been doing her best to avoid a certain someone. But really, aside from her quick chat with Owen and Grace around the side of the house and her short break to cool her nerves, she’d been in the backyard with everyone else. She’d tasted the food. She’d toasted with champagne. She’d mingled.
“You look tired.” Her mother zeroed in with the laser focus that she had for all her kids and brushed back a lock of Mal’s hair. “Are you getting enough sleep?”
“I’m fine, Mom, and I’m getting plenty of sleep.” And on those nights when she wasn’t, she worked, so it wasn’t as though she tossed and turned or lay on her back staring at the ceiling, contemplating sheep jumping a fence.
“You need to take care of yourself.” Evelyn brushed back the lock of hair again. Like all guests at the wedding, Evelyn wore pristine white. In her case, a crisp white suit showed off her figure and demonstrated why she easily passed for ten years younger than the age on her driver’s license. “I worry about you. About what happens when you don’t take care of yourself.”
Health was a newly discovered focal point for all the Fords, as it was just over a year ago that Mal’s father, Gus, had suffered a heart attack. Suddenly eating reasonably well and exercising occasionally hadn’t been enough. Mal had taken up Pilates, Owen had started running more regularly and was apparently eating egg whites, and Donovan had begun walking everywhere. Mal’s father had taken up gardening while Evelyn had developed an obsession with making sure everyone ate their greens.
But the changes had been worth it. Her dad had bounced back with a new lease on life and a new attitude. One that he’d turned into a contract to do whatever he wanted. First, it had been his vegetable garden, then nosing around in his kids’ personal lives, followed by the decision to hand over the reins of the family business to his three children.
Mal still wasn’t sure her mother was over the loss of her flower bed by the side of the house—the once beautiful magenta peonies razed to make way for tomatoes and cucumbers. Or that’s what Evelyn pretended, which Mal now suspected had just been a ploy to get the backyard greenhouse she’d been hinting at for the last five years.
“I’m taking care of myself,” she told her mother. “I eat right and Grace and I still go to Pilates three mornings a week.” Even on Saturdays, which had once been her day for lounging in yoga pants with a vat of hot coffee, a cinnamon bun, the crossword and a pen.
“I know.” The line between Evelyn’s eyebrows eased slightly as she nodded. “But it’s a mother’s right to worry about her children.” She fussed with the high collar of Mal’s dress, smoothing it down. “Have you spoken with Travis?”
Mal forced herself not to react, not to flinch or rear back, even though her bare fingers suddenly seemed to burn with the weight of the missing ring. “Only for a couple of minutes.” Which had been plenty. Even if she still felt as if that final bit of closure continued to elude her.
“And you’re okay?” Evelyn’s dark-brown eyes, the same color as Mal’s, darted up to meet hers.
Mal fiddled with her hair, the chocolate color, like her eyes, inherited from her mother. “I’m not going to throw myself into the Pacific Ocean, if that’s what you’re asking.” Just how bad did she look, anyway? Travis was an ex and their breakup had been painful, but it hardly required the family to treat her as though she was glass—fragile, easily shattered. But then, there was Owen...
Mal felt the beginning of a scowl twist her lips. Owen and his ham-fisted attempts at creating conversations could definitely treat her more delicately.
Evelyn frowned. “That was certainly not what I was asking.” She waved at her husband who was never far from his wife’s side when they were in the same general area. “Gus. Come take a look at your daughter.”
“Hello, love.” Gus pressed a kiss to his wife’s cheek, then his daughter’s. “Hello, princess.”
“I thought we agreed to call Owen princess.”
Gus laughed long and loud. “We did. But not on his wedding day.” Anyone who didn’t know about Gus’s heart attack would never guess he’d suffered one from looking at him today. He was tall and slim. He and Evelyn had recently taken up cycling and were talking about a trip to Europe to see the sights on a bike tour. He looked very much like his sons, with just a few more wrinkles and a little extra gray at the temples. “Exactly what am I looking at?”
Mal shrugged. “Mom’s being crazy.”
“She looks tired, doesn’t she?” Evelyn said at the same time. She lowered her voice, though the other guests were far enough away that there was little chance of being overheard. “She talked to Travis.”
The confusion on Gus’s face cleared. “I see.”
Mal just bet he did. That they all did. “As I already told Mom, I’m fine.” Bad enough that she had to deal with her own emotions at seeing the ex she thought she’d left behind, but dealing with her family’s concern on top of it was getting to be too much. And she was fine. So fine. Even if Travis was moving back.
She ignored the thump of her heart.
“Wasn’t the wedding gorgeous?” Because Mal could think of no better way to change the subject than to do it herself.
But these were her parents she was talking to and they weren’t so easily conned. “I think she’s trying to pull a fast one,” Gus said to his wife while Evelyn nodded.
“It’s not a fast one.” Mal held her hands out. Nothing up my sleeves, folks. “I’m simply commenting on the beauty of the day, which is what normal people do at a wedding.”
“We’re normal?” Gus feigned a shocked look. “Don’t you remember when she was a teenager and she used to tell us we were from another planet because we didn’t get her?”
“And how she used to make us drop her off a block from school if she couldn’t get a ride with her cool brothers?”
“I was thirteen. It was a phase.” Mal felt herself falling back into those old teen habits and stopped herself from rolling her eyes. Barely. She put her hands on her hips instead. “And I wouldn’t have had to behave that way if you’d been able to get me and understand that climbing out of the family minivan on the first day of school would forever taint my chance of high school popularity.”
“High aspirations,” her mother said and pulled her into another hug. “I’m not sure how you managed to survive our parenting.”
“Sometimes I wonder that, too.” But Mal leaned into her mother’s arms and rested her chin on her mother’s head, which earned her a swat.
“You know I don’t like it when you do that.” But there was a twinkle in Evelyn’s eye. “It makes me feel short.”
“You are short,” Mal and Gus said in unison.
“You should appreciate my height more.” Evelyn straightened the cuffs of her winter-white suit jacket. “Who else would you find to lord your own height over if not for me?”
“Your mother has a point.”
Mal nodded and followed her dad’s lead when he curved his arms around his wife so that the two of them surrounded her completely. Their eyes met
