in gear, backed out of the parking space, then put on the brakes and glared at Wendy again. “I’m your oldest friend! If I can’t tell you the truth, who can?”
“You don’t know the truth,” Wendy said, the words tumbling out in a desperate rush. “I’m the one this happened to. Me, not you, or the doctors, or the nurses, or the therapists with their sympathetic looks and endless exercises.” She pushed down her hood and dragged her hands through her tumbled auburn curls. “Sometimes I wish I’d died that day, instead of waking up in a hospital bed and finding out that—that…”
“What? That you were alive? That you still had both your legs? I don’t understand you. Don’t you ever stop to think how lucky you were?”
“I’m trying to move on, Allie. Don’t you understand that?”
“By pretending Seth doesn’t exist? By trying to force a doctor into surgery that might do more harm than good?”
“Seth’s got somebody. You just told me that. And the doctor will want to do this operation once he talks to me.” Wendy shook her head. “You’re right. I lived. I got out of a wheelchair I was never supposed to get out of. But this woman, the one who can’t do the things she once did—this woman is a stranger. I can’t help it if that sounds selfish. It’s the way I feel.”
“You’re right,” Alison said quietly. “I don’t understand.” She looked at Wendy and smiled, though her eyes glittered with tears. “But I don’t have to. I’m your friend. I’ll stand by you, no matter what. Okay?”
Wendy nodded, even though it was more than okay. The pledge, the compassion in Alison’s eyes… Wendy felt her own eyes fill. For one improbable moment, she thought of letting all the pain inside her spill out. The truth was so much more complex than anyone knew. Maybe if she shared her awful secret…
She knew better. It wouldn’t change a thing.
Her heart, not just her body, had been broken in pieces on a winter’s day nine years ago. Looking in the mirror, seeing her scarred, twisted flesh was a constant reminder of what she’d almost had, what she’d lost, what she’d never have again. Now she could only pin her hopes on a time when she could stare at her reflection and see a whole Wendy instead of a shattered one. Then, perhaps, the agony would turn into a pain she could live with.
“Wendy?” Alison said softly.
She looked up, saw the confusion in her friend’s eyes. “Yes. I heard what you said. Thank you. You’re the best friend in the world.”
The women gave each other wobbly smiles, then Alison scraped her hand across her eyes. “If you make me cry,” she said gruffly, “and my mascara runs, I’m never going to forgive you.”
“Too late. It’s already running.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Yours, too, so don’t look so smug.”
They gave each other sharp looks. Then they laughed, reached out and hugged.
“It’s good to have you home,” Alison said, “even if it’s just for a little while.”
“And it’s good to be here.” Wendy pulled a couple of tissues from her pocket and handed one to Alison. “Even if it’s just for a little while.”
Alison wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She started the car again and they drove to Cooper’s Corner, turned down a familiar old street and stopped in front of a handsome house with bay windows and flower boxes that Wendy knew would overflow with pink and lavender impatiens all summer.
She stepped from the car just as the front door opened. Her mother and father stood poised in the doorway. Then Gina laughed and ran down the steps, with Howard right behind her, and just for a moment, as Wendy went into their sheltering arms, she had to admit that home was the best place in the world.
IT WAS, Seth Castleman thought, the worst possible kind of day to be wrestling with Santa Claus on a sloped, snow-covered roof.
Almost six inches of snow had been predicted overnight, and that was exactly what had fallen. Those six inches, coming hot on the heels of an earlier storm, had been enough to make taking down the ten-foot Santa figure a nasty, fairly dangerous job.
“I hate to ask you,” Philo Cooper had told Seth when he phoned at nine that morning, “but I can’t reach the guy who rented it to me up in Pittsfield and it’s due back tomorrow. His answering machine’s on but maybe he’s away.”
“In Florida, if he’s got half a brain,” Seth had said dryly. “I’ll stop by later this afternoon.”
“Thanks, Seth.”
“No problem,” Seth had replied, which wasn’t really true. It was a problem to move around on the pitched roof with ice under your boots. But the job was simple, and he was almost finished. The Santa was now in the back of Philo’s truck and Seth had just one more brace to remove.
Actually, the view from here, twelve feet above Main Street, was pretty interesting. The town looked like a Currier and Ives Christmas card. Spruce boughs, accented with big silver balls that dangled and swayed in the wind, were wired to a cable that stretched from one side of the street to the other, and holly wreaths hung on the old-fashioned lampposts. It wouldn’t be long before all those decorations were taken down, too.
Seth pulled out another nail from the brace.
Cooper’s Corner was beautiful all year, but winter was special. He’d first seen the town in December a long, long time ago. He’d been eighteen then, a sullen kid who’d bounced from one New York City foster home to another, with no bigger plan than to find a job at one of the ski resorts, make a few bucks and then move on. But he’d found something here, not just a job but a way of life that had turned his life around.
Even at eighteen—hell, especially at eighteen—he’d been a cynic, world weary and hard-shelled. At first, he’d scoffed at the town’s old-fashioned setting. Surely it was phony, something carefully constructed for the tourist trade.
After a couple of months, he’d been surprised to learn that the town was what it seemed, a village whose residents cared about each other and even about him, tough guy that he tried to be.
Gradually, without him even realizing it, his carefully constructed walls of cynicism started to crumble. Tough guys weren’t supposed to fall in love, but Seth had, with the pretty little town that time seemed to have bypassed. He’d fallen in love with its solid, old-fashioned houses and quiet roads, with its friendly people…
…with a girl whose hair was the fire of maple leaves in autumn, whose eyes were the blue of a mountain lake in midsummer.
“Damn it!”
Seth mouthed a string of four-letter words as the brace broke free and clipped the side of his hand. Well, that was what you got for daydreaming. You worked with tools, you worked on a slippery roof, you had to pay attention. A mistake could be a lot worse than a bruised hand, and what in hell was wrong with him, anyway, thinking about what used to be? Wendy
