The one that got away

Could Kate Rafael’s day get any worse? First she lost her job, then her house burned down and now her ex is back in town. Apparently, Ben McGuffey’s taking a break from being a big-city doctor to help at his family’s tavern and reassess the choices he’s made for his career.

Ben ends up giving Kate a hand…then giving her kisses…and finally, a second chance. But when a local teenager shows them both a glimpse of what it means to be a family, Ben wonders if having kids in small-town Vermont would clash with his ambitions. Or can he truly come home again…to Kate?

“Since you have clothes now,” Ben said, “I might consider taking you out to dinner in Burlington.”

“Well, you know—” Kate inserted the key into the lock and looked up at him. Even in the darkness, she saw the green gleam of his eyes, but she couldn’t read his expression “—you don’t have to do me any favors, Dr. McGuffey.” She didn’t know whether to laugh or not.

His hand covered hers before she could get the door unlocked. “Oh, come on, Katy.”

“Come on where?” she said, the words and her breath both catching in her throat at once so that she squeaked when she spoke.

“It wouldn’t be a favor, unless it was to me,” he said, turning her so that his arms surrounded her. “Don’t you ever wonder?” he asked, pulling her close. And closer. “What would be the same between us? What would be different?”

Then he kissed her.

Dear Reader,

I have lived in Indiana my entire life. This is fine with me—it’s home and I love it here. I also love traveling, and my favorite place to go is Vermont. Since our younger son and his family lived there for fifteen years, I got to go at least once a year. Every time I went—especially after the grandkids came along—it was like going home.

On one visit a piece of a story and a couple of people I hadn’t met before decided to keep me and my notepad awake one night. I love second chances both in books and in real life, so when high school sweethearts Kate and Ben introduced themselves and their Northeast Kingdom hometown, I was compelled to follow along. To see how the guy who really wanted to be a world-class skier ended up as a doctor, and the girl who only wanted to be a mom never became one.

Then, just when I thought things were falling into place, Jayson Phillip Connor entered the picture. Sixteen, with Down syndrome, a penchant for juice boxes and a great, loving heart, Jayson changed everyone he met.

I hope you enjoy finding out how.

Liz Flaherty

Back to McGuffey’s

Liz Flaherty

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LIZ FLAHERTY

retired from the post office and promised to spend at least fifteen minutes a day on housework. Not wanting to overdo things, she’s since pared that down to ten. She spends nonwriting time sewing, quilting and doing whatever else she wants to. She and Duane, her husband of…oh, quite a while...are the parents of three and grandparents of the Magnificent Seven. They live in the old farmhouse in Indiana they moved to in 1977. They’ve talked about moving, but really…thirty-seven years’ worth of stuff? It’s not happening!

She’d love to hear from you at lizkflaherty@gmail.com.

For the Wednesday Women.

We’ve known each other since we all knew what our natural hair color was, couldn’t write our names in cursive and had no idea where we would find our happily-ever-afters. We’ve gone from passing notes in elementary school to comparing pictures of grandchildren, mourned each other’s losses and cheered every success. If we don’t see each other for ten years or so, we have no problem picking up right where we left off.

Thanks for the friendship. See you at lunch.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EPILOGUE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

“TWENTY YEARS,” KATE Rafael lifted her glass and squinted at its contents. “I went to Schuyler and Lund straight out of high school. Just to work a year before college, you know, because I was going to be a nurse. A four-year-degree one—I could have learned to stop fainting at the sight of blood. Really I could. And then I was going to marry Ben and have four children. You know, two boys and two girls like you did only my boys were going to be older than the girls.”

Penny Elsbury listed to one side and sat up straight on the bar stool in her kitchen. “Is it just me or is it getting really tired in here?”

Kate frowned at Penny. “I’m not tired. It must just be you.”

“And they let you go why? Nobody ever bled there, so they didn’t know about your problem.” Penny squinted at her glass, too, then gave Kate a confused look that would have been funny if Kate had been sober. Which she wasn’t exactly.

“They said they couldn’t afford me.” Kate nodded sagely. “That poverty-level salary they were paying me for six-day weeks was more than the law firm of Shyster...Schuyler...Schuyler and Lund could stand.” She set down her glass. “I don’t know what to do. I never did go to college, you know. I meant to, but I didn’t.”

“I know.” Penny nodded sadly. “Me neither.”

“And I never married Ben and had babies.” Oh, no. Three glasses of very cheap wine weren’t enough to stop that particular pain. Kate had to concentrate on holding her mouth steady and keeping her eyes from tearing up. Not marrying Ben—she could live with that. But no babies? Not nearly so easy. She wouldn’t have been insistent on four—just a couple would have been enough. Even one.

“Me neither.” Penny nodded again. She was still tilting on her stool.

“You couldn’t. You married Dan and had his babies. He wouldn’t have liked it if you’d married Ben, too,” Kate said.

“Nah, he wouldn’ta cared if I married Ben. Would you, darlin’?” Penny smiled at Dan when he came into the kitchen and steadied her on her stool.

“Probably would have. Ben’s a family practice doctor and we have more need of an orthodontist.” He kissed the back of Penny’s neck and reached across the counter for Kate’s glass. “More, Katy?”

“Please.”

Dan poured the last drops of the wine into the women’s Shrek glasses and sat on the stool beside his wife’s. “You heard he’s moving back to town? At least for the summer.”

Kate blinked. “Who?”

“Ben.”

“But he left. He practices down in Boston.”

“He says spring just isn’t the same without Vermont mud.”

She thought—albeit not clearly—of Ben McGuffey and the last day he’d been her boyfriend. They’d sat on bar stools similar to these in his father’s tavern on her twenty-fourth birthday and he’d said he didn’t think he’d be able concentrate on both her and his residency and he needed to break up. For a while.

She’d sat there sipping diet cola with a maraschino cherry garnish and a shot of grenadine in it and wondered why he didn’t hear her heart breaking. Surely it made a splintering sound, didn’t it?

“I wonder why he really wants to come back. He doesn’t like spring. He only likes it on the mountain when he can ski.” Deciding the last little bit of wine might be crossing her own personal line, she slid off her seat and went to pour herself some coffee. She filled a cup halfway and returned to the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room.

Dan shrugged. “All I know is that he’s staying the summer.”

Penny frowned at him. “You bicycle and ski with him every time he comes back to see his folks. How can you not know?”

“It’s been months since the last time he was here. Christmastime, as a matter of fact.”

Kate didn’t like thinking about Ben, about what might have been, although she’d spent an uncomfortable amount of time doing just that.

Ben had gotten married after he joined a practice in an affluent Boston suburb—she’d even sent a gift—but he and the pretty socialite had been divorced a few years later.

Kate had been engaged for a time in her mid-twenties, but had given Tark Bridger’s ring back due to a mutual lack of interest. They’d broken up in the same bar as she and Ben had, talking over Maeve McGuffey’s potato soup about a future they didn’t want to share. The next time she saw Tark, she introduced him to the woman he married six months later.

She’d been busy in the way that people were. She’d worked, gained and lost the same twenty pounds several times over the years and been inordinately proud of Penny and Dan’s children as they arrived. When she passed thirty, she started to think maybe it was time for her to get married and start a family, but no one had been around to help complete the equation. As a thirty-seventh birthday gift, her gynecologist had said if she had childbearing in mind, she’d better get to it.

Kate tried not to hear that particular ticking clock. She didn’t like to think about the babies she’d wanted and never had.

She was finding that a few glasses of wine made that a little difficult. More than a little.

She and Ben had seen each other often over the years. They always smiled, talked and exchanged looks that were at once familiar and bemused. They danced together at weddings and avoided each other’s eyes at christenings, or at least Kate avoided his. They held hands at funerals in a way that was comforting but lacking the chemistry of their youth. She thought maybe magic wasn’t meant for her at all.

“I’m a spinster, and the fact that I even use that word in conversation means I spend too much time reading historical novels.” She made the announcement to the contents of her coffee cup, overwhelmed by sadness. “And now I’m unemployed on top of it. What else can happen?”

“Now there’s a loaded question.” Penny shook her head at her. “I think the last time Dan asked that was when I told him I was pregnant for the fourth time. The washing machine heard me say it and broke down immediately.”

Kate snorted. “Washing machines don’t have ears. They might sense things, but they don’t hear them.”

“It really worries me,” said Dan, “that not only do I listen to the conversations you two have, sometimes they almost make sense to me.”

“Aunt Kate?” Dan and Penny’s second daughter, Mary Kate, stood in the kitchen doorway, the cordless phone clutched to the flat chest of the Denver Broncos pajamas she wore to upset her Patriots-fan father. Her eyes were wide and horrified. “The fire department buzzed in on call waiting. They called here figuring Mom and Dad would know where you were. I guess the lady who lived in the other half of your duplex fell asleep while she was cooking and the whole place burned down.”

Kate stared at her goddaughter, not quite comprehending. “Burned down? My house? Are you sure?”

“Yes, ma’am. They said it twice.”

“Come on.” Dan tossed Kate her coat and put Penny’s around her shoulders. “I’ll drive you over.”

A few minutes later, they stood at the charred remains of the saltbox house Kate had bought ten years ago. Firefighters, their faces streaked with soot, were checking the site for new flames shooting out of places still glowing hot in the darkness. The yard was a mire of mud and hopelessness.

Neighbors in pajamas hugged her, relieved to see her in one piece. The tenant who’d lived in the other half of the house had left with friends. She’d left carrying the plastic bowl of cookies something had compelled her to rescue.

Kate stood unmoving as near the rubble as the firefighters allowed. Her cat leaped from her next-door neighbor’s arms and came to stand against her legs as though to protect her.

She felt as though a block of lead was lodged in her chest. It wasn’t exactly heartbreak—everyone was safe, after all—but the sense of loss was overwhelming. Loss and loneliness. Her parents and sister lived in Tennessee, and she always missed them, but never this much.

