Yes, that and only that was what I’d be.

They’d see.

God, I hoped they’d see.

Chapter Two

They Didn’t Reply

I was driving down Cross Street, the main street of Magdalene, that next day on an errand of going nowhere and doing nothing, just getting the lay of the land of my new home.

I’d been born in California, and although Conrad had moved to a practice in Boston and we’d lived there for two years (and then to Lexington, Kentucky for two more), I’d never been to Maine.

From what I could see, I liked it. It was pretty. Quiet. Sparsely populated. Restful.

There was a chill in the air even though it was early June, which I wasn’t used to, and I worried that the bloom would go off the rose of not having everything you could possibly want in the form of shopping, restaurants and movies within easy driving distance. But I liked the change.

And the fact there was practically no traffic was a major plus.

For a woman who needed to reinvent herself, a relatively sleepy coastal Maine town seemed the perfect place to focus inwards without any distractions.

These were my thoughts when my phone in my purse rang.

My children had not phoned me of their own volition in over a year.

I still held hope. I was there. Close. Not in California when they were in Maine like it had been for the last ten months.

Maybe they felt badly about ignoring me all weekend.

Maybe they liked the new house (because who wouldn’t? it was fabulous) and wanted to ask if they could show their friends around.

And maybe I was insane to hope.

But the idea of losing hope terrified me to extremes.

So I hoped.

I saw a road with a sign that said Haver Way, turned off and turned right into a parking lot. I pulled into a space, put my car in park and grabbed my purse.

I yanked out my phone and stared at it.

It was unsurprisingly not my children.

It was my mother.

Since I’d left California, this wasn’t the first time she’d called. She’d called once a day starting the day I got in my car with my suitcases to drive across the country.

And this was only once per day, regardless if I didn’t return her calls. She would not be so ill-bred as to phone more than once, even if her only daughter, who had been ravaged by divorce then took that out on her family, was driving across a continent for the first time in her life to launch an all-out effort to save her family…and herself.

Even if only once a day, I had not taken a single call.

This, I knew, was not going over well. I also knew she’d call the next day. And perhaps the next. She would not get angry at me. Her voicemails would not become heated.

No.

The day after that, my father would call.