stop him? You push him, he shoves back. You’ll be lucky if you aren’t testifying about adultery at their divorce trials and then leading them down the aisle as maid of honor at their wedding. He knows how to get under your skin.”
“We’d both be lucky if he divorced your mom, and my father finally got tired of Mother cheating on him.”
“Emma, how can you say that about me?” Emma looked up as her mother pushed through the partially open door and then shut it behind her. “Don’t worry. I’ve told your father you misunderstood what you saw, and Odell was only looking for Noah. I spent the night with my mother to help her get ready for today. Odell isn’t going to press charges.”
Emma shook her head. “Press charges against whom for what?”
“He’s saying you pushed him down the stairs. We know that’s not true, but he’s already managed to spread the story, and people like to talk. Now you get some rest, and maybe you’ll be able to come home tomorrow.”
With that, she was gone again, her breezy lies poisoning the air. The heart monitor at Emma’s side tapped out a hectic beat.
“She thinks she can stay with Dad after being with your father.” Emma closed her eyes as twenty-two years of family dysfunction replayed in her head. “I have to get out of this town.” She grabbed Noah’s hands. “Come with me. You can do your residency somewhere else. We can be married. I’ve waited for you so long, but I can’t breathe here anymore.”
“I can’t go.” It was the answer she expected. “My father will be more out of control than ever because of what happened today. My mother can’t protect herself, and he’ll try to punish my sister and brothers out of his sick sense of retribution. He’s a thug.” Noah shook his head. “I cannot go with you.”
“Owen is almost your age,” Emma said. “Maybe it’s his turn to protect them. And your mother should step up.” She pulled his hands to her face. “I’m begging you. I love you. You say you love me. Love me more than them, this once.”
“I do love you more than anyone. I just can’t walk away from the war zone at home.”
“It’s not your home anymore.”
“But I’m the one the others come to when they can’t stay in that house with him.”
“You’re supposed to be my place.”
“Understand, Emma.” He pressed his palms to either side of her head, his fingers tangling painfully in her hair. “I want to kill him for what he did to you, for what he’s done to all of us, but I have to find a way to help my family survive.”
“I’m leaving Bliss, Noah.”
“Stay. We can live it down.”
“If you don’t come with me, nothing will ever be right for us. Our plans will die. We’ll never be married. We won’t have children who know they’re loved. I can’t wait any longer for you to finally choose me.”
“Emma, come on. You’re not the only person who needs me. Give me a chance.”
“We don’t have a chance if we stay here. I’m getting out, with or without you, because if I don’t, I’ll be broken.”
Four Years Later
“JUST CHECK ON him.” Suzannah Gage followed Noah from the back of her SUV as he carried a sack of goat feed into the garden shed. “Owen’s failed at rehab twice already. If he’s drinking again, he could fall off Louisa Candler’s termite-ridden roof.”
“It’s Emma’s roof now, Mom, and that’s your point. You think if you can send me over there, I’ll forget she left me and beg her to start over.”
“If I’d been strong enough to throw your father down our stairs, she never would have left.”
Noah shoved the feed into a shelf tall enough to keep it out of the goats’ reach. “She didn’t push him, Mom, and you shouldn’t joke about it. Most of the people in town think she ran away out of guilt.”
“She did me a favor,” Suzannah said. He glared at her, and she waved her hands as if trying to erase her words in midair. “I mean, watching her life fall apart made me realize I needed to fix my own. I do feel responsible for your breakup, and I wouldn’t mind helping you forgive each other.”
Noah grabbed the last bag of goat feed. “You live in a dream. Emma’s been traveling the world without a word to me, and you think we can get over our split with a little chat on her collapsing porch?”
“Don’t you want her back?”
He stood there, leaves blowing around his head, hardly feeling the weight of the bag in his hands. “No.” He’d tried to stop managing his family’s emergencies, and he had a full life, running his medical practice in town. He’d even begun to organize a committee to open a clinic that would provide more extensive care than he could in a one-man office. “I have my life. I want to be here. Emma made her life elsewhere. She never believed in me anyway.”
“Never believed in you?”
“Forget it.” He put the last bag of feed on the shelf and ushered his mother back into the crisp sunlight. “I’ll go see Owen, but don’t dream up any more ideas about Emma and me. Deal?”
“Deal.” She pulled the hatch down on her vehicle. “For now, anyway. You’ll go while he’s working? Not to see Emma, honest, son, but to make sure your brother’s sober when he’s working.”
“All right, Mom, but Owen is old enough to take care of himself, and I’ve had it with being my family’s keeper.”
“I know.” Her face wrinkled with worry. “Owen thinks I have no right to worry about him because I spent so many years letting your father treat us badly.”
Noah glanced from her to the inn she’d created out of their old farmhouse. Pale yellow, surrounded with white porches and landscaping that was his mother’s pride and joy, it bore little resemblance to the tumbledown wreck of a family home it had been.
“This place is like you,” he said. “Bright and shiny and new.”
“And it’ll last, as long as I don’t let a man like your father into my life.”
So she was capable of understanding his position. He wouldn’t go back to a woman who’d made him feel like he was never enough. He’d been torn between his family’s real need and Emma’s emotional insecurity about their relationship. He’d loved her, but never enough to suit her hunger.
Besides, everyone knew she was only staying long enough to repair termite damage to her grandmother’s house.
Bliss had never made Emma Candler happy either.
* * *
THE SCENT OF sawdust and new wood treated to discourage termites filled the house. Emma leaned her forehead into the screen on one of the wide, open windows, to watch her contractor, Owen Gage, on the lawn sawing