“Do you have insurance?” Dan stood between Kate and Penny with an arm around each.

“Yes.” Her precious laptop computer was in her car. Family pictures and important legal papers had been reproduced on computer disks by her electronically savvy brother-in-law. No one had been hurt. Even Dirty Sally, the ancient one-eyed cat who stood sentinel against her legs, hadn’t been in the house. That was what mattered. Really it was.

Except that she had no job, no home and no clothing. Not even a nightgown or a pair of shoes without swooshes on the sides. She was thirty-seven years old, her roots were showing and she didn’t want to start over. She didn’t think she could. It was just too hard.

She borrowed Penny’s cell phone—her own had been on its charger in the kitchen—to call her family to tell them she was all right even though she was technically homeless. “Could you drop me off under a bridge somewhere?” she asked Dan, her voice wobbly.

He tugged at her hair. “Try not to be an idiot. It doesn’t look good on you. You’ll come home with us.”

Kate knew their house was already full to overflowing with three of their four offspring, a foster child and numerous and sundry pets. “Just loan me something to wear and take me over to Kingdom Comer. The insurance company will put me up. It probably won’t be full this time of year.”

“You sure?” Penny stood close beside her, her arm around her waist. “You know the kids love it when you stay. You always do their chores and then pretend you didn’t.”

“I’m sure.”

They drove her the few blocks to the big Victorian, Dan calling ahead so that the owner was waiting at the front door in her bathrobe.

As Kate had predicted, there was room at the inn. The bed-and-breakfast, named after its owners and the Northeast Kingdom, was empty except for the apartment over the garage. “That’s rented for the summer, but you can have the suite at the back of the house. Sally can stay in the three-season room with the dog. Lucy always likes company,” Marce Comer told Kate. “The suite is the quietest and will be more comfortable if you stay till you know what you’re going to do.”

“We’ll see you tomorrow.” Penny hugged her, her cheek wet against Kate’s.

“Things’ll look better then.” Dan pulled her hair again. “I’m a cop. We know these things.”

“She’ll be fine.” Marce locked the door behind them. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll make tea.”

Once there, seated at the big island in the middle of the room, Kate scrabbled for her checkbook, grateful she’d had her purse with her at Penny’s house, but Marce waved a hand. “I’ll just bill your insurance company. Is Joann your agent?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Here you go.” Forty, widowed and pleasantly round, Marce handed Kate a steaming cup of tea. “It’ll look better in the morning. It always does, though you surely don’t know how it will.”

“How are you doing, Marce?” It had been over a year since the innkeeper’s husband had sat down to watch the six-o’clock news and quietly died. His funeral had been the last time Kate had seen Ben. They had sat together. She’d felt the deep, silent shock of losing a friend who was way too young. When Ben had taken her hand without even looking at her and held it all the way through the service, she’d known he felt the same grief.

For a moment, the other woman’s clear eyes looked bewildered, like those of a child who doesn’t understand why she’s being punished, but then they cleared. “All right,” she said. She looked around the big kitchen of the B and B, her expression sad. “Yes, really, all right.” Her mother was British, and some of the crispness of that heritage stiffened Marce’s voice. “But I’m not sure what to do with myself. This was our dream and we realized it, but it doesn’t mean as much without him to share it. The twins are at university. I’d like to go, too. I never finished, and I’d like to.” She grinned. “I could get my degree in time to teach algebra to Josh and Michael. I only have about a year to go.”

Kate could relate to not knowing what to do with herself. Right now, her options seemed pretty limited. She smiled at Marce, afraid her skin would snap in little places from the effort. “Well, that should make you reconsider your choices.”

The women laughed together. Penny’s ten-and eleven-year-old sons were what was euphemistically referred to as a handful. They were also hilarious and loving in a way only young boys could be.

Upstairs, Marce handed Kate a cosmetics bag and a white cotton nightgown. “It’s just the necessities. Toothbrush and stuff. I keep a few around in case a guest forgets to pack them. I got the nightgown for Christmas from my mum, who thinks I should be a nun since I’m a widow. She also thinks I’m a size bigger even than what I am. You’ll swim in it, but your virtue will be protected for all time.”

Kate hugged her. “Bless you, Marce.”

She took a bath, feeling small and forlorn in the big claw-foot tub. She washed her hair under the faucet, sniffed it and washed it again. The smell of smoke was pervasive, seeming to have seeped into her very pores as she stood on her muddy lawn and witnessed the end of yet another dream.

The rose scent of the lotion in the silk pouch of necessities seemed almost incongruous, but she breathed in deeply, thinking maybe in the greater scheme of things, inner peace smelled of roses.

She hadn’t thought she’d be able to sleep, but she laid her still-damp head on one goose-down pillow and hugged another to the chest of the borrowed gown and fell into an instant dream about Ben McGuffey and Tark Bridger. They were fighting over her, with Ben wearing a lab coat with his skis and Tark dressed in a gray three-piece suit and red canvas high-tops. His wife stood to one side holding his briefcase.

* * *

WHEN KATE WOKE, with her caramel-colored hair standing straight up on one side of her head where she’d slept on it, she felt rested and unafraid despite the headache that scratched along the edges. She was also obscurely pleased that the man she had loved to distraction and the one she hadn’t loved enough had cared enough to fight over her. The only problem was she didn’t know who’d won. Dreams were that way, ending ambiguously.

Looking in the framed mirror over the bathroom sink, she thought of her house with its flower boxes and pretty shutters. Sometimes dreams just ended sadly. One thing you could count on, though, was that they did indeed always end. A soft fleece robe lay across the foot of her bed. She drew it on over the voluminous gown and went downstairs, trailing her hand along the worn-smooth wood of the curving banister. The dining room was empty, so she pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen.

“Sleep okay?” The innkeeper handed her a cup and gestured toward the double-carafe coffeemaker. “Coffee’s ready and water’s hot if you’d rather have tea.” She smiled. “No wine before dinner if you had in mind to continue your wicked ways from last night.”

Ah, that explained the niggling headache—it wasn’t a product of fires or dreams but of three glasses of supermarket wine. “Coffee works.”

The brew was half gone when she lowered the cup from her mouth. Yes, it certainly did work.

“Marce—” she went back to the coffee, refilling the cup “—are you really thinking about leaving the inn?”

“Only for the summer,” said Marce. “I need to be away from it for a bit, but I want it to come home to. I can run the inn and still go to school.”

The knock at the back door announced the arrival of Joann Demotte, Penny’s older sister, carrying Kate’s insurance policy and a bulging briefcase. “Coffee?” she pleaded, before sitting down and diving into her bag to emerge with a laptop and a yellow legal pad.

After a few minutes and a cup and a half of Marce’s breakfast blend, Joann looked over the top of her purple-framed reading glasses at Kate. “The good news is that you weren’t underinsured the way a lot of people are, and the cause of the fire was cut-and-dried.”

Kate tensed. “And the bad news?” Not more. Please not more.

“The house is a total loss. Nothing was saved that can be restored. But you knew that.”

Kate drew a deep breath. The lead was back in her chest. She thought of the heirloom quilts that had covered the beds and the Blue Onion and Blue Willow dishes she’d collected one by one at garage sales, and she nearly wept. They hadn’t been family treasures—her mother and grandmothers would have eaten glass before they’d have sewn or kept old dishes—but she’d enjoyed them. They’d kept her warm and made her poky little house into a place of welcome and comfort.

She remembered the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the den. She’d filled them with well-read paperbacks, not worth much in the used-book trade, but priceless to her. Her knuckles turned white where she gripped her cup in both hands. But then she remembered the contents of the safe-deposit box, the laptop on the seat of the car and the fact that no one had been hurt.

Even Dirty Sally had been visiting the Siamese next door at the time of the fire. Sally had never had kittens, but she was totally captivated by the neighbor’s litters. Kate knew exactly how she felt.

“It’s all right,” she said. She took a deep breath. And another. “Yes, it is.” Or it will be. I’ve made a life without babies or Ben McGuffey—I can make one without my house. Or handmade quilts or dishes that are blurry blue and beautiful.

“You can have the lot cleared as soon as it cools down.” Joann’s voice was brisk, bringing Kate out of the tunnel grief was taking her into. “The fire marshal and my adjuster have promised to release their reports ASAP. This, by the way, is unheard-of—normally they don’t do it until I’ve called at least five or six times, begging and weeping and threatening to do dire things to them. Are you dating anyone interesting?”

“No. Not even anyone boring.”

“Too bad, I was looking for some good gossip to spread around the tavern at lunch.” Joann’s eyes widened when Marce set a huge slice of coffee cake in front of her. “Oh, Marce, you shouldn’t have.”

“It’s your reward for taking care of Kate,” said Marce airily. “If there’s nothing else I can do for you two, I’m off to make the beds.”

Kate watched the woman leave the kitchen. “How much money will I get?” She turned her attention back to Joann.

“Lessee....” The agent put on her glasses and clicked computer keys, pausing to frown, ask questions and shake her head at Kate’s answers.

Several computer screens later, Joann gave her a number. “That’s ballpark. We don’t know how much your contents will be yet, so it will probably be more. Plus we’ll put you up here for thirty days—longer if you need it. Your car wasn’t damaged, was it?”

“No, it’s in Penny’s driveway. Dan always says it won’t run when I’ve been drinking.”

Joann smiled fondly. “Dan Elsbury is a nice man, isn’t he?”

“He is,” said Kate. “Of course, he’s also a cop. He knows Penny wouldn’t like it if he arrested me. Especially at their house.”

“So.” Joann shuffled the papers into a folder and turned off her laptop. She closed it and slipped it back into her briefcase. “Any ideas? You’re not going to rebuild, are you?”

