Monday afternoon on her way to the vet’s office. It was such a beautiful spring day that Eden was sitting outside on her front porch steps when Faith arrived. Faith had an ulterior motive for the visit but was in no hurry, so she’d accepted her sister’s invitation to join her.
“A verdict?” Faith asked in response to Eden’s question after she’d perched beside her sister on the top porch step. “About what?”
“Northbridge—if you’re staying forever or for a while, or if you’re already thinking about leaving as soon as cousin Jared’s wedding is over.”
“I just got here Saturday night,” Faith reminded.
“And did you bring your whole wardrobe or only enough for a quick trip?”
Faith knew what her sister was getting at. “I brought enough for a while but not everything I own. The rest is still at the apartment in New Haven that Shu bought as part of the divorce settlement—”
“So you’re keeping the apartment?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Then there’s the chance that you’ll actually live there?”
Faith heard her sister’s disappointment. Now that Eden had moved back to Northbridge and married a local cop—Boone Pratt’s brother, Cam—Eden and their other sister, Eve, who also lived in Northbridge, were hoping that Faith would make her home in the small town, too. They’d been trying to persuade Faith for months now and Faith knew Eden was fishing for a sign she had made her decision. But Faith hadn’t and so couldn’t give Eden the answer she was looking for. Or any answer at all, really.
“I still don’t know what I’m going to do,” Faith said. “There is the apartment in Connecticut and I have an offer to go back to work full-time there if I want to—”
“With the same party and event planners you were working for when you met Shu—isn’t that what Eve said?”
“Yes. The Fosters wouldn’t hear of me working when I was married. That wasn’t my role as Shu’s wife. But I just had some dealings with my old cohorts over the plans for the opening of Nedra’s gallery and they said there was a spot for me if I wanted a job.” Nedra was Nedra Carpenter, an old college friend of Faith’s whom Eden had met several times during her visits to Connecticut.
“But you don’t have to work,” Eden reminded.
Faith shrugged. “No, I don’t have to. The settlement was beefed up substantially to keep me quiet. But I also don’t know what I’ll do with myself it I don’t work. That’s the problem—I don’t know what I want any more than I know what I’m going to do. I’m hoping to sort through it all here, remember? It was your idea when I visited in January for me to come back, bask in the peace and quiet and see if I could get my bearings again.”
Faith had come to Northbridge at the start of the year for just a day to Eden’s wedding to briefly touch base with her family when they were in turmoil over the revelation that the grandmother they’d all believed to have run off with a bank robber more than forty years ago had secretly returned to work as a clerk at the dry cleaners. Because Faith had been packing up and leaving her in-laws’ house, one day was all she’d been able to spare. But Eden and Eve had persuaded her to spend some time in Northbridge to regroup once the last loose ends of her divorce were tied up. And the upcoming wedding was the perfect time to do just that.
“And you haven’t come any closer to getting those bearings between January and now?” Eden asked.
Faith shrugged again. “It isn’t easy when I find myself questioning everything I’ve been so sure of my whole life. You had the rug pulled out from under you when Alika was killed in the line of duty in Hawaii, you had trouble being able to accept that Cam was a cop, too, and in similar kinds of danger on the job—”
“That almost seems silly now that I’ve really settled into Northbridge. Sometimes I wonder why we even need cops around here.”
“Still, as bad as it was to lose Alika, and as hard as it was to get over your fear so you could be with Cam, you never had to doubt your choice of Alika as a husband or doubt the life you two had together. You didn’t have to look back and see that what you thought was real wasn’t and ask yourself if you were blind or stupid or if you’d gone after the wrong thing in the first place. Alika’s death left you afraid of being with another cop, not wondering if you were an idiot who couldn’t see what was right in front of your face for years. But me… I have to wonder if, somehow, I asked for what I got.”
“Oh, Faith, how could you have asked for what you got?”
Faith shrugged a third time. “I got what I asked for and the rest came with it.”
“But what came with it was not what anyone would have asked for or could have expected.”
“Maybe not—”
“No maybe about it.”
“The bottom line, Eden, is that on the surface I got exactly what I wanted. What I’d always wanted. And it turned out so badly that now… Now I just don’t know.”
“So you can stay here and figure it out,” Eden concluded.
“Or I can stay here until I figure it out,” Faith said, not wanting to commit to more than that when it came to Northbridge.
It seemed like a good time to change the subject so she opted to embark on her ulterior motive. “What are you up to for the next hour or so?” she asked her sister.
Eden held up a cell phone. “I’m waiting for a call to tell me whether the last fairy sketches are all right.”
Eden had ended her career as a forensic artist and was now illustrating a children’s book.
“You could take your phone with you and help me out,” Faith proposed hopefully.
“Help you out with what?”
“Your brother-in-law. According to his receptionist, he’s keeping Charlie another night. I guess Charlie still isn’t eating or drinking and he needs to watch her. But I wanted to at least visit her. The receptionist put me on hold to ask if that would be all right. He okayed it but the receptionist said his schedule today was full, so would I come after the last appointment. As if my being at the office would interfere with anything.”
Eden either didn’t notice the derisive note in Faith’s voice or she chose not to mention it. Instead she said, “What does that have to do with me?”
“I don’t particularly want to go alone. Your brother-in-law is a creep.”
“Boone?” Eden said with a laugh. “You have to be kidding. Boone’s a pussycat.”
“He is not. He’s rude and obnoxious and we sort of had a fight yesterday. I was hoping I could pick up Charlie this morning and not even see him, but now not only don’t I get to take Charlie home, I’m sure I’ll have to see bad-news Boone while I’m visiting my dog.”
“Are you sure we’re talking about the same person? The tall, hunky guy who resembles my husband except he has longer, darker hair and lighter eyes and when he
