“True.” She looked at Cora Lee and saw a woman who’d been through her own trials and had triumphed. Just as Jillian planned to.
“But in this case,” the older woman said, “worry is unnecessary. That horse? That’s Ivy. Sweet mare. She was one of Lucy’s first rescues. Would you believe when the vet first brought her here, you could count her rib bones, poor thing. Someone tied her up in a barn and then moved, never telling anyone Ivy was there.” Cora Lee’s mouth turned into a tight frown. “If it hadn’t been for one of the Stillwell boys cutting across the property taking a shortcut home from school and hearing her, she’d have died there, too.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It really was. Nothing on this earth should be treated with such vicious neglect. But with a lot of love and good food and time, she’s healthy now and even pregnant for the first time.”
Jillian smiled, looking at the horse with new admiration. Ivy hadn’t let her past get in the way, either.
“She’s the most gentle animal on the face of the planet. And lazy with it, if truth be told. Likes nothing better than standing still under a shade tree and avoids running as if it would kill her.”
Jillian’s lips twitched. “Well, that’s good then.”
Cora gave her a quick look. “And not only that, but Jesse’s a good hand with children. Patience. He got that from his father, not me.”
Glancing at the woman beside her, Jillian waited, sure there was more. She wasn’t disappointed.
“His biological father, I mean. That was the most patient man on the face of the planet.” She chuckled, then added, “Now, Roy Sanders, the man who raised Jesse and Lucy and was their father in every possible way, was as impatient as I am.” She laughed a little harder, gave a sigh and shook her head. “It’s a wonder the two of us got along at all. But my, we had some good times. Some wonderful fights, too.”
“Wonderful fights?” Even Jillian could hear the doubt in her voice. But she had too many memories of her own parents before they’d abandoned her, indulging in shouting matches that had terrified her.
“If you’re arguing with the right man, yes.” Resting her chin on her hands, Cora Lee said, “My own mother used to say, don’t fight in front of your children. But Roy and I figured that wasn’t healthy, either. Children grow up expecting everything to be sunshine and roses all the time and then they’re never happy. But your kids see you arguing, then see you hugging and making up, they know you can disagree without the world crashing.”
Jillian smiled. “I never thought of it like that, but I think you have a point.”
Nodding, the older woman said, “You kids today don’t know how much good a clearing-the-air fight can do for a marriage. Keeps things hopping, that’s for sure.”
The only fights Jillian had experienced were blurry memories of raised voices, tears and drama, with one or the other of her parents vowing to leave and never come back. There’d never been any hugging and making up. Maybe if there had been her parents wouldn’t have left.
“There you are, Mom,” Lucy called as she and Brody walked up to the fence to join the party. “We went to your cottage because Brody said you’d have cookies.”
“You bet I do,” Cora Lee said, scooping her grandson up onto her hip. “Who’s my favorite four-year-old in the whole world?”
“I am!” Brody shouted and threw his arms around his grandmother’s neck.
“Displaced by Grandma and her cookies,” Lucy mused.
“Must be nice,” Jillian said without really thinking about it, “to have your whole family right here on the ranch.”
“Oh, it is,” Lucy agreed. “But thank God we don’t all live in the same house.”
“Thank God,” Brody parroted.
“That’s enough of that, little man,” Cora warned and shot her daughter a hard look.
Lucy just grinned. She pointed to where a small, English-style cottage sat amid a stand of oak trees. It had dormer windows, a stone chimney and a bright red door behind the snowy white porch railings. Roses, dormant now, climbed a trellised arch just in front of the porch.
“That’s Mom’s place. She moved in there once we were grown, said the big house should belong to Will.”
“It was only right,” Cora Lee said. “Time for my kids to build their own lives and they didn’t need their mama watching their every move.”
“There wasn’t any point trying to talk her out of it, either.” Lucy nodded and swung around to point toward another house not far away. “That’s Jesse’s place.”