Safe Harbor by Antoinette Stockenberg

Author:Antoinette Stockenberg [Stockenberg, Antoinette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Antoinette Stockenberg
Published: 2012-01-18T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

Holly stumbled in blind anguish down the footpath that cut through the trees between her cottage and the barn.

It must be me. I fought with Ivy, and now I've fought with Sam. It must be me. I'm making mountains out of molehills. Sam didn't do anything. What did he do? Nothing. He didn't lie; he just didn't say. Ivy and Sam in one night, that's impossible. Something is wrong with me. It's my fault.

What had he said exactly?

Eden Walker is still my wife.

Holly tried to brush away a stream of tears. How could it possibly be her fault that Eden Walker was still Sam's wife? It was his fault, that bastard, that bastard, it was his fault. She let out a moan: she so much wanted it all to be hers.

Blindly, she staggered on. She caught a fallen branch with the toe of her sandal and went sprawling onto the mulched path. Surprised, she lay there picking off pieces of pine bark that were sticking to her right leg and arm; she was numb with shock, completely out of it. Behind her she heard a twig snap. It got her scrambling to her feet again: she had no desire to repeat the agony with him in the barn. Her barn. Her wonderful red barn. Her studio, her refuge, her art. Ruined. Ruined by a stupid, stupid man. Two stupid men.

They tell you what they think you want to hear. They don't want to hurt you but they don't want to make hard choices, either. They want it all. Pigs, pigs, all of them. They're all alike, not to be trusted. Ever.

She ran inside her house and locked both doors, spooked not by the fear of a bogeyman or a Koloman, but by the thought of a Steadman.

I have to talk about this with someone. But Sam was her someone of choice. Who instead?

Not her father, that was for sure. He knew—surely that's what the fight on the beach had been about—and he didn't care. The only choice, the obvious choice, was for Holly to confide in her mother.

She knew that it looked bad for a thirty-one-year-old to be running straight to her mom. But her sixty-year-old mom had come running to Holly not so long ago, and over the same woman at that.

How ironic, thought Holly. How totally twisted.

She drove on automatic to the turreted house on Main. It was late when she arrived; the house was dark.

Unless. She skirted around to the side. As she expected, the lights in the master bedroom were on. She crept over to the gnarled old cherry tree that grew alongside the house and began climbing, monkeylike, from lower limbs to upper until she reached the small balcony outside her mother's bedroom.

The French doors were open to the night air, but the screen doors were locked. Her mother was in the bathroom: Holly waited until she emerged and then called softly through the opening. Her mother jumped half a foot.

"Holly, for Pete's sake," she said, tying her robe around her as she approached the screen doors.

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