Hearts Unfold (2 page)

You Before Me. . .

Chapter One

It seemed to
Emily that her father must have known.
 
He
must have read the misery in her eyes and drawing on what little strength
remained, he had roused himself to give her the benefit of his wisdom one last
time.
 

Three barely
discernible words, stammering and slurred, forced from his unwilling lips with
such tremendous effort, yet they had spun a web of possibilities in her brain.
 
She had argued with herself that it was her
own directionless longing that magnified those words, transforming them into
what sounded like fundamental wisdom.
 
She was grasping at straws in her need to find some way to put her life
back on track.
 
She had prayed for a
sign, for clarity, for a miracle.
 
What
she had received seemed to be a mere suggestion, a few words uttered by a man
who might not even realize what he was saying.
 
But she couldn't accept that.
 
Her
heart urged her to believe otherwise.
 
In
the end, she had followed her heart.

Now here she
was, at home as she had never expected to be again, and she was certain beyond
any shadow of a doubt that her father had sent her.
 
Pop must have known that the future she was
blindly seeking lay in her past, in the dreams and plans that had once appeared
shattered but were in fact hers for the rebuilding.
 
Had he known that once she walked back into
the house, saw that it was waiting for her to return, she would understand what
she was meant to do?
 
Perhaps he'd merely
been encouraging her to come back, to see what was here and decide what she
wanted for herself.
 
It would be like him
to tell her to try something, and if it didn't work out, chalk it up to
experience.
 
Failure was most often in
the hesitation, he had always said.

It hadn't been
quite that easy.
 
She’d fought a
protracted battle with her more practical side.
 
There were obvious flaws in the logic of just coming here alone in
search of answers to questions too painful to put into words.
 
She would have to try to explain something
she couldn't make sense of herself.
 
She
would have to stand firm against the arguments that the house had been closed
up for years, that a nineteen-year-old girl had no business alone in such an
isolated place, that she should be spending the holidays with friends, not
closeting herself away to brood over the past.
 
In the end, coming here without telling anyone seemed by far the easiest
thing to do.
 
That led to the question of
where to tell them she was spending the Christmas break.
 
They would all want to know, Jack, Angela,
the kids at school, especially Penny, even Mike and Sara.
 
She had handled that with what she knew to be
a despicable lack of honesty.

She had never
believed herself capable of a convincing lie, but evasion had become second
nature since she'd been at college.
 
Reluctant to expose herself as a lonely girl without a family or a real
home, she had trained herself to skillfully evade the issue.
 
She was sure her classmates considered her a
snob, but she dreaded the idea of their pitying looks, or worse still, their
thoughtless gossip.
 
Rather they wonder
what she had to hide than suspect her of seeking sympathetic attention.
 
So when she was asked about her holiday plans,
she glibly alluded to a ski trip with some hypothetical friends.
 
To those back home, the friends were assumed
to be classmates.
 
To her classmates, and
to Penny, they were old chums from her childhood.
 
She never actually said where she was going,
just that she'd been invited, and that wasn’t quite a lie.
 
She
had
been invited, by a boy who persisted in showing an interest in her, a boy with
a huge ego and an overabundance of confidence in his own charms, a boy she
wouldn't have considered walking across the street with.
 
But it had been an invitation.
 
She hadn't lied about that.

She knew that
once she armed herself with enough arguments to go to Jack with her plan, she
would have to confess her deception.
 
And
she would also eventually have to tell Penny the truth.
 
But for now, it was enough to know that her
dishonesty had been justified.
 
The idea
her father had planted had led her back to her home, her past, and back to
herself.
 
This night's epiphany had brought
her into her future, and she could only hope the people who loved her would
understand why she had chosen to make the journey on her own.

The actual miracle
had occurred, she believed, when she’d stood beneath the stars and whispered
her own name into the darkness.
 
In the
cold night wind, the fog that had for so long bound her mind began to
clear.
 
She had looked up to the sky, a
broad black bowl over the valley filled with stars she hadn't seen in
years.
 
As the profound silence embraced her,
she had sensed that she was embarking on a deeply spiritual journey toward her
better self.
 
The wind rustling in the branches
above her seemed to whisper words of calm and comfort, as if to say don't rush,
take time to be very certain of each step.

She had thought
then of her father's words.
 
“You,”
touching her hand with a trembling caress; “farm,” shaking his head sadly.
 
And finally, after what seemed a herculean
struggle, “home.”
 
There had been tears
in his eyes, as though it grieved him to have to remind her.

Looking up to
the sky again, she’d felt the surge of her reviving spirit.
 
Overhead, familiar constellations winked in
place.
 
A sliver of a moon hung low over
the trees, too pale to compete with the brilliance of the stars.
 
This would have been the perfect cinematic
moment for a star to arc from its orbit and trail to the horizon, she
mused.
 
But nothing moved, save the
gentle twinkling and one small cloud sailing just below the moon.
 