“Probably not.” Kate’s street had gone from being beginner-home-cozy to a row of buildings that mostly contained small businesses with second-story office or living space. The single-family dwellings and duplexes that were left didn’t seem to belong anymore. While it still wasn’t a bad place to live, she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life there, either. At least, she didn’t think she did.

The back door opened and Penny came in, wearing a ragged sweater over jeans and a T-shirt with a slogan proclaiming it had been stolen from the Fionnegan Police Department. “You’re all right?” She took Joann’s cup from her hand and sipped, looking at Kate over its rim.

Joann took back the mug. “She’s fine. Get your own cup and see if Marce has any more of that coffee cake. For me, not you. You’re still trying to lose baby weight.”

Penny gave her a baleful look. “Michael is ten.” She brought the coffee carafe and the cake and sat at the island with the other two women.

Marce came back into the kitchen. “Doesn’t take long to make beds when you only have two guests. It also helps that one of them is gone half the time and the other one made her own bed,” she grumbled. “Now I’ll have to eat some of this coffee cake so it won’t go to waste.”

“I can take some with me,” Penny offered generously. “I’d be in good with the boys. Might even be able to get them to start cleaning their room. They wouldn’t finish, but starting would be real progress.”

“No, that’s okay.” Marce got herself a cup and plate and came to sit down. She cut the remaining cake into four pieces and passed them around. “See? No problem.”

“How busy is the inn, Marce?” asked Kate.

The older woman sipped her coffee. “In mud season, it’s often slow. It’s not always full in summer, either, though trail cyclists are changing that. We have some nearly every weekend. In the fall and winter, you don’t have time to blow your nose, so don’t even think of getting a cold. I’ve never gotten rich, by any means, but like the old saying goes, it’s a living. In the off-season, it’s a party place. Teas and showers. Meetings now and then. The dining room and the two parlors run into each other and you can accommodate up to fifty if they don’t all want to sit down at the same time, not nearly so many if they do.”

“How many guest rooms?” asked Joann.

“Two suites—the one Kate’s in and the two-bedroom one over the garage, which also has a kitchenette—and three rooms. They all have private baths, phones, wireless internet and television. I fought Frank tooth and nail over television, saying the kind of clientele we’d attract wanted peace and quiet. He said they wanted to choose their own kind of peace, and he was right.” Marce’s eyes misted over. “It seems I’m looking for Frank every time I turn a corner. The truth is he’s not there, and I need to stop looking. Maybe a couple of months away would help me with that.”

The women helped her load the dishwasher before saying their goodbyes and leaving the big Victorian. Joann returned to her office and Kate walked as far as Penny’s house with her before heading out on her own.

At loose ends for the first time in longer than she could remember, she wasn’t sure where to go. It wasn’t as though Fionnegan, Vermont, presented many choices. There were two stoplights downtown and a caution light on Worship Street at the intersection with a church on every corner. There weren’t any strip malls or chain restaurants yet, nor was there much physical space for growth, the town being nestled into the Green Mountains the way it was. So people still shopped and ate downtown, and sat on the park benches the chamber of commerce placed in front of every business. Fionnegan was a good place to live, to raise children, to find, as Frank Comer had said, one’s own kind of peace.

Before she knew it, she found herself walking along the path that meandered through dips and shallow valleys toward the more difficult trails that climbed Wish Mountain. Kate felt unaccustomed restlessness. What did she want to do? Did she want, for the first time in her thirty-seven years, to move away from the Northeast Kingdom to a place that offered longer summers, less mud and—and what? Something different. She could move to Tennessee, near the log home on Dale Hollow Lake where her parents were so happy, or the Nashville suburb to be near her sister.

But she realized neither of those places would be home. The wanderlust that had made her family relocate and had put motor homes in their driveways had skipped her completely. Whatever she decided to do, it needed to be here.

“Coming up behind!” The shout came just before something—or someone—knocked her right off her feet, pushing her not so neatly into the mud on the edge of the trail that led down to Tierney’s Creek.

“I’m sorry,” said a familiar voice. “I know better, but I think I flunked looking where I was going in running school. Are you all right?”

Hands, wide palmed but with long and slender fingers, helped her up.

And Kate looked up into the eyes she’d once planned on looking into for the rest of her life.

“Ben,” she said, “I’m way too old for you to sweep me off my feet again. And it’s just barely May—the creek’s still freezing.”

He snorted. “Like it won’t still be freezing in July.” His voice was like a caress as he brushed her down, easing the sharp edges of her nerves even as a new—or maybe remembered—excitement thumped through her veins. “I heard about the fire. You all right?”

She wondered if his blood pressure was fluctuating as much as hers was. His eyes were still deep and mossy green, his handsome face even more compelling at thirty-nine than it had been in high school. His legs below the baggy running shorts were lean and muscled, and if he’d added any weight to his six-feet-plus frame, it was in all the right places. His hair, wheat-blond and arrow-straight, still needed cutting, though it wasn’t long enough to pull back into a leather thong anymore. This was, she admitted to herself, exactly what she noticed about him every time she saw him, but something felt different today. Warmer. Intenser. Intenser? Was that a word or just a sensation that made her veins jump around like they had electrical charges in them?

“My dad hated the ponytail.” She felt herself blush. Idiot. Her father’s opinion of her high school boyfriend’s hair hadn’t mattered twenty years ago—it mattered even less now. “But Mom said he was being a curmudgeon.”

He pushed his hair back from his face. “Pop hated it, too, but it sure did keep it out of the way. And I thought I looked really cool.” He kept looking at her. “Oh, man.”

“What?” She looked around. There were dogs farther up the trail, barking insistently. The leaves were coming on strong even though she could still see her breath in the late-morning air, but she didn’t see anything to have caused the frustration in his voice.

“You look great, Katy,” he said. “You do.”

She would congratulate herself later on whatever kind of willpower it was that kept her from putting a smoothing hand to her hair and tugging her sweatshirt down over her hips. Hips that had grown some in the past thirteen years. “Thank you,” she said. “So do you.” With a nod and a smile that even felt vague—she could only imagine how it looked—she started off again. “Take care, Ben.”

“You, too.”

But she was less than ten feet away when he said, “Hey!” and she stopped, feeling his nearness even before he came to stand beside her. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Her smile felt rueful this time—she felt rueful. “I don’t have anywhere to go, which feels strange. I’m unemployed and homeless.”

He put his hands on her shoulders, and she felt the warmth immediately. It made her understand how Dirty Sally felt when she found the blanket with a heating pad under it on the inn’s porch swing.

Ben turned her around briskly. “Nope,” he said, “I don’t see any signs that you’ve become a bag lady overnight.”

“Appearances can be deceiving,” she said. “But, since we’re here, what’s this I hear about you coming back to Fionnegan? I thought Boston was your dream.”

Something changed in his eyes, though she wasn’t sure what it was. She had to stop herself from touching his face, offering comfort for a pain she didn’t understand.

“I’m here for the summer—I just took a partial leave from my office. We’ll see what happens after that.” His voice was deliberately—and not all that convincingly—casual. He shrugged and fell into step beside her when she started walking again, more disturbed than she wanted to admit by the impression that something was wrong.

“Did you have a fire, too?” She met his gaze for just an instant, long enough to reestablish the connection that never seemed to entirely break, then looked away. If she didn’t watch where she was going, she was going to end up in Tierney’s Creek yet, and she didn’t have any clean clothes to put on if she did. “An internal one, maybe?”

He was silent long enough she thought she might have overstepped the bounds of questions old girlfriends could ask.

“Sometimes,” he said finally, “what you dream of isn’t what you wanted after all. Sometimes you mistake other people’s dreams for your own.”

Kate didn’t know, because none of her dreams had come true. If anyone else had had dreams for her, they probably hadn’t come true, either. Her parents, who had run the gamut from being hippies in college to becoming startlingly conservative schoolteachers to selling their house and taking off for Tennessee in a motor home, had never visited their own ambitions on their daughters.

She wasn’t unhappy with her life or the choices she’d made, exactly, but none of the things she’d written about in her adolescent diaries had come to pass. There were no young Bens or little Kates running around; she’d never passed meds at a hospital or comforted patients in her doctor-husband’s office; she’d never even slept in a dorm or gone to any of the parties her sister and Joann Demotte had talked about. The only talents she was sure she had involved answering the phone and making copies. Oh, and coffee. They’d miss her coffee back at Schuyler and Lund.

“I discovered,” he said, “that I had a bigger ego than I was comfortable with, something which wouldn’t have surprised my basketball coaches, but shocked the heck out of me. I began to feel a sense of—” He stopped, seeming to struggle with what came next.

“Entitlement?” she suggested, having worked with lawyers who’d been overendowed with that particular shortcoming.

“Yeah, I think so.” His tone became self-mocking. “Like I shouldn’t have to answer the phone in the middle of the night anymore and seriously ill patients really could take two aspirin and call me in the morning. It no longer bothered me that as part of a large practice, I seldom got to know the patients. After all, I was helping them, wasn’t I? And the other partners in the practice—man, they are good. It’s not as though patients needed me specifically.”

“But?” she said, stepping out and around a tree root and greatly enjoying it when he bumped into her once again.

He steadied her and kept an arm looped over her shoulders when they walked on. “But I don’t have time to ski or ride my bike or read the newspaper or even play basketball at the Y. I haven’t read a book from start to finish since I read Green Eggs and Ham to my brother’s kids at Christmastime.”

“Well, Ben, you’re busy. People are nowadays. They just are. Look at Penny and Dan. She caters all the time, he works twelve-hour shifts at the police department plus officiating at high school football and basketball games.”

“Yeah, and they still take care of their kids and however many they’re fostering at any given moment. Plus, he makes time to ride or go skiing every time I come back to town. I know they’re busier than I am, but they still make a life. I just make lots of money.”

