Once Upon a Winter Wonderland by Susan May Warren

Author:Susan May Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sunrise Publishing

Woman dies while derailing her parents’ second honeymoon.

Okay, Stella was probably overreacting to the fifteen seconds of sheer terror, but it felt true, given the silence between her parents over the past two hours, and especially since she’d overheard their fight.

About her.

About inviting her on this romantic getaway to some tucked-away town in northern Minnesota.

She probably shouldn’t have told them she wasn’t leaving for Vienna, or at least the part where she wasn’t hopping on a plane in the near future. She didn’t have the courage to tell them the rest, aka, the results of her audition for the Fritz Kreisler Institute in Vienna.

Lackluster. Dispassionate. Try again next semester. The words had sat in her brain throughout last night’s recital, so much that she’d missed a couple crucial notes in the oh-so-familiar “Ave Maria,” part of her Schubert concert, and reqs for her masters in chamber music for the violoncello.

The other part being, of course, her one now-defunct year of study in Vienna.

But if they didn’t want her, she didn’t want them either.

“You okay, honey?” Her mother turned in her seat as they started back out into the night, her dark hair poking out of her white knit hat. The heater in her father’s ancient Honda CR-V barely kept ahead of the storm, and frankly, they should have stayed another night in Duluth. But Mom seemed particularly excited to escape to their vacation, despite her words this morning, the ones she thought Stella hadn’t heard—You invited her on our trip? Really, Bob? I thought we were going to spend some time alone.

Stella got it, really. Their first real vacation in years, and never at Christmastime. Most of all, she hadn’t been blind to the look of excitement on her mother’s face last night at the concert when she told Stella about the getaway. Or the embarrassing lingerie she’d seen in her mother’s suitcase this morning while her father folded up the pull-out sofa in Stella’s cramped apartment.

So Stella probably should have kept quiet about her shattered plans. Even if she had to spend Christmas alone.

But maybe this getaway would be good for her—spend some time figuring out, well, what next? Because she had no backup plan.

Just a sense that she wanted…more. More life. More…anything.

She just didn’t know what more meant. It certainly didn’t mean that she was going to throw in her bow and quit the instrument she’d spent her entire life playing, right? Especially after her parents had put everything into the dream of her being a concert cellist.

Because if not that, then what? Wait tables down at the local diner in her hometown of Big Lake, Minnesota?

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said now to her mother. “I was just freaked out.”

“You were a little hard on the snowplow driver.”

She cocked her head at her mother. “Seriously?”

“He did push us out of the ditch.”

“He nearly killed us.”

“No, that was the other driver,” her father said now as he slowed. They were descending a hill, the roads deeply salted. Through the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.