Free A Sudden Sun by Trudy Morgan-Cole

ARE YOU COMING TO TOWN STOP.
    Stop, stop, stop, Lily thought. Stop dragging back people, names, images from the past. She did not like to think of Abigail Hayward, not the silly girl she once was nor the preachy Lady Bountiful she had become. Abigail frequently wrote about her various committeesand hospitals and orphanages, thinking good works formed a bond between herself and Lily. She had no children of her own. It was almost inevitable that she should meet Grace and want to take her under a well-feathered wing.
    Lily thought she ought to go to town and put a stop to this wing-sheltering business.
    She avoided visits to town. She had no desire to walk the empty halls of the house she had once lived in, the beautiful house Papa had rebuilt after the fire. She had sweeter and more bitter memories of the two short years she’d lived in that rebuilt house than of any other part of her life, though very little had happened to her in the house itself. The house had been the place she returned: her tiny room on the top floor with its gable window looking out over Queen’s Road was the place she waltzed back to as if there were air under her heels. There was the pillow she had hugged as if it were a living person in her dreams, the floor she had paced hour after midnight hour. There was the bed on which she had thrown herself crying ’til her throat ached, ’til she felt drained and empty of tears.
    She had no desire to go back and see her father, who had steered her inexorably towards the only possible solution and never known what he was doing. She had no desire to go back and see Daisy reigning in her mother’s stead. The happiness Papa had found with Daisy in his second marriage was an affront: not so much to her mother’s memory—there was so little of Eleanor in the first place that her memory was almost completely insubstantial, like the shadow of a shadow—as an affront to Lily’s own unhappiness.
    The only person she wanted to see, of all that merry party in St. John’s, was Grace. Lily wanted Grace home for one of the conversations they had only in her imagination, when they sat on the front porch in the sun. It was always warm and sunny in the land of Lily’s imagination, and she and Grace sat in the sun doing some kind of fancy-work. Grace talked about the things that troubled orinterested her, and Lily listened and gave sage advice, which Grace always accepted and thanked her for.
    Lord, how her head ached. Keeping her hair up all day was such a burden. She was alone in the house now, except for the girl in the kitchen, and what did it matter? Lily pulled out one hairpin, just the one that was making her temple throb, and felt a split second of blessed relief as a rope of long, heavy hair snaked down over her shoulder.
    Since Abigail’s telegram had been delivered she had been restless. It would be a good day to polish the silver, a task no kitchen maid in Lily’s experience had ever been able to do properly. She got as far as opening the box in the dining room that contained the silver, then sat down and stared at the beautiful pieces, starting to show signs of tarnish around the edges. Time was she would have been horrified to let the silver get into that condition. Lily had prided herself on her housekeeping, on managing the house and the maid and the menu and the silver as well as the Women’s Missionary Society and the Sunday School. She had done everything expected of a minister’s wife and more.
    She had dropped all those responsibilities in the hard weeks after Charley’s death, and then, knowing it was expected, she had taken them up again, one by one. She still did everything expected of her: this afternoon Elizabeth Perry and Rachel Snelgrove were coming over to plan the sale of work to benefit the wounded veterans, and Lily had promised to find a steady older woman to take the boys’ Sunday School class since no reliable young man could be found to replace Bert Courage, who had gone off to