Free Wild Iris Ridge (Hope's Crossing) by RaeAnne Thayne

all your mom and my favorites when we were children— The BFG, Charlotte’s Web, Nancy Drew, Jack London, The Hobbit. ”
    “Hey, I saw that movie,” Carter exclaimed.
    “You need to read the book now.”
    “Only I can’t read chapter books,” he answered in a duh sort of tone.
    “It’s only a matter of time, kid. You’ll be reading chapter books before you know it and then you’ll want to read some of these books, I promise.”
    She pulled a boxed collection from the bottom of the box and held it out to Faith, who looked dazed with delight at the literary bounty. “And look at this. My very favorite. Anne of Green Gables. One summer when I came to stay with Annabelle for a few weeks, your mom and I made a pact to read the whole series by the time school started again. I think I was thirteen.”
    She actually knew she had been thirteen. It was the summer her father had left them, she remembered, when she had been lost and frightened, emotionally traumatized by a lifetime of being caught in the crosshairs on the battlefield of a horrible marriage.
    When her mother—seeking attention, as always—made a halfhearted suicide attempt and was subsequently committed to the psychiatric treatment unit at the local hospital, Robert Drake had once more shrugged off responsibility for her.
    How could he possibly be expected to take in a frightened girl? He had just moved in with his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, and Pam wasn’t at all prepared to handle that kind of responsibility. Besides, they just didn’t have room. She would have so much more fun staying at Annabelle’s, where her favorite cousin, Jessica, was living with her recently widowed mother.
    For Robert, it had been the perfect solution. For Lucy, it was just another betrayal, made bearable only by Annabelle and Jessica and the magical escape she found that summer in books.
    When her mother was released, she moved back to Denver with Betsy but she’d never forgotten those treasured hours reading on the shaded porch swing on hot July afternoons or under the big maple tree out back.
    “You’ve read them, right?” she asked Faith now.
    The girl shook her head. “Not yet. I’ve been wanting to but I never started.”
    She was not quite eight, much younger than Lucy had been when she’d read them. Maybe she wouldn’t enjoy them as much.
    Despite her worry, Faith looked delighted and picked the first book out of the collection and opened it up right there in the living room.
    “What about me?” Carter asked, not to be outdone. “Which one should I read?”
    She looked through the collection and pulled out Charlotte’s Web.
    “Have you read this? It’s one of my favorites.”
    “Is that the one about the spider and the pig?” he asked.
    “The very one.”
    “Daddy checked it out of the library for us once but we were reading something else and never had time for that one before we had to return it.”
    “Now you have your own copy and don’t have to take it back to the library. Why don’t we start it tonight?”
    “Okay!”
    “Faith, do you want to stay out here and read your book or come into Carter’s room and listen to Charlotte’s Web? ”
    “I’ll come with you.”
    Carter led the way back to his room, still decorated the way Jessie had left it, with a Western Americana theme: red, white and blue, with horseshoes holding up some shelves and a trail of stars stenciled around the ceiling.
    It was a cute room for a boy, perfect for an active kid like Carter.
    The sharpness of loss clutched at her chest again. Jessie had loved her family, being a mother, making a comfortable home for them. Of all the gross inequities in the world, Lucy considered it so unfair that this loving young mother with her life ahead of her would be taken from her family by a health condition nobody could have anticipated.
    The room had two twin beds, maybe in anticipation for the day when Carter would have shared this room with his brother, who had been too