Free The Liar by Nora Roberts Page B

things done, it just gives a woman lines in her face. So you put the worry aside. What needs doing will get done. You’re not alone now, Shelby.”
    “I . . . forgot what it feels like not to be, so all this seems like a dream.”
    “This is what’s real and always has been. Come here, darling, hold on awhile.” She drew Shelby close, rubbed her back. “You’re home now.”
    Shelby looked out at the mountains, smoked with clouds, so strong, so enduring, so true.
    She was home now.

5

    S omebody brought out her grandfather’s banjo, and in short order her uncle Grady’s wife, Rosalee, had a fiddle, her brother Clay his guitar. They wanted bluegrass, the music of the mountains. Those high bright notes, the close harmony of strings plucked and sawed stirred memories in her, lit a light inside her. A kind of birth.
    Here were her beginnings, in the music and the mountains, in the green and the gatherings.
    Family, friends, neighbors swarmed the picnic tables. She watched her cousins dancing on the lawn, her mother in her yellow heels swinging little Jackson to the rhythm. And there, her father with Callie in his lap having what appeared to be a very serious conversation while they ate potato salad and barbecued ribs.
    Her grandmother’s laugh carried over the music as Viola sat cross-legged on the lawn, sipping champagne and grinning up at Gilly.
    Her mother’s younger sister Wynonna kept a hawk eye on her youngest girl, who seemed joined at the hip with a skinny guy in torn-up jeans her aunt referred to as “that Hallister boy.”
    As her cousin Lark was sixteen and as curvy as a mountain road, Shelby figured the hawk eye was warranted.
    People kept pushing food on her, so she ate because she felt her mother’s own hawk eye on her. She drank champagne even though it made her think of Richard.
    And she sang because her grandfather asked her to. “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and “Salty Dog,” “Lonesome Road Blues” and “Lost John.” The lyrics came back to her like yesterday, and the simple fun of it, singing out in the yard, letting the music rise toward the big sunstruck blue bowl of the sky, soothed her battered heart.
    She’d let this go, she thought, let all of it go for a man she’d never really known and a life she knew had been false from the first to the last.
    Wasn’t it a miracle that what was real and true was here waiting for her?
    When she could get away, she slipped into the house, wandered upstairs. Her heart just flooded when she stepped into Callie’s room.
    Petal-pink walls and fussy white curtains framing the window that looked out on the backyard, and the mountains beyond it. All the pretty white furniture, and the bed with its pink-and-white canopy all set up. They’d even arranged some of the dolls and toys and books on the white bookcase, tucked some of the stuffed animals on the bed.
    Maybe the room was half the size of the one in the big house, but it looked just exactly right. She moved through the Jack and Jill bathroom—sparkling, as her mother would have it no other way—and into what had been her brother’s room. What was her room now.
    Her old iron bed where she’d slept and dreamed through childhood faced the window, just as it had in the room down the hall. As she’d liked it best so she could wake to the mountains. A simple white duvet covered it now, but Ada Mae being Ada Mae had set pillows in lace-edged shams against the iron headboard, and more in shades of green and blue mounded with them. A throw—blues and greens again—crocheted by her great-grandmother, lay folded at the foot.
    The walls were a warm smoky green, like the mountains. Two watercolors—her cousin Jesslyn’s work—graced them. Soft dreamy colors, a spring meadow, a greening forest at dawn. A vase of white tulips—her favorite—sat on her old dresser, along with the picture in its silver frame of her holding Callie at eight weeks.
    They’d brought her suitcases up. She hadn’t