Kate thought of the state of her bank account and her employment status. Although making money had never been at the top of her list of things that made her happy, she wished she’d been able to save more of what she had made.

“The first thing I thought of,” he said quietly, “when I heard about your fire, was that I’d send a check. We grew up together, shared more than I’ve probably shared with anyone in my life, including the woman I married, and that was all I could think, was that I’d send you a check.”

“I’d have understood,” she said, just as quietly, but she was hurt by the very notion of it. This was a man who knew every secret she’d ever had and had never told any of them. He’d made the three-hour drive from Boston to Fionnegan when she and Tark Bridger broke up just to make sure she was all right. “It wouldn’t look good,” he’d explained, “if you’d killed yourself with me being a doctor and all.” She’d laughed so hard she’d cried, and he’d held her close and hard, then gotten back in his car and driven back to Boston in time to work a night shift in the emergency room.

No, she wouldn’t have understood. Not at all. She’d have torn up the check.

“You’d have torn it up,” he said, echoing her thoughts so exactly she laughed out loud. “So if we end this walk by schlepping through the vacant lot behind the tavern, will you let me buy you lunch?”

“I could be talked into it.”

Of course, that was nothing new. He’d always been able to talk her into anything.

Oh, come on, Katy. You can do this hill with one hand tied behind your back.

We’ll be back before your folks wake up.

We’re going to get married, anyway, right?

It’s only beer. It’s not like really drinking.

Oh, come on, Katy...

* * *

MCGUFFEY’S TAVERN HAD sat at the corner of Main Street and Creamery Road—and Tim McGuffey had stood behind the bar—for as long as Kate could remember. Maeve, Ben’s mother, ran the kitchen with an iron hand, and between the two of them, they’d reared two doctors, a priest and a college professor. Every kid in town who’d ever needed lunch money to get through the week had earned it by washing glasses at McGuffey’s.

Old habits die hard. As soon as she finished her potato soup and corned beef sandwich, Kate moved to the triple sinks behind the bar.

“Take a break, Pop, and go wheedle potato soup out of Ma,” suggested Ben. “Kate and I’ll earn our keep while you eat.” He reached for an apron and tied it around her waist.

“Think I will, at that.” Tim, elegant as always in his crisp white shirt and black vest, kissed Kate’s cheek as he passed. “There’s a lass. We’re sorry about your house, but you’re better off without that blighted job.”

She flashed him a smile, taking startled and concerned note of his grayish complexion, the dark circles under his twinkling Irish eyes. No, you can’t be old. “Thanks, Tim.”

For a while, she did feel like she was better off. Brushing hips and elbows with Ben behind the bar was like old times, only with slightly matured hormones. Calling greetings to patrons was a lot more fun than saying in a hushed and professional voice, “Good morning. Schuyler and Lund. How may I direct your call?”

“You still carry a good tray of glasses,” said Ben, catching her as she took empties back to the bar. He lifted the tray from her hands and set it on the nearest table. “Can you still dance, too?” And with no accompaniment other than clapping and shouting customers, he whirled her away between the tables, moving the way Tim and Maeve had taught them years ago. Keeping them in each other’s arms to dance, Maeve had said later, was their way of keeping them out of each other’s arms in the backseat of a car.

“And you,” Kate said, flushed and laughing when they ended up back where they’d started, “still talk good blarney, Ben McGuffey.” She was quiet for a moment, then smiled into his face. “It was fun,” she said quietly, “and for a little while, we were young again. Something, at least, wasn’t in ashes. Thank you for that. I needed it.” She stood on tiptoe to brush a kiss along the line of his jaw, then took off her apron and pushed it into his hands. “Tell your folks so long for me—I have to go.”

She fled before he could stop her.

On the way back to Kingdom Comer, she stopped at the now-vacant double lot on Alcott Street where her house had stood. The long piece of land with an unexpected grove of maples at its back was cordoned off with police tape, and the charred remains of her duplex still smoked. She remembered her excitement when she’d bought the white clapboard saltbox, her plans for making it into a single dwelling when she could afford it. There would have been room for several children and a couple of dogs, for cats to lie on heat registers and the porch swing. She’d haunted rummage sales and antiques shops, searching out blue-and-white dishes and quilts with love stitched into them.

The last time she’d danced between the tables with Ben, he’d told her he didn’t want to be her boyfriend anymore. She’d felt, even as she nodded agreement and kissed him goodbye with all the bonhomie she could muster, as though the bottom had fallen out of the world. She’d felt lonely and afraid and betrayed. She’d stared blindly into the soapy water in the bar sink and wondered what in the world she was going to do now.

Thirteen years later, still warm from being in Ben’s arms, still hearing the music of the dance, she looked at the place where her house had stood. And wondered what in the world she was going to do now.

CHAPTER TWO

KATE MUMBLED UNMUSICALLY about making lists and checking them twice as she went over, for what was more like the twentieth time, the inventory of contents for her house. “I didn’t keep receipts from garage sales,” she told Penny and Marce, who were discussing recipes across the kitchen island from where she sat. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Of course, even if I had, they’d have burned up.”

“I think you should buy the inn from Marce,” said Penny, “and we should be partners. I can’t afford half—no one will pay enough for the kids or Dan’s ’57 Chevy for that—but I’m good for twenty-five percent and I’ll throw in one of the boys. Michael gives good shoulder-rubs, but Josh takes out the trash without being asked.”

Kate got up and went around to hug her. “We’ve been best friends since first grade. I’m not giving that up for a partnership. Not to mention, I don’t think Marce is interested in selling.”

Penny looked sorrowful. “I can’t get you to take any of the kids, even if we don’t buy the inn?”

“Not a one. You’d end up wanting them back and we’d fight over them. The kids would like it—the boys always like a good fight—but it would be ugly for us. We’re too old for the whole hair-pulling thing.”

“Oh, well, okay.” Penny stopped poring over coffee cake recipes and leaned her chin in her palm. “So, best friend, how was lunch with Ben yesterday?”

“It was fine,” said Kate, “but I swear, he seems as much at loose ends as I am.”

“He is.” Marce got up when the bell on the oven dinged, opening the back door to admit Joann at the same time.

Kate looked up in surprise. “You’ve talked to him, Marce?”

“My word, I thought you knew. He’s the tenant in the garage apartment. He said he thought he’d outgrown spending summers with his parents.” Marce handed out scones before biting into one herself. “I don’t know about these. They’re cranberry, which some people are quite picky about. What do you think?”

Kate took a taste, blowing out crumbs when she sighed in ecstasy. “Yum. You need to forget about college and the B and B, Marce. You and Penny need to build a bakery where my house used to be.”

“I’ll insure you,” Joann offered, grabbing another scone before she’d finished the first one. She held up the second one. “This is the real meaning of insurance. If you’re in a kitchen with a bunch of women, don’t be too polite or you’ll end up with nothing to eat but the parsley garnish on the plate.”

Penny ignored her, latching on to the bakery idea. “But who would teach my boys algebra?” she demanded. “Although if it was a bakery and caterer combined, I could be the catering half and just make Dan help the boys with their math.”

Joann shook her head. “Dan was in my class. He only got by with a C minus because he was charming and Mrs. Wildermuth was susceptible. He should have flunked.”

Penny smiled fondly. “He was something, wasn’t he?”

“So, anyway.” Joann leaned her elbows on the solid surface of the island. “How was lunch at McGuffey’s, Kate? I heard you and Ben danced and that no one heard the music except you two.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” Penny snorted derisively. “Everybody dances at McGuffey’s.”

“Not at lunchtime, without music,” said Marce wisely, “although Frank and I did, and then we had the twins.” She paused, her cup halfway to her mouth, her eyes softening in memory.

“That’s a lie,” Kate accused, sending more crumbs flying.

Marce smacked her with a folded napkin. “It is not a lie. We danced at McGuffey’s and then a year later the twins were born.” She refilled everyone’s coffee cups, grinning. “It was a really long pregnancy.”

“All of them are,” Penny agreed.

Joann sighed. “I’ve heard all these stories before. I just want to know about Kate and Ben’s lunch.”

“We just walked a little, talked some and ate potato soup and corned beef sandwiches. On that rye bread Maeve makes from scratch. You need to get her recipe when you open your bakery.” Kate looked down at her list, trying not to remember the momentary look in Ben’s eyes. She ached, knowing something was wrong but not what it was. “My refrigerator was really old. Do you think I could list that under Antiques and increase its value?”

“I remember that refrigerator.” Joann reached for the cream pitcher. “You would have had to pay someone to haul it away, so you need to reimburse the insurance company for that.”

It was easy to laugh when Kate was in Kingdom Comer’s kitchen with her friends or even when she was walking with Ben McGuffey, but later that night, when she was alone in the back suite of the B and B, her situation was overwhelming. She sat in the window seat of the sitting room, hugging her knees and staring at the stars that peeked through the maple trees in the inn’s backyard. Below, Dirty Sally walked slowly across the courtyard toward the pet door that led into the three-season room on the back of the inn. Before she got there, however, a man stepped into Kate’s view and scooped the cat up, cuddling her against the side of his neck.

Ben.

They’d always been able to talk. One long and cold night soon after he’d broken up with her, she’d sat in the dark for hours, the silence of her apartment a screaming assault to her senses. Penny was just a few blocks away, but it was Ben’s voice she needed to hear.

The day she and Tark Bridger had broken their engagement, it had taken all the willpower she had not to get Ben’s number from his parents and call him. In the end, she hadn’t had to—he’d just shown up and made her laugh. He’d held her until she’d stopped shaking. When the laughter turned to tears, he mopped them up with a dish towel on her kitchen counter. Later, after he’d kissed her cheek and tugged at her ponytail before returning to Boston, she’d put the towel at the back of her underwear drawer. Sometimes, when she couldn’t convince herself she was only independent and not lonely, she’d take the towel out and hold it against her cheek.

