Free Home to Hart's Crossing by Robin Lee Hatcher Page A

Lord loves us.”
    The old Angie—the one who’d arrived in Idaho on that small plane thirty-one days before—would have scoffed outright. She would have accused Kris Hickman of sermonizing or, at the very least, being simpleminded. But today, seeing something in this woman’s eyes, hearing it in her voice, she neither scoffed nor accused. She listened, and she tried to understand. She wanted very much to understand where that sort of peace came from…
    Because she knew she didn’t have it.

    Chapter 12

    ANGIE TOSSED AND TURNED on her bed that night, unable to fall asleep, unable to shake the voice in her head and the memory of Kris Hickman and those three children, unable to ignore the peace she’d read in Kris’s eyes, despite the painful nature of her story.
     “I was way more than my mom could handle.…So I laid there in that hospital bed, knowing I was never going to be pretty again.…Jesus was standing there, saying, ‘Look what I have for you, Beloved, if you follow me.’ So I followed him.…I never got to tell her how sorry I was for what I put her through. People think there’ll be plenty of time to make amends with those we love, but that isn’t always true.…It’s a miracle, really, the way God’s provided for us all.…He takes what the devil means for harm against us, and he turns it into something beautiful.…That’s how much the Lord loves us…
    “That’s how much the Lord loves us…
    “That’s how much the Lord loves us…”
    At 3:00 A.M., Angie gave up and got out of bed.
    Tucking one leg beneath her bottom, she sat on her desk chair, opened her laptop, and turned it on, determined she would seriously begin her job search. Surely that would help cure whatever ailed her. Getting back to the real world was what she needed. Getting back to the hustle and bustle of the newspaper business.
    Only instead of clicking the Internet link on her desktop, she opened her word processing program. She sat there a while, staring at the cursor blinking on the screen, and then she typed: Kris Hickman is an unlikely heroine in a very different kind of love story.
    It wasn’t a bad lead. Maybe not the best, but not bad either. And it didn’t matter one way or the other since she had no intention of writing the article. It was an interesting story but had nothing to do with her. Maybe she simply needed to jot down a few things in order to clear it from her head.
     “I never got to tell her how sorry I was for what I put her through. People think there’ll be plenty of time to make amends with those we love, but that isn’t always true…”
    Perhaps those were the words that troubled Angie most of all. What if something far worse than knee problems had affected her mother? What if she’d died without Angie seeing her again? She’d neglected her mother for so long. Oh, she’d made those occasional visits and had called on a semi-regular basis, and her day planner had helped her remember to send flowers on Mother’s Day and birthday gifts every February, items purchased in haste and without much thought for whether or not they were things her mother would want or need.
    But what about the one thing that really mattered? What about giving of herself, of her time? No, that she hadn’t done. But what was a career woman to do? Angie had to have a job, didn’t she?
    Of course, Bill had offered her employment at the Press . The pay couldn’t be much, but if she sold her house in California, she would have a nice nest egg to see her through for a long spell. Despite her dire expectations, she hadn’t found these weeks in Hart’s Crossing onerous. Maybe she’d even enjoyed them.
    She thought of Kris Hickman again and the strength of the faith that had been revealed as she related her story. A strong faith shared by Angie’s mother, Bill Palmer, and Terri Sampson, to name only a few of the people she knew. For the first time in her life, Angie wanted to know why they believed what they believed.