I’m bad news.” She was probably right. “How’s she going to react to the fact you’re living with me?”
“I’m not living with you. I’m staying in your house. It’s not the same thing.” Her gaze slid to his and away again. “I’m still living at Snow Crystal. She doesn’t need to know more than that.”
He thought about her walking barefoot around the house and sleeping next door to him. “Probably a good decision.”
IT WAS STILL DARK when Brenna slid into her car the following morning.
The drive to her parents’ house took around twenty minutes, and there wasn’t a single second of that time when she didn’t feel like turning around and driving back to Snow Crystal. It had been snowing steadily for days, but not enough to make the journey treacherous, and the road had been cleared so she had no reason to postpone her visit.
Her mood plummeted along with the temperature.
Visiting her parents was a duty, not a pleasure, and it was a duty that always left her feeling flat, depressed and more than a little guilty.
Compared to Kayla and Élise she was lucky, wasn’t she? She had two parents still married and living together.
She pulled up outside the vintage brick colonial that was her mother’s pride and joy. To Brenna, a house was somewhere to be indoors when you couldn’t be outdoors. She’d as soon live in a tent. Occasionally in the summer, she’d done just that, erecting her little tent in the backyard until her mother had forced her back inside, worried about what the neighbors would say.
To Maura Daniels, the opinion of the neighbors came second only to God’s.
Brenna sat for a moment, bracing herself for what lay ahead, promising herself that she wasn’t going to get upset.
She had a key in her pocket, but she rang the bell and then waited, tense as a deer scenting the wind. She would have walked straight in to any one of the O’Neil properties and been sure of a warm welcome. Here, in the house where she’d grown up, she hesitated to cross the threshold without permission. Nothing annoyed her order-obsessed mother more than people dropping in without warning or invitation.
To Brenna, it had been like growing up in a strait-jacket.
She heard the rhythmic tap of her mother’s low heels on the cherrywood floor and then the door opened.
“Hi, Mom.”
“You’re wet!”
“It’s snowing.”
“Leave your boots outside.”
She would have done it without being told, but her mother left nothing to chance when it came to her home.
Brenna had learned at an early age that snow was to be kept outside the house. Her mother couldn’t control the weather, but she worked every hour of every day to control its less welcome effects, from shining the windows to removing imaginary marks from her lovingly polished floor.
“How are you, Mom?” She stepped inside, careful not to slip. The last thing she needed at the start of the season was a broken ankle, especially as a result of her mother’s overzealous cleaning habit.
“Good. Things have been busy at work.” Her mother eyed her black ski pants, and Brenna intercepted that look as she pulled off her boots and left them on the step.
“I’m teaching at ten o’clock. I thought I’d have more time if I didn’t have to go back and change first.”
“If you visited more often, you wouldn’t have to cram so much into each visit.”
Brenna knew better than to respond to that one. Conversations with her mother were like a game of tennis. Whenever she returned the ball, it came back at her harder, but even she had to admit that her mother seemed more tense than usual.
She wondered what had happened.
She stepped into the house and immediately felt as if the walls were closing around her, trapping her inside. She wanted to push back at them, wanted to free herself. It didn’t help that they were painted a dark shade of red and hung with paintings and photographs. Her mother was a collector of things. Paintings, ornaments, vases, figurines—the house was crammed with them and no doubt Christmas would bring another flurry of objects to add clutter to the already cluttered walls and surfaces. Brenna couldn’t see the point of filling a house with objects, but her mother enjoyed adding things to the home.
It was the house she’d grown up in but it had never felt like home to Brenna. The place suffocated her. She missed the soaring cathedral ceiling of Lake House and the acres of glass that captured the sunlight and framed the trees. Winter or summer, it was like looking at a postcard, and she never tired of it. It scared her how quickly it had begun to feel like home.
She followed her mother through to the kitchen.
Her father sat at the breakfast bar, his eyes glued to the TV.
“Hi, Dad.” She leaned forward and kissed him, and he gave her a quick hug, briefly taking his eyes off the football game.
“You should turn that off when your daughter is home. Lord knows, it’s not something that happens often.” Her mother reached for a mug and filled it with coffee. “I hope those O’Neils are paying you well for all the hours you put into that place.”
There it was again, the friction, the tension. If her mother were an engine, Brenna would have checked the oil to see if she could get her working more smoothly.
“It’s my choice to work hard, Mom. I love my job. And Jackson O’Neil is a good employer. I love working with him.”
“So you’re set to work another season for the O’Neils.” The set of her mother’s mouth expressed her opinion on that decision.
“Yes.” Brenna curved her hands around the mug, warming herself. Her mother could chill the atmosphere more effectively than any air-conditioning unit. “Bookings are up. It’s pretty exciting after the past few years of struggling through.”
“If Michael O’Neil had paid more attention to his responsibilities, they wouldn’t have been struggling.”
The bitterness shocked her. “He’s dead, Mom. You shouldn’t speak like that of the dead. And Jackson and Kayla have worked really hard over the past year. It’s a really exciting time, and I’m enjoying my job.” If she’d hoped that news might invite a positive response, she was once again disappointed.
“We both know it’s not the job that keeps you here.” Maura Daniels thumped her mug down on the shiny granite countertop, her emotions released in a cacophony of clattering and banging as she pulled bowls out of the cabinet and eggs out of the fridge. “You could have stayed in Europe. You had a chance to escape from these long, endless winters and the O’Neil family, but did you take it? No. You came back here first chance you got and threw away your life.”
She’d