Even at the weddings and funerals where they’d seen each other for the past thirteen years, they’d stood in corners and talked long beyond the point of good manners. Afterward, she would always tuck the memories of those conversations away behind her heart as carefully as she had stored the worn dish towel.

She started from the window seat to get the dish towel before she remembered that it had been lost in the fire. Grief, deeper and more scalding than she’d felt for her dishes and her quilts, made a shaking fist in her stomach. She hugged her knees and pressed her face against the soft cotton knit of her skirt.

A few minutes later, she was able to take a deep breath. A few deep breaths. And laugh a little at herself. She’d been so self-congratulatory that she’d felt scarcely any need to mourn over the possessions claimed by the fire, yet she was brought to her knees by the loss of one threadbare dish towel.

As though he could hear her thoughts, Ben looked up at the window where she sat. He waved, and she waved back. When he gestured—come on down—she didn’t hesitate, just slipped on the jeans and sweatshirt that had become her uniform and ran stocking footed down the back stairs of the B and B. She tiptoed past the closed door of Marce’s private quarters and stepped outside, stopping on the step to put on her shoes.

When he came to stand in front of her while she tied her shoelaces, she looked up. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” she blurted. “It was easy when I was the face and voice people knew at the law office and the woman who owned the duplex on Alcott Street.” She knew there were tears on her cheeks, and if she’d been talking to anyone besides Ben, she’d have been embarrassed by them. As it was, she just let them fall.

“I wouldn’t have thought my house and job and taste in household items made me into the person I was, but now that they’re gone, I don’t know who’s left. It used to tick me off so much that I was only Sarah Rafael’s little sister or one of the McGuffey boys’ girlfriends, but at least I was somebody. I wasn’t invisible even to myself.” She drew in a sobbing breath. “I’m not even somebody’s mom.”

Dirty Sally climbed into her lap and stood with her front paws on Kate’s chest to lick the salt from her face.

“She still knows who you are,” said Ben. He knelt, his gaze meeting hers in the dusky blue light from the moon and the solar lights beside the porch steps. “We’re back in the same place as we were thirteen years ago, aren’t we, Kate? We’ve both lost who we were and we’re both worried about who we’re going to become.”

She laughed, though it caught in her throat and sounded more like a sob. She supposed that was better than hysteria. “You want to go down to the tavern and break up? It was really horrible the first time, and I don’t understand even now why you did it, but it worked. We stayed broken up.”

“No.” He smiled at her. “We just made up in the tavern the other day. Not that we were ever mad at each other—at least, I don’t think we were. But it’s time we created a new relationship. Call it something new and life changing, like friendship. What do you think?” His expression sobered. “Maybe then we can talk to each other at weddings and funerals without feeling guilty about it.”

She frowned at him. She hadn’t felt guilty. Well, except while he was married. She’d still yearned for him, and coveting someone else’s husband wasn’t something she’d liked about herself. Later, when Ben’s younger brother Dylan told her the marriage was annulled, she hadn’t felt guilty anymore. Only sometimes, when the little flare of hope whooshed up under her breastbone and took her breath away. But she’d buried that quickly, stuffing it into a mental drawer that would have been labeled Denial if she’d been willing to give it that much thought.

Kate loved her friends. She and Penny knew things about each other no one else knew, even Joann and Kate’s sister, Sarah. But the link between Ben and herself had never come completely undone. Over the years since their breakup, she’d occasionally hated him, but she’d never stopped missing him. She’d never stopping wishing he was there to talk to. But he wasn’t her friend, was he? It was a whole lot more complicated than that.

Lucy, the inn’s resident golden retriever, slunk into the backyard from the alley behind and ambled toward the pet door. She raised a paw to push herself inside, then looked back over her shoulder at Kate and Ben. The struggle was written on the dog’s face: should she go inside and sprawl bonelessly on her bed or should she remain out here where it was cold and make sure she didn’t miss anything?

With a sigh and clicking toenails, she lay on the rug on the porch. Sally left Kate’s lap with a leap, landing in the middle of the C curve of Lucy’s body and snuggling into the burnished fur. The dog opened her eyes, sighed again, and closed them.

“Well,” said Kate, smiling at the animals, “I guess there might be stranger friendships than ours.” She got to her feet. “Come on, friend. I need to walk off some of these pastries Marce is forcing me to eat.”

“Forcing you, huh?” He chuckled and led the way out of the yard. “And here I was going to offer to buy you a bagel and a coffee—the Bagel Stop’s the only place in town that’s open this late. Guess I won’t ask you now. I’d hate to lead you astray.”

“Oh.” Kate walked beside him, stretching her stride as he shortened his so that by the time they reached the corner, she was gasping for air and he was taking baby steps. “You know,” she said, “if you’re hungry, I could probably get something down. Just a small coffee, you know, and maybe half a muffin. I could save the other half for breakfast.”

“You bet,” he said. “Come on, short woman. Move it.”

When he took her hand, it was a casual, friendly gesture, but it made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She shook her head. It was probably just the frayed collar of her sweatshirt. She was going to have to get some clothes; that was all there was to it.

The Bagel Stop was half-full of people. Kate, a natural-born morning person, looked around in disbelief. She’d never been here later than nine in the morning and assumed that’s when everyone else came, too. There couldn’t possibly be this many people in Fionnegan who stayed awake until midnight. “I thought it would be empty.”

“This is a college town,” Ben reminded her, “and it’s time for finals.” He waved at the young woman behind the counter. “That’s Debby, who works nights and always looks tired. There’s a story there, but I don’t know what it is.”

The pretty waitress’s smile did much to erase the weariness from her face. She made recommendations and didn’t roll her eyes when Kate changed her mind. Twice.

“It’s a lot of calories,” said Kate, when Ben did roll his eyes. “I can only walk around the block so many times before I fall asleep.”

“That one’s not worth it.” Debby pointed at Kate’s second choice. “It looks nice and a lot of people like it, but it will sit in the middle of your stomach and weigh seven pounds. That one weighs seven pounds too—” she pointed at the first choice “—but it’s so worth it. I’d even run around the block for it, but it would take more than once.”

Kate opted for the first one, then followed Ben across the room to slide into a booth across from him.

She was halfway through her chocolate-chip-and-cream-cheese muffin and Ben was on his second bagel when a commotion from a corner booth captured their attention. By the time she said, “I wonder what’s going on,” Ben was halfway across the room, shouldering his way into the middle of the crowd that had materialized around the booth.

“Call 911,” he barked over his shoulder. Then to the milling group of panicked students, he said, “What’s he on? I need to know now.”

Kate reached for her cell phone and dialed the emergency number, noting that several people hurried out the door of the Bagel Stop, sprinting toward the college campus a few blocks away without looking back.

“I don’t know,” she said when the dispatcher came on the line and asked her to describe the situation. “A student collapsed at the Bagel Stop is all I can tell you. There is a doctor here. Yes, I’ll stay on the line.”

“Walk!” She flinched at the shouted command.

Ben and one of the remaining students held a barely conscious young man on his feet. “Come on, boy, get moving,” Ben ordered, not even a hint of a bedside manner in his approach, “or I promise you’re not going to like what they do to you in the emergency room.”

“’S jus’ pills,” the boy insisted. “Jus’ a coupla pills.”

Ben gave him a shake, one that had his head bobbing. “Yeah, yeah, I know—a couple. Been there and done that. No, you can’t sit down.”

“Gotta study.”

“You probably should have thought of that just a wee bit earlier in the semester. Keep walking!”

“’S hard.” The boy gamboled along between his escorts, walking as though his knees were made of rubber.

Kate stood aside and watched the scene unfold, waiting with the phone for further instructions from either Ben or the dispatcher. By the time the ambulance arrived, there were virtually no students left in the place other than the tall young man who’d supported his friend from the other side when Ben forced him to walk.

The ambulance attendants asked calm questions as they loaded the still-mumbling patient onto the gurney. His friend watched them prepare him for transport, his expression difficult to read.

“It’s hard for him,” he explained quietly to Ben and Kate after the ambulance had left. “He doesn’t care about college at all, but his folks think that’s the only way for him to be successful. It’s not that he’s lazy or anything. He’s not even that bad of a student, but he wants to go a different direction than the one they’ve laid out.”

“It’s too bad.” Ben shook his hand. “Thanks for helping get him back on his feet. It probably won’t be the last time he’ll need a friend.” He felt around in the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, coming out with a business card. “If I can help, call that number.” He grinned. “When I was in college, I majored in disappointing my father. We both survived.”

The young man left, walking alone toward campus. As they watched through the window, others joined him.

“You’re good at that,” said Kate, when Debby had brought them fresh coffee and the students were out of sight. “Good at doctoring and good at listening.”

“I know how the kid feels.”

She looked up, startled. “What do you mean? And when did you disappoint your father? He’s always been proud of all of you.”

He shrugged. “All I wanted to do was ski in the Olympics—you know that. I went to med school because it was so important to my folks that we all get good educations and overcome the fact that we grew up in a bar.” Ben shook his head, looking away from her. “Thing is, I didn’t want to overcome it. It was great growing up the way we did. I’m sorry they didn’t realize it.”

Although a part of Kate was shocked that Ben apparently wasn’t as devoted to the practice of medicine as she’d always assumed, there was another part that understood. She remembered arguments he’d had with Tim about skiing when there was good powder. “The books’ll be there when the snow isn’t good anymore. They can wait.”

“No, they can’t,” his father had insisted. “You’ll end up behind the bar like your mother and me.”

So Ben had studied and excelled both in medical school and in practice in Massachusetts. Tim and Maeve were justifiably proud of their middle son. It had never occurred to Kate that he wasn’t proud of himself, as well.

“Did you come back to Fionnegan to start a practice here,” she asked, holding his gaze with her own, “or to break the news to your folks that you weren’t going to be a doctor anymore?”