That, she believed, had been the sign she had
prayed for.
 
The sky she had gazed up at
as a child was unchanged.
 
The hills had
not shifted their positions.
 
The winter
cold had arrived in the proper season.
 
Some things, the most essential of things, remained constant.
 
In her short life, so much had changed.
 
So much that she’d almost been uprooted and
lost herself.
 
In this familiar place was
the direction she'd been seeking, the peace and stability she craved.
 
Had her parents been standing with her there,
she could not have felt more confident of the path she saw opening before her.

What remained
was accepting that with this decision came a binding commitment.
 
This was more than merely taking possession
of what was already hers.
 
Any plan to
return to this place, to make it her home and build her future here, would not
only include the promise to care for the house and the land.
 
She must also submit herself to be further
shaped by what was here.
 
Just as it
belonged to her, she knew she belonged to the farm.
 
She would not be free to go elsewhere.
 
It would always need her care, her
companionship.
 
It would be her family,
her responsibility.
 
Maybe that was why
Pop had been so sad.
 
What if she hadn't
wanted that?

There beneath
the infinite expanse of the winter sky, mindful of all that had gone before,
she made her commitment.
 
She would come
home, build on what her parents had already established, dedicate herself to a
life they would have wanted for her.
 
She
would work through the practical problems of her decision in the days ahead,
holding firm to the belief that things meant to be could be made to
happen.
 
The failure of her plan would
have been in the hesitation to take this first step into her future.
 
Her father had taught her better, and she
intended to make him proud.

On her pallet
next to the hearth, Emily slept more peacefully that night than she had in
years.
 
She dreamed of the house as it
was when there had been the three of them together.
 
In her dream, she heard the sound of music,
the piano and the violin speaking as surely as the voices that called from room
to room.
 
She smelled freshly polished
wood, sun-warmed roses and the alluring scent of baking bread.
 
In every room, as she passed slowly through
the house, surfaces gleamed in the sunlight and a sweet breeze stirred the
curtains at the open windows.
 
In the oak
trees outside, birds sang and the fields beyond the barn were green with the
summer's abundant crop.
 
The house seemed
to glow, renewed, reborn.

Daybreak
brought the full force of harsh reality to bear.
 
The first of those practical problems she had
been so sure could be worked through met her first waking glance.
 
The house was cold, her fire now barely
glowing ashes, and from her vantage point by the hearth, she had a view of the
dust that coated every surface and the delicate webs laced across light
fixtures and clinging in corners.
 
The
musty smell of neglect filled her nostrils with each breath.
 
With a resolute groan, she threw off the
covers and scurried to the kitchen.
 
Soon
the copper kettle was heating water for tea and slices of buttered bread were
toasting under the broiler.
 
She had
never been afraid of hard work; in fact it had always helped her think.
 
There was enough work here to last for days,
plenty of time to formulate her strategies and test her arguments.
 
By the time the house was clean, she should
be prepared to march into Jack’s office and present her plan.

Jack.
 
The image of his wise, weathered face brought
a lump to her throat.
 
More than her
godfather, Jack had been her third parent.
 
For another two years, he was also her legal guardian, the one person
whose support was essential if she was going to move forward with her
plans.
 
Just convincing Jack that she was
no longer a child would take some doing.
 
Persuading him that she could actually come home, take over running the
farm and live here on her own would take much more.
 
Better to get busy doing something
constructive, than waste energy quaking at the thought of that moment when he
realized she’d lied to him and sneaked up here practically under his nose.
 
If hard work could help her think, then the
more hard work the better.

She had made a
mental list of the chores to be done, but first, she wanted to take a
walk.
 
When she had arrived, just before
dusk, she had rushed to prepare for the night, carrying in her supplies and
enough firewood to last until morning.
 
Now she walked deliberately to the gate, opening it wide enough to let
herself out into the drive.
 
Slowly, in
order to enjoy the full impact, she turned back to gaze across the lawn.
 
It was an image she carried in her mind, as
clear as any photograph; the solid frame house guarded by two ancient oaks,
flanked by the big red barn to the east and the little timbered smokehouse to
the west.
 
A large, graceful house, with
a deep porch and big dormers lined in perfect symmetry across the front, it sat
close to the ground, as if rooted there over time.
 
Seeing it now after so many months away she
thought it seemed a little sad, but not at all unwelcoming.

Mounted on the
rail fence by the gate was the hand-painted sign first put in place by the
farm's original owner, her father's uncle.
 
He had christened his home Valley Rise Farm, a name that had been
carried on when her father inherited the property.
 
Repainted numerous times over the years, the
sign was again in need of refreshing, the paint now faded and chipping.
 
Beneath the title, the name of “J. D. Haynes”
had almost disappeared.
 
She would make
the sign a priority, she decided.
 
As
soon as she could get to the hardware store, she would buy paint and brushes
and carefully restore it.
 
It would
announce to all comers that “Haynes” intended to carry on here.