Redeeming Travis by Kate Welsh

Author:Kate Welsh [Welsh, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Steeple Hill
Published: 2004-10-15T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Tricia stepped aside as Travis’s family gathered around him at the end of the service. When Pastor Gabriel began his message, it had sounded made to order for Travis and what he’d been through. Still, she’d been surprised when he answered Pastor Gabriel’s altar call. She smiled. And there’d been no family conspiracy with the pastor about the topic he chose. She was the only one who knew—and even she hadn’t known for sure—that Travis was coming. The Lord worked in this world in small quiet ways, but He surely did work.

A terrible sadness came over her. Maybe getting Travis here really was the only reason she’d been brought back into his life. She couldn’t regret that he’d found his way back to the Lord, but she no longer wanted that to be the only reason she’d run into him in that shadowed alley.

So much had happened in such a short time. Could it really have been only a week ago that Travis burst into her life and turned it upside down? She glanced at him as a smile broke across his face over some teasing remark his father made.

Travis was smiling. Really smiling. All the way to his beautiful eyes. She guessed hers wasn’t the only life turned upside down this past week.

It seemed inconceivable that she could feel all she did for Travis after the way he’d hurt her—the way he’d turned to Allison after refusing to give Tricia the time she’d needed. She’d forgiven him long ago but she was surprised that the hurt still lingered. Maybe no one ever got over their first love until they’d loved someone else. Maybe that was her problem. After Travis, she’d closed off that side of her, too afraid to love after losing it the way she had. For the reason she had.

What Travis hadn’t understood, and maybe back then neither had she, was that love had always hurt and disappointed her. More damage than she’d realized had been done to her soul by those early years with her parents and the subsequent fractured and loveless years of her later childhood after being taken away from them. She’d moved from foster home to foster home, never belonging anywhere, cared for by people pretending love when in fact her care had been nothing but a job to most of them.

Of course she’d still been too ashamed to tell any of her new friends the depths from which she’d climbed by freshman year of college. She’d arrived at school and had told herself it was all behind her. She was a new person. But she’d spent every waking moment waiting—just waiting—for life to kick her in the teeth. It finally did the night Travis walked away from her. She’d expected to be hurt because she hadn’t been a new person at all. And she didn’t become one until she found the Lord.

Someone pitched a penny into her lap from the pew in front of her, dragging Tricia back to the now-silent church.

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