CHAPTER THREE

“I DON’T KNOW,” he said quietly, as they sat across from each other at the Bagel Stop. “I don’t know why I came back.”

Kate asked a legitimate question, one Ben wished he had a definitive answer to. He’d thought about it over and over in the two weeks since they’d gotten the news. He’d talked to his father about it only a few nights before.

“Sometimes I hate medicine,” he’d said, washing and rinsing glasses.

“Aye.” Tim slid the stemware onto its racks and cast a surveying glance around the room, crowded with patrons eating Maeve’s Thursday night special. He leaned against the back counter, something he’d have reprimanded one of his children for. The change in the senior McGuffey, the visible weakening, made Ben clamp his teeth down on his bottom lip to keep from protesting aloud.

His father, a full four inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than any of his sons, laughed, a deep infectious sound that had lost none of its charm with his diminishing health. “Sometimes I think if one more person gets belligerent about the taking of his car keys, I’ll throw up my hands and let him go off and kill himself. But the truth is, he’d probably kill someone else and I’d never get over it.” He shrugged. “It’s what I do, and most days I like it much more than I don’t.”

Ben liked being a doctor, too. As his father put it, most days. He liked being able to heal, laughing with young patients, sympathizing with old ones. He liked studying and learning new things on nearly a daily basis. But he didn’t like insurance companies and the endless threat of lawsuits and having his own space in the professional building parking lot.

He thought that in particular was stupid. When one of the women who worked in their office had reached the basketball-out-front stage of her pregnancy, he’d urged her to use his parking place. She’d given him an incredulous look and said, “What, you want me to gain another twenty pounds? Waddling across the lot is the only real exercise I’m getting these days.”

Her laughing remark had made Ben consider his own fitness—or lack thereof. He’d grown up skiing, playing basketball and hiking, and while there were plenty of places in Massachusetts he could do all that, he didn’t really want to anymore. So he did cardio a couple of times a week in the rehab unit at the hospital, working up a sweat and wondering why he wasn’t happy. Sometimes, after a couple of beers on the golf course with old friends, he came close, but that only worked on the links-style course in the shadow of Wish Mountain just outside Fionnegan.

But most of what he didn’t like was centered on a single epiphanous life event, the one that had brought him back to Fionnegan.

His father’s diagnosis.

Tim McGuffey had come to America from Ireland at the age of seventeen. He’d worked as a waiter for five years until the County Mayo girl he loved could join him, then stepped behind the bar and never stepped out again. He and Maeve had bought the pub at the bottom of Wish Mountain when Morgan was little more than a baby. They worked sixteen-hour days and taught their children to dance, how to pour the best pints in the Northeast Kingdom and that Sunday mornings were for church, not sleeping late.

They emphasized to their brood of little McGuffeys that the good life was to be gained by hard work, education and the love of an equal partner. Although everyone paid their parents back the money spent on their educations, Ben never forgot that Tim wore the same suit to Morgan’s commencement from grad school that he’d worn when Patrick graduated from eighth grade. “It’s my graduation, wedding and funeral suit,” he’d said when Ben protested. He’d brushed the too-wide lapels, his eyes twinkling the way they always did. “Any day now, it’s going to be back in style. And aren’t you the lucky boy whose father never gains an ounce? Comes from clean living and good liquor.”

Ben had laughed, as Tim intended, but he still hadn’t liked it.

But most of what he didn’t like this summer of his return to Fionnegan, whether it was temporary or permanent, was that his father was dying and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. All the years of schooling, study and practice couldn’t stop the rapid downward spiral of Tim’s heart disease.

“Go home,” said his ex-wife gently ten days ago, still in the hospital from when she’d delivered her third child with the neurologist she’d married after Ben. He’d gone to see her, carrying the gift the office receptionist had picked up for him. “Go home. Spend more time with your folks—you never know how long you’ll have them. Find what you’re looking for while you’re there. You’re my favorite ex-husband and you’ve got all kinds of shadows in your eyes.” Nerissa had smiled at him, that sweet smile that had captivated him all those years ago. “Find Kate.”

Now he’d done that, all of it. And after all these years, he still wanted Kate Rafael every time he looked at her. If he was being honest with himself, he wanted her when he wasn’t looking at her, too. He liked the extra pounds she carried on her hips, the way her face had slimmed into a defined heart shape as she’d grown older. Although he couldn’t talk himself into being sorry she was single, he did regret that she didn’t have any children. She’d always wanted four. So had he, but never as much as she had.

Now here they were in their late thirties; many of their friends’ children were in high school. Dan and Penny’s eldest, Samantha, was in college already, her pretty brown eyes set on being a veterinarian. Ben didn’t know about Kate, but he’d pretty much lost the urge to procreate. He’d been amazed and somewhat horrified when Nerissa got pregnant for the third time at thirty-six, but she’d been ecstatic and so had her forty-year-old husband, so what did her childless ex know?

Ben had grown not only unsure of his goals, but selfish as well, and he didn’t want to turn his life over to someone who would always have to come first.

But now, as he and Kate finished their coffee, Ben didn’t mention the fire she’d asked about, the internal one. Tim’s story wasn’t his to tell. Not yet. Ben’s parents had insisted no one outside the family know the extent of Tim’s illness, and the McGuffeys had all agreed to keep the secret. With different degrees of sulkiness, but agreed nonetheless.

He’d sat at a table in a Boston bar with his partners and his pediatrician brother Patrick and talked about it until he was no longer sure of what he was saying. He and his priest brother Dylan had ridden bicycle trails and talked some more. Prayed. And prayed some more. Just the night before, all his siblings had waxed the hardwood floor in McGuffey’s after closing and discussed what to do. What to say. They’d laughed a lot and cried some and hugged each other hard when they said goodnight. That wasn’t something they did—except for their little sister Morgan, who hugged everybody all the time. She cried pretty easily, too, but she didn’t take it well when they brought it up.

“I’ll stay here,” Ben had said as they stood together at the back door of the bar, “as long as there’s reason for me to stay.”

And that’s what he would do. It didn’t matter whether he remained a doctor or gave ski lessons on Wish Mountain, he was there for the duration. But he couldn’t say that to Kate. Not yet.

She slid out of the booth and reached for his hand. “I need to get some sleep, Dr. McGuffey, and so do you.”

Outside, in the chilly, damp air that was springtime in Vermont, they walked toward the bed-and-breakfast. Habit meant Ben always had his cell phone, even though the signal in Fionnegan was iffy at the best of times and nonexistent at the worst. He called the emergency room to check on the condition of the student.

“He’s fine,” he told her when he’d hung up. “Maybe now his folks will listen. The nurse said they were flying in.”

“Your folks would listen, too, you know, if you think you’ve made the wrong choices somewhere along the line,” Kate suggested. “They always have.” She laughed, her eyes twinkling. “Your dad even listens with a brogue.”

“He does, doesn’t he? And I know they’d listen.” Maeve and Tim had taught their children everything they knew, and they’d listened the whole time they were teaching. Time hadn’t changed that any more than it had changed the Irish lilt of his father’s voice.

Dylan had hated the very idea of tending bar, so Maeve had taken him into the kitchen. He’d learned to cook, as Tim said, “with a bit of the same magic as his mother.” He’d worked his way through college as a chef in the same Irish restaurant in Burlington where Ben and Patrick, the oldest of the McGuffey boys, had stood behind the bar. They’d had, as Ben remembered it, a little cult following among the crowd. The restaurant owner hadn’t been happy to see them go, although he’d been pleased when their little sister, Morgan, came along while Dylan was still an undergrad. Morgan was a good bartender and her looks were a definite asset besides.

“What about you?” Ben said, embarrassed by how much of their time together had been spent talking about him. “You’ve had a few days to think about it. How’s the future looking to you?”

“Terrifying.”

He steered her around a half barrel that would be full of petunias when the danger of frost passed, or at least became less of a threat. Maybe July.

“You know what it is?” she said suddenly, looking up at him.

“No. What is it?”

“I’m one of those people that life has just happened to. I’ve never wanted anything badly enough to fight for it. I’ve waited till something came along and then I’d say, okay, I can do that. That hasn’t been bad, but it’s not enough anymore. I want to want something.”

That was, Ben realized, the same thing he wanted. No matter how much he liked medicine, no matter how good he was at it—a mentor in his residency days had once said he was gifted—he’d never loved it. He didn’t want to examine the thought that his father’s illness, by making him angry at the world of medicine, was offering him a way out of it.

But he’d be willing to bet Kate wasn’t talking about what she—or he—did for a living. Not at all.

“Passion,” he said.

For the space of a few heartbeats, their eyes met and he knew she was remembering passion shared. He knew because that’s what he was remembering, too.

“Yes,” said Kate, and he had no idea how much time had passed. “That’s right.”

* * *

IT WAS EASY to feel at home in the bed-and-breakfast. With the passage of a few more days, Kate had taken on enough of the housekeeping duties that she no longer felt like a guest.

“How do you feel about managing the inn?” Marce squinted at her watch and then looked at Kate. “Say until the last week of August. You can move down into my rooms. The girls and I can spend the summer at the camp on Lake Willoughby Frank’s family owns. You can decide if you want to be an innkeeper when you grow up and maybe I can regain some equilibrium.”

“What if I lose all your clientele and you come back to a hovel even Lucy and Dirty Sally wouldn’t stay in?” asked Kate, loading the dishwasher with breakfast dishes. “What if I break some of this china?”

Marce grinned. “So far, you’re describing the place the way it was when Frank and I bought it, up to and including the broken dishes. That’s another part of it, by the way. Lucy needs to stay here. She’s old and she gets upset when we even take her away for a weekend. She loves us, but she loves home more.”

