Free Willow Spring by Toni Blake Page A

Mustang.
    “That sounds like a fun job,” Rachel told her. “Were you at the Hyatt downtown in Indy? My ad firm, before I moved back to Destiny, was just around the corner from there.”
    It had been nice to discover Rachel had lived in Indianapolis for most of her adult life. “Yes, I was,” Anna replied.
    “And where did you go to school, dear?” her new mom asked.
    “The University of Indiana. It allowed me to live at home and take care of—” Okay, maybe these questions weren’t so easy after all.
    But her new dad—not that she’d ever had an old one—immediately put her at ease, even reaching to touch her hand where it absently held her fork near the edge of her plate. “It’s all right, Anna. Really.”
    Yet she’d accidentally brought up an unpleasant subject. “Well, it allowed me to take care of . . . my mom. My other mom.” God, her stomach pinched saying it—no matter how you sliced it, it was still awkward.
    “She . . . wasn’t well?” her father asked.
    And then Anna did her best to explain. About the nervous breakdowns and the occasional psychotic breaks. She didn’t like discussing it; she didn’t like remembering how it had forced her to be the grown-up in the house long before she should have had to take on that role—but . . . “I hope maybe that can help you all to . . . forgive her, just a little. Or at least understand. I’ve struggled with that myself since her death, and I still harbor a lot of anger, but . . . she raised me, and she loved me, and she never meant to hurt anyone.”
    Everyone stayed silent after that, and she realized it was far, far too soon to be asking anything like forgiveness of them and she wished she hadn’t gone there. And she found she wasn’t quite able to meet anyone’s eyes in that exact moment—well, except for Logan’s, who sat across the table from her. Her gaze stopped there and, like before, she felt she had a friend in him.
    And maybe something more.
    “Well, the lasagna was great, Rachel,” Logan said with a big smile.
    Which spurred happy conversation and thankfully ended the awkwardness Anna had created. “From Grandma Romo’s recipe,” Rachel said.
    Anna’s new mother told her, “You’ve really got it down, Rachel. It took me years to make it just like hers.”
    And while that was going on, Anna kept her eyes on Logan and mouthed the words, Thank you .
    Once dinner was over, everyone gathered in the living room to look at family pictures. Which all seemed good and easy and fine until they began showing her the ones of her as a little girl. She’d never seen herself so young. “My mother told me all my baby pictures were lost in a fire,” she said softly as she reached down, running her fingertips over one of the photos of her in a white Easter dress. Maybe she was trying to connect with it that way, feel it, remember it. God, she looked so happy.
    And then she turned the page of the photo album in her lap to find snapshots of her with her two older brothers, both of them looking so protective of her—and she gasped. Because . . . “I think I remember.”
    “What do you remember?” Mike asked. He sat by her side, almost hovering, the way he had ever since they’d met yesterday. He hadn’t even really wanted to leave to go meet their parents this afternoon.
    She met his gaze, so close—and again, so much like her own—and swallowed back the lump in her throat before she said, “You. And Lucky. Just a little.”
    She’d had the vague notion of recollection about them both before, but this was more. She stared off before her without really seeing anything in the room for a moment, trying to go back in time, trying to recall. “I think . . . I used to ask my mother about you both. I think I called you Mikey and Lucky.”
    “You’re kind of how I ended up with the nickname,” Lucky told her from where he sat perched on the arm of the couch. “Mike called me ‘lucky’ one night because I kept beating