with Ryan.
Funny how just a few weeks or months of her life could define it so perfectly.
She could only recall spending the majority of two summers in Strawberry Sands, but that defined so much of her childhood and made up a big portion of the memories that made her smile.
Holding the key in her hand, she walked toward the front door. She actually wasn’t sure which door the key opened, but if she recalled correctly, the same key opened both the front door and the back door that went directly to the residence and the stairs that led up to the bedrooms.
There wasn’t much living area behind and above the shop, but it would work for the girls and her. It was better than being homeless or living in a women’s shelter.
She didn’t even want to think that could be her next step.
A deep longing went through her. A longing for her horse and the rodeo circuit and all the dreams that had crashed and burned and lay in ashes at her feet.
Now she was facing things like women’s shelters and bridges.
Even the small-town, cozy atmosphere of Strawberry Sands couldn’t completely eradicate her fear of being homeless with her children. Or worse yet, having her girls taken from her.
“Do they have a school in this town?” Maddie asked, and the question made Dakota smile.
Maddie was quiet and responsible, easygoing, and she hardly ever got upset about anything.
Rachel was the exact opposite, emotional over everything, and everything was a major emergency, from needing to use the restroom to getting a paper cut.
“Mom, I have to pee,” she said. This time, there was a lot of whine in her tone and more than a little bit of urgency.
“All right. I’m hurrying.” She didn’t have time to think about the memories, didn’t have time to prepare herself or to worry about the future. Right now, she needed to find a restroom for her daughter, then she’d figure out how she was going to feed them.
Talk about taking care of the urgent and letting go of the necessary.
When she opened the door, she was in a bit of a rush, fearing that her daughter was going to pee herself just steps from the toilet. So, it was probably excusable for her to not recognize the man who was standing on a ladder, spreading spackling on a spot on the ceiling, his hand up, his eyes wide, and surprise in every feature.