The temporary position would give Kate time to make a decision about her future. Time to find passion. Time to stop saying, “Schuyler and Lund,” every time the phone rang. That had triggered quite a reaction when her old boss called her after the house fire to offer his sympathy and ask if there was anything he could do. The offer stopped short of giving her job back, though.

“If it gets overwhelming, T. J. from over at Traveler’s Rest will be able to help you. He was a godsend when Frank died. It was amazing how much I didn’t know and I’d been here the whole time.” Marce still smiled, but sadness lingered in her eyes.

Kate took a deep breath. “Let’s crunch a few numbers. See if we can afford each other for the summer.”

They crunched, using the calculator on Kate’s phone and the paper napkins lying on the island, and by the time the dishwasher had stopped swooshing hot water around, they’d come to an agreement.

“I can pick the girls up at college in Burlington and we can go directly to the lake,” said Marce happily. “Going on the hope we could do business, I’ve already cleared you out a closet and a dresser in my room and made space in the bathroom for your things.” She looked pityingly at Kate’s sweatshirt. “You’ll get some soon.”

Kate picked at her faded shirt. “You talk as though I need them. You don’t think this is attractive?”

“Come on,” said Marce, laughing, “I’ll show you the living quarters.”

The bedroom, sitting room and bath had been created from the summer kitchen of the old house. They were comfortable and welcoming, opening into the three-season room accessed by the kitchen. Kate picked up a picture of Frank and Marce that sat on the bedside table. The couple sat together in a chair meant for one, and instead of smiling for the camera, they were smiling at each other.

Kate felt like crying. “Do you think you’ll ever love someone again?”

Her face softening, Marce looked at the framed snapshot in Kate’s hands. “Maybe. But not that way. I think you only get that once. On my good days, though, I remember how lucky I am to have felt that way at all. As time goes on, there are more and more good days, so it’s all right. It’s all right,” she repeated, as though trying to convince herself.

The sound of the bell on the desk in the foyer made her lift her head. “That’ll be weekend guests. Come watch me check them in. You’ll have the hang of things in no time.”

Kate watched as Marce greeted the newlywed couple from Indiana. They signed the old-fashioned guest register, then added their information to a card. On the way up the stairs, Marce told them about local attractions and explained the times and choices for breakfast. “There’s an elevator,” she added, pointing toward the end of the hall upstairs, “in case you visit Wish Mountain and find that a flight of steps is more than you can face at the end of the day. The elevator groans as though it’s on its very last lift up, but it’s well maintained and safe. We tell everyone it just makes that noise to add to the ambience of the place.”

The bell sounded from below. “Kate,” said Marce, “would you attend to that please while I show Mr. and Mrs. Fallon how to open this window without breaking any nails?”

“Of course.” Kate smiled at the guests. “Welcome to Kingdom Comer.” There, that wasn’t much different from saying, Schuyler and Lund. How may I direct your call?

But there were no guests in the foyer, only Joan n and her mother. Before Kate could inquire what they were doing there and where Joann got the blouse she was wearing, the door opened, admitting Maeve McGuffey and her daughter. Morgan was a history professor at a small private college in Fionnegan even though she still looked like the homecoming queen she’d been in high school.

Kate hugged Maeve and then Morgan. “How do you do it? Is it hard teaching students who want to take you out after class?”

“I got Mom’s bones.” Morgan beamed at her mother. “And you know the rest—clean living and good liquor.”

They shared a laugh, and Kate took a longer look at Maeve. The green eyes her son had inherited still sparkled, but she looked tired. Older. Kate shook her head at her. “You’re working too hard, aren’t you?”

Maeve waved a dismissive hand. “Working’s good for the soul—just gets a bit hard on the body from time to time.”

“Go on into the parlor,” Marce invited from the stairway. “Here we are, Kate. Now you can see how we handle parties. This is obviously an afternoon one, confined to the east parlor and the dining room—unless someone gets a bit rowdy. Penny’s catering it, so everyone will have gained ten pounds or so by the time they leave.”

“That’s odd. She didn’t say anything when we talked last night,” Kate said, following the guests toward the parlor.

The room, a well-lit expanse of cushy blue carpet, chintz slipcovers and lap-size quilts tossed over the backs of chairs, was full. More to the point, it was full of women Kate knew, all holding glasses and most of them laughing.

“Well,” she said, feeling a little more hurt than she’d have cared to admit, “is this a meeting of the Fionnegan Women’s Club? More to the point, wouldn’t I have known about it if it existed?” She wanted to ask why she hadn’t been invited but was afraid she might not like the answer.

Penny crossed the room to hug her. “We thought about telling you, but you’re not nearly well dressed enough to join.” She gestured at the crop pants and matching blouse she was wearing. “Joann handed this down to me after owning it only two years, making me the walking dress code for this group.”

Meg Palmer, a paralegal from Schuyler and Lund, stood. “We decided that since you’d given roughly four hundred wedding and baby gifts over the years, it was your turn to have a shower. And since none of us can face that sweatshirt for one more day, we elected to make it a clothing shower.”

Joann pinched Kate’s sleeve, wrinkling her nose. “Wasn’t this sweatshirt Penny’s in high school?”

“No, actually it was Dan’s. Penny’s all had baby spit-up stains on them. But the jeans were yours somewhere near the end of the last decade. They should pass muster.” Kate narrowed her eyes at the insurance agent. “And if you want to keep collecting insurance premiums from me, you won’t remind me that the reason you gave them away was that they were two sizes too big for you.”

“Sit down, Kate, and open your presents,” Marce urged, walking around the room with a bottle of white and a bottle of red wine, refilling glasses. “After Friday, when I leave you here, you won’t have that much sitting-down time.”

Kate sat in the chair offered to her, then gasped with delight when Penny and Joann brought in armloads of gifts, dumping them unceremoniously on the floor in front of her.

“Open mine first!” Penny sat on the floor with the gift bags and brightly wrapped packages and rooted until she found a box festooned with ribbons and covered in Christmas paper. “Michael wrapped it,” she explained.

The present contained a pair of pajamas “for slumber parties,” a bottle of wine “also for slumber parties and you’ll always know it was from me because it was really cheap,” and a pretty green blouse: “Dan picked it out. It wasn’t even on sale!” Also in the package were two Blue Onion cups and saucers “for after the slumber party” and a replica of their senior year T-shirt from twenty years ago—“Skip Lund still had his and his wife was glad to get rid of it.”

Kate pulled her sweatshirt off over her head and donned the only-slightly-too-big T-shirt. “This is better than having my job back.” That wasn’t quite true, but close enough.

Midway through the gift-opening, Marce ran to answer the door and came back with a huge express mail parcel. “It’s from your mom and Sarah,” she explained. “They called this morning to say it was on the way. I was hoping it would make it.” She produced a box knife. “Be careful with this. We’ve seen you cut things before.”

Kate sat on the floor and opened the box carefully. “Sarah must have taped this,” she said, slicing through three layers of packing tape. “Mom’s more the ‘a piece and a promise’ type.” When Kate opened the flaps of the box, a soft aah went round the room.

Kate stared at the contents of the gift for a moment in silence, holding her eyes wide and taking deep breaths. Finally, she covered her face with her hands, tears flowing inexorably between her fingers. Penny slid off the couch to sit beside her and put her arms around her.

The box contained two quilts. Not new, but beautiful and handmade. One was a Double Wedding Ring pattern, made from hundreds of scraps of fabric on a cream-colored background. The other quilt was a blue-and-white Irish Chain, nearly identical to the one that had been on her bed when the house burned. It had been the first one she’d ever bought, when she’d still thought that things with Ben were going to last forever.

“We know this was supposed to be a clothing shower,” said the note written in her mother’s scrawled handwriting, “but Sarah and I decided we just wanted you to be warm and safe, no matter how you were dressed.”

When the party ended two hours later, Kate had enough underwear to get through a week, enough church clothes for three Sundays, and enough outfits to change clothes every day from Monday through Friday as long as she wore the black pants twice and didn’t spill anything on herself. There was a pair of yoga pants, sweats, sandals and a new pair of walking shoes with a card inside the box that read, “Meet you on the porch at eight o’clock—bagels are on you.”

Her hairstylist gave her a supply of hair and skin products and the nail technician who’d gone to school on money Kate loaned her had given her ten appointments, free of charge. Tark Bridger and his wife had sent a gift card from Louisa’s Garret, the bookstore over on Alcott Street, a thoughtful gesture that made her eyes water.

As she opened presents and laughed with the roomful of women, something stirred in the back of her mind, creating an emotional itch she knew she’d end up scratching at some point. Is this all there is of my turn? Have the bridal and baby showers Meg mentioned passed me by?

The thought was painful, and she wondered if it was like a new phone or having the gas cap in a different place on a car—just something she’d have to get used to.

She sipped from the glass of punch beside her, thinking how much time she’d spent at events like this. Playing games engineered for the guest of honor to win, hoping the gift she’d chosen would be a cause for happiness. It wasn’t till now, surrounded by her friends, that she truly believed the gift didn’t matter—it was the thoughts of the giver.

“You know,” she said, holding a silk scarf against her cheek, “I think I’m pretty rich.” And as for that itch, well, she could live with that.

Penny helped carry the bounty back to Marce’s room. “You don’t have any excuses now,” she said, slipping clothes onto the satin-covered padded hangers Morgan had included with her gift.

“Excuses for what?” said Kate, hanging a peach-colored blouse beside brown crop pants and admiring the effect.

“For starting a new life. You lost your job and now you have one. You lost your home and now you have one. You lost your clothes and now you have some. You even got a new roommate for Dirty Sally, since she prefers Lucy to you.”

“I don’t want a new life.” Kate hung up a dress, arranging a matching jacket over it. “I just want the old one back.”

“No, you don’t.” Penny caught and held her gaze. “You’re starting over, girlfriend. Do it right.”

