“I guess,” Jack said. “But that silver lining had some holes in it.”
He smiled in memory. “Later, Sara told me the story from her side. It’s much more interesting than mine. She knew from the beginning that I wanted something, but there I was, thinking I was being so subtle.”
“Tell me every word,” Kate said.
Lachlan Cemetery
2004
Sara listened to the young minister talk about what a loving, caring, generous and kind woman Ruth Medlar had been. But even he was having a hard time saying the words when the only people there were ones he’d found hanging around the church that day. The man who mowed the lawn had his head down. The secretary kept looking at her watch. The assistant minister had a new baby at home and seemed to want to lie down on the soft grass and go to sleep.
As for Sara, her hands were clenched so tightly she could hardly feel them. Ruth Medlar had never done or said a kind thing to anyone in her life—except for her beloved son.
If her good-for-nothing brother was available, Sara would have sent him money for the funeral—Randal was always broke—and let him handle it all. In lieu of that, she’d tried to dump the whole mess onto the church, but they’d refused. They’d insisted that Sara return to Lachlan and deal with it all herself. She understood, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t bitter about it. She wanted to be here as little as everyone around her.
The minister finally stopped his flowery lies—and people say I write fiction, Sara thought—and the funeral was over.
She gave a curt nod and left as quickly as possible. She didn’t go down the gravel path with the others and have to listen to their fake words of sympathy. Instead, she cut across the lawn. There was a gravestone she needed to see. Or maybe she shouldn’t see it, shouldn’t remind herself that a man she’d loved so very much was forever gone.
As she rounded the little building that sat in the center of the cemetery, she halted. If she’d been hit by lightning, she couldn’t have stopped more abruptly.
Another funeral service was going on. But unlike her mother’s, this one was attended by what looked to be half the town. A big photo of Henry Lowell was on an easel.
Standing on the far side of a casket, like a vision from a nightmare, were three women Sara had known long ago. It was like a Lachlan High School reunion—something she’d avoided for so many years. Tayla Kirkwood, Donna Wyatt and Noreen Stewart stood there, side by side. They’d been close friends in high school and were widows now.
Ate your men alive and threw the bones away? Sara wondered.
But in the middle were two men who took Sara’s breath away. She hadn’t seen them since Cal had passed and they looked so very much like him. His dark looks, inherited from his Brazilian mother, had always made Cal stand out in a sea of blond heads and pale skin.
One was Cal’s son, Roy, the bane of his father’s life. Liar, cheat, thief. As bad as Randal but without her brother’s finesse, his sense of showmanship, his likability.
For all of Roy’s sins, he was still a very good-looking man. There was gray in his dark hair and he had unshaven cheeks, but they just made him look more interesting. His eyes hadn’t lost the sparkle of his lust for life.
He was standing beside his ex-wife, Heather, who looked like she’d been crying for days. It was obvious how much she’d loved her husband, Henry. And as Sara watched, she saw Roy glance at the diamond on Heather’s hand. Saw him stare at her pearl earrings.
On Roy’s other side was a young man who looked so much like Cal that Sara thought she might faint. When Cal was eighteen years old, his senior year of high school, he had been a glorious creature: tall, dark, athletic, smart. He and his two friends had been dubbed The Magnificent Three—and they well deserved the title.
That Sara had been the girlfriend—the true love—of one of them had been a great source of pride to her. The world that she and Cal had outside of school, away from the spotlight of sports and school intrigues, was what fueled her entire life. It was what gave her the strength to survive her mother and the horror that was her home life.
That it had all ended badly didn’t take away the seed that had rooted so deeply and strongly. Love lasts forever, even if the lovers are rarely together.
The boy who looked so much like Cal was his grandson Jackson, grown up now and bursting with health and energy—and, from the expression on his handsome face, anger.
When Sara saw Roy put his arm around Heather in a proprietary way, then saw the scowl on Jack’s young face deepen, she knew that war was to come. She could foresee the future: Roy would move back in on his ex, now a rich widow, and Jack would do what he could to stop it.
I must get him away from here, Sara thought. When the funeral service ended, she went forward.
No one seemed to be surprised to see her. But then, news always spread quickly in Lachlan. Cal’s widow, Donna, snake that she was, wisely slithered away through the crowd. She had always been one to do things in secret, never in the open.
Tayla still wore that “forgive me” look, but Sara ignored her. Noreen Stewart didn’t deign to look at a Medlar.
Roy was so intent on leading pretty Heather away that he barely glanced at Sara.
Bet if I had on my Cartier watch and some pearls he’d run to me, she thought, then dismissed him.
Jack stayed by the coffin, watching as it was lowered into the ground. His eighteen-year-old eyes had a look of age and turmoil that were too much for him.
She didn’t know if his grandfather had ever mentioned her to him. But she did know how close they’d been. Jack was what Cal had hoped his son would be.