Home at Last by Shirlee McCoy

Author:Shirlee McCoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

She set the alarm for five a.m. She was awake at four. Digging through her dresser drawers, trying to remember what she used to wear when she rode the old stallion her father had owned.

She settled on jeans, a lightweight button-down shirt that had probably belonged to Matt, and dusty cowboy boots she dug from a box of old shoes that her mother had kept in the closet. Apparently, Sunday hadn’t been able to part with them.

Every pair of shoes had held a memory.

Once.

Now they were just shoes. Old and dusty. Worn from years of walking and running and jogging and dancing. She’d throw them out. Eventually.

For now, though, she closed the box, shoved it back into the closet, and walked back across the room, the cowboy boots a little snug but not uncomfortable.

They must have been hers.

Long ago.

When her parents had been alive.

She could see herself in the mirror, ghostly pale and moving with jerky, disjointed steps that had made her cringe when she’d seen herself in a video Twila had uploaded for a project she was working on.

Something to do with the wedding, she’d said as she’d leaned over her keyboard and clicked the mouse.

Twila hadn’t explained what she was creating or how it was connected to the wedding. Sunday didn’t even think she’d said whose wedding she was creating it for. She’d assumed it was for Clementine and Porter’s, but she hadn’t asked.

That seemed to be her pattern lately.

Being there just enough to say she was.

But not enough to matter.

She hadn’t written down the words Flynn had spoken before he’d left her room. She hadn’t really wanted to remember them. But like Matt’s betrayal, she hadn’t been able to forget.

She couldn’t quote him word for word, but the gist of what he’d been saying was lodged in her heart and in her brain, beating an endless rhythm that she couldn’t ignore. No matter how much she wanted to.

She lifted the calendar from her dresser. She thought Twila had bought it for her, but she didn’t know. What she knew was that important events were written in boldly colored ink. Pink. Red. Blue. Orange. Yellow. Green. Purple. A key had been drawn in at the bottom of each page, neatly explaining the color system. Pink for Moisey’s events. Red for Heavenly’s. Purple for Twila.

The calendar had been there for at least two months.

She couldn’t remember the day it had arrived.

She couldn’t remember who had brought it.

But she’d known it was there.

God! How could she not? It was positioned dead-center in the middle of the dresser, next to the only complete family photo she had. Taken at church, she thought. Probably after Heavenly’s adoption was finalized. All the kids were in it. Oya just a tiny baby in Sunday’s arms. Matt standing close, his arm circling Sunday’s waist, his gaze on the photographer, his smile broad.

Sunday was looking at Heavenly. Smiling as if every dream she’d ever had were coming true.

She’d known, even then, that Matt was cheating. She’d written about it in the journals long before the adoption paperwork was final.

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