* * *

SHE LOOKED DIFFERENT. Watching Kate step off the back porch to join him, Ben wasn’t sure how she’d changed, but she had. Her brown eyes looked brighter somehow, her hair shinier. Tendrils that escaped her ponytail fell about her face in perky golden-brown commas. The fact that she wasn’t wearing Dan’s old sweatshirt didn’t hurt matters at all. He wondered if that had anything to do with the women that had filled the bed-and-breakfast that afternoon. He’d gone into the kitchen to beg a cup of coffee, but had left empty-handed when he heard the noise from the rest of the house.

He returned her smile. “Good day?”

She fell into step beside him. “Real good,” she said, and held up one foot, giving it a little spin. “See my new shoes? Aren’t they pretty? How about you? Have you settled your future yet? Is it doctor or ski bum? Or maybe a bartender like those guys in that old Tom Cruise movie, Cocktail?”

He tugged at her ponytail but was silent for a half block. The only sounds were the soft ones of their rubber-soled shoes and Lucy’s toenails against the sidewalk. When he spoke, he heard the hesitancy in his own words. “Everything I said before is true, but the first and most important reason I’m here for the summer is that my dad—” He stopped, reminding himself of his promise to his parents to not talk about Tim’s illness outside the family.

But for years, Kate had been inside the family. She’d had her own toothbrush in the upstairs bathroom, her own pillow on the spare twin bed in Morgan’s room. Tim had taught her to dance and Maeve had shared the magic of Irish cooking with her. Kate and Dylan had been so close Ben had suffered a few bouts of jealousy, no less painful for being silent—they were still close as far as he knew and the thought of it still made him resentful. She’d been a bridesmaid when Patrick and Wendy got married. If it hadn’t been for Ben’s idiocy thirteen years ago—but, no, there was no way of knowing that.

“Your dad?” Kate prompted, drawing Lucy to a stop before they crossed the street. “Don’t tell me he’s going to take a vacation and you came home to help in the bar. Tim never takes a vacation.”

“More than a regular vacation, really,” Ben said, relieved she’d made answering that question so easy. “His and Mom’s trips back to Ireland have all been for funerals. Their families have always come here to visit. We know they get homesick, so we’re sending the folks to Ireland for the entire summer and we’re going to run the bar.”

Sadness settled on Kate’s features. “Who’s sick? Your grandma in Cork? One of your aunts and uncles? Tim and Maeve would never leave McGuffey’s or you kids for that long unless they had no choice.”

He should have known she’d pick up on that. The weight of knowing about his father’s illness and—worse—his prognosis, grew heavier with the effort to not talk about it. Maybe if he changed the subject, he could keep his promise.

Ben looked around, searching for something to say that didn’t have to do with Tim. The mud was dissipating early this spring. The growers in the Northeast Kingdom would be planting their gardens in the coming days. “Are you planting a garden this year?”

She shrugged. “Probably. Everyone on Alcott Street helps with it, plus Penny and Dan. One thing about a double lot is there’s plenty of space.” Her sigh was bone deep. “Especially now, with the house gone.”

“Right. All vegetables?”

“Mostly, but we put flowers around the edges. Some of them help with insects, and the butterflies look so pretty around them.” She grinned at him, though her eyes were questioning. “Did you want me to plant you a nice row of beets?”

“Yuck. You bet. Right next to your favorite kind of squash.”

She left his side, taking a seat on a park bench in front of the candle shop. Lucy collapsed at her feet. “She’s tired.” Kate leaned forward to ruffle the golden retriever’s fur. Ben thought if dogs could purr, that’s what Lucy would be doing.

Without looking up, Kate said, “I thought maybe if we sat here for a little while, you’d want to talk about whatever’s really bothering you. We’ve already broken up, so it can’t be that. We’re doing pretty well with the friendship thing, so I don’t think it’s that, either. But something’s wrong.” She continued to stroke Lucy, her hands gentle on the old dog.

He sat beside her, thinking if they weren’t looking at each other, he could stop himself from telling her. But he hadn’t reckoned on the feel of her arm against his, the warmth of her skin through her sweatpants where their thighs touched or the remembered certainty that anything he said or did was safe with her. But a promise was a promise. He couldn’t tell her what was on his mind, hurting his heart, making his knuckles white. He couldn’t—

“It’s Pop.”

“Tim?” She laid her free hand on Ben’s where he clutched the edge of the bench between them. “I noticed he looked tired. Is there more to it?”

He chuckled, though there wasn’t any humor in the situation that he could see. “He’s had heart disease for years. There’ve been a few surgeries and he’s been on the transplant list. Mom’s taken great care of him when he hasn’t been well and they’ve chosen how they were going to live with the disease. Actually, he’s chosen and she’s made it possible. Patrick and I wanted him to retire five years ago. I’m sure you can imagine how that conversation went.”

She laughed, and her fingers squeezed his. “I’ll bet it made the ones about your ponytail seem mild in comparison.”

“Oh, heck, yes. There were even a few ‘don’t darken me doors’ tossed in there.”

Her fingers, nervous now, squeezed his again. “Go on. Tell me about your dad.”

“His heart disease has followed its natural course. He was on the transplant list, but the older he got and the worse his general health became, the less likely he was to receive a heart. He is at the point now that he probably wouldn’t survive the surgery. As he puts it, ‘me ticker’s winding down and the stem’s broken off the clock.’” Ben shook his head, finding relief in talking about his father.

“Oh, no.” Horror flickered across Kate’s features. “What does Maeve have to say to that?”

“She smacks him upside the head and starts singing to him. He sleeps a lot more than he used to, though, and every now and then, one of us will catch her just watching him and crying. You know Mom—she never lets anyone see her cry.” He fell silent for a minute, searching for equilibrium amongst all the thoughts of losing his father. “It’s hard.”

Kate secured Lucy’s leash under her foot and turned to face Ben, putting her arms around him. Her cheek, damp with tears he hadn’t seen there, rested against his. She didn’t give him “buck up” pats or whisper soft shushes into his ear, but just held him.

When she did speak, her words were brisk. “So, what can I do to help?”

It never occurred to him to give her the standard answer: Thanks anyway—we’ve got it covered. She’d know he was lying, for one thing, and would be insulted for another. Her offer came without strings or drama. The least he could do was accept it. “Work at McGuffey’s sometimes if you’ve got the time? Morgan’s helping out on weekends. I’ve taken a partial leave—I’ll work in Boston one or two days a week. Dylan’s taking some kind of sabbatical to come and cook for the summer. Patrick’s contributing some vacation days here and there when he can and so is Morgan’s fiancé, Jon. Mandy’s been with them for years, but the other waitress finally retired. She’d probably be willing to help out, but her feet and her back can’t take it anymore.”

“Yes.” Kate drew back, mopped her face on her sleeve and smiled at him, though the smile trembled at the edges of her mouth. “I’ll work as often as I can.”

He’d forgotten how beautiful that mouth was. He had to look away from her before he did something about it. He got to his feet. “We should get moving. Lucy’s sound asleep. So to answer your original question, short woman, bartender’s looking like the profession of choice. For a few months anyway.”

“I just saw Maeve and Morgan this afternoon. They didn’t say a word.”

“No one’s supposed to know. While they’re gone to Ireland, we can tell people, but they don’t want any ‘black wreaths hanging about the pub,’ to quote Pop again. I told you because you’re by way of being family, no matter what happened that night thirteen years ago.” Ben caught Kate’s hand and pulled her past the Bagel Stop. “Let’s go around a couple more blocks.”

Kate gave him a speculative look. “It’s giving you a chance to avoid making a decision, too, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he agreed instantly, although this was the very thing he hadn’t wanted to admit aloud. “I’ve never felt about medicine the way I thought I should, though it’s been a good life and a great living. But I can’t do a thing for my father, the person who does love medicine. Did you know he used to study with Patrick and me? Pop’s education is spotty at best—my grandfather thought being able to sign your name and balance your checkbook was sufficient for anyone—but he could have aced a few of the hardest tests we took. The fact is that for all the time and money and effort he put into our educations, none of our knowledge can do a thing for him. I don’t know if I want to continue practicing medicine. I just don’t know.”

They dropped Lucy off at the inn, grinning at each other when she lay down in a sighing heap on the back porch. Sally came to snuggle next to her. The dog was snoring by the time they closed the gate behind them to continue their walk.

“Take time to decide then,” she suggested. “It’s not what you would have chosen—we’d all like for Tim to live to be at least a hundred—but he’d be the first one to tell you to put this time to good use. Make lemonade out of a definite lemon situation.”

“Kind of like someone I know who’s going to manage a bed-and-breakfast.” Ben put his arm around her shoulders, tugging her close enough that he could feel her body heat as they walked. He didn’t need it—it was a warm evening—he just wanted it. Being with her eased the ache of thinking about his father and the abrupt and sad turn life had taken.

It was more than her clothes and the brightness of her hair and eyes. She smelled different, too.

“You’re right,” she admitted. “I am using the time to avoid making a real decision.”

Good grief, she not only smelled wonderful, she admitted he was right about something. Maybe the day wasn’t a complete loss after all.

“What are you going to do for breakfasts when Marce is gone?” he asked. Unless more had changed than he realized, the kitchen wasn’t Kate’s favorite room in the house, although she was a good cook.

“I’m going to cook them. Believe it or not, I’ve helped Penny cater enough that I’ve learned to enjoy cooking. Not to mention that I make arguably the best coffee in the Northeast Kingdom—next to Dylan. Penny’s going to make the pastries—she and Marce have always baked together and I don’t have the patience or the touch. I’ll do the laundry, and as soon as she’s home from college, Samantha’s going to help with the cleaning and be my backup when I need to be away from the inn. She didn’t have a job this summer, so that worked out perfectly.”

They’d arrived back at the Bagel Stop, and Ben opened the door, allowing Kate to go in first. “You were buying, right?” he said. “Because I’m really hungry.”