to Northbridge to orient him on the workings of the place and the social service requirements he would have to meet for a placement facility of that nature.
So there she was, the week before Labor Day, once again on her way to Northbridge. Embarrassed that she’d had a few too many drinks and spent the night not only with a virtual stranger, but a virtual stranger who was her friend’s brother. Embarrassed that she’d ditched that brother the next morning. And carrying with her the consequences of her actions.
“Welcome to Northbridge, Montana,” she said sarcastically, once again reading a sign as she turned right, off the nearly deserted rural highway.
It was two more miles down a road that ran between matching fields of cornstalks that formed tall walls on either side and cast long shadows in the late evening light. Then the fields gave way to ancient oak trees lush with green leaves before she actually reached the town itself. And Main Street.
Clair pulled into the first place she came to on Main Street—the service station, which, along with the bus station across the street, was the beginning of that end of the town proper.
She didn’t need gas. She just needed to stop. So she parked alongside the station rather than at the pumps and got out.
The front door to the station was open, even though it was long after the scheduled 6:00 p.m. closing time, and so was the big garage door where a truck with its hood raised was apparently being worked on in the mechanic’s bay. But no one was anywhere to be seen. Clair headed for the restroom, which she knew would only be locked if someone else was using it.
No one was, so she stepped inside and turned on the light before she leaned back against the door, closed her eyes and once again advised herself to breathe.
This wasn’t the way things were supposed to work out, she couldn’t help thinking as it began to sink in that she really was in Northbridge again.
Her dad was supposed to live to a ripe old age and go on running the school until he was ready to turn it over to someone else himself.
She was supposed to be married. She was supposed to have a big family to bring back and raise in Northbridge so her father could be included, so her father could revel in his role as grandfather. She was supposed to finish her own life here in Northbridge. And she was supposed to do it all with Rob.
But that wasn’t the way things had worked out.
And if there was one thing she’d learned in the last year of having her whole life turned topsy-turvy, it was that she had to deal with whatever came of the latest topsy-turvy turn.
“So deal,” she told herself. But that was easier said than done.
Still, she was determined to manage to the best of her ability.
So she took one more deep breath, blew it out and opened her eyes.
If there was a cleaner gas station bathroom in the country, Clair had never been in it and just the sight of that spotless space made her smile.
Northbridge.
Where else would the station owner’s mother come in to personally scrub the restroom and keep a crocheted doily across the top of the toilet tank?
Clair pushed off the door and after using the pristine facilities, she grabbed the heart-shaped, strawberry-scented soap from a ceramic dish on the edge of the sink to wash her hands. Then she dried them with paper towel taken from a roll held on the wall by a dispenser with two brown bears perched atop either end of the bar.
And all the while she kept thinking, only in Northbridge….
She tossed the used paper towel into a wicker basket, and glanced at herself in the mirror above the sink.
It had been a long drive from Denver, through Wyoming to Montana, and she’d been traveling since dawn. It was now after eight o’clock, and she decided she looked like someone who had been behind the wheel of a car all that time.
Some repair work was in order, she decided.
She grabbed a tissue and blotted her face, paying particular attention to her forehead since she’d just had her very wavy, honey-blond hair cut short—including the bangs that were now barely below her hairline and left most of her brow showing.
With that done, she opened her purse and removed a small makeup bag. After applying a light dusting of blush onto the crests of her high cheekbones and into the hollows below them, she passed the brush lightly along the underside of her jawline.
She was grateful to have the skin and the bone structure she had—neither would put her on the cover of a magazine but at least her complexion had always been clear and between her cheekbones and jawline there was some definition.
She wished her eyelashes were longer though, and reapplied mascara to help give the illusion that they were. And as she did, she was glad to see that the whites around her almost-purple irises weren’t bloodshot as they had been the week before when the latest topsy-turvy turn her life had taken had kept her from sleeping for several nights.
A light coating of lip gloss didn’t alter the natural pink of lips that she also wished were a bit fuller. And for about the hundredth time since she’d had her hair cut, she wondered if it had been wise to go so drastically from shoulder-length to a curly cap that the stylist had proclaimed sporty and cute and so much more au courant than the way she’d been wearing it.
Actually, what she was wondering was what Ben Walker would think of her haircut. But she curbed that thought the minute she realized she was having it. Rob hated short hair and would have had a fit—which had probably influenced her decision to do it. But once she had gone ahead with the new style, it had seemed liberating to do something for herself. She certainly wasn’t going to start fretting over the approval or disapproval of another man.
“Sporty and cute and au courant,” she said, finding that repeating the hairstylist’s words and taking stock of her new look somehow helped bolster her. It also helped remind her that she was her own woman now. Strong enough to have withstood a lot in the past year. Resilient. Capable. Competent. She could take care of herself and whatever else she needed to take care of. So what if things hadn’t turned out the way they were supposed to? She could handle it. She could handle anything.
At least she hoped she could when her stomach did the little lurch it had been doing for the past few weeks, and she remembered that the latest topsy-turvy turn was a big one.
But still, now that she had actually arrived in Northbridge, and had freshened up and reassured herself that she would be okay, she felt better than she had driving into town.
Even if she was back in Northbridge to hand over her father’s school.
Even if she was divorced.
Even if she’d made one of the biggest miscalculations of her entire life when she’d spent the night with Ben Walker in June and became pregnant with his baby…!
The Northbridge School for Boys was just outside of town to the west. When Clair turned off the road onto the drive that led up to it, she stopped the car so she could have a moment to look at the place her father had loved.
The original house was a flat-faced, three-story wooden box painted pale yellow and trimmed in white. The building stood about a quarter of a mile from
