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He smiled again. She wished he'd stop that. "My cabin's there." He pointed to the A-frame next to the one she shared with her mother. "I'm going to bed."
"Oh."
"Enjoy the music." He touched her cheek as lightly as a leaf blowing by and turned away.
When she realized she was standing where he'd left her watching him leave, she shook her head and whispered, "I've got to call Douglas." She was up the walk and opening the door before she remembered that Phoenix Spa cottages had no phones. Guests were even encouraged to check their cell phones when they registered. The same went for laptops.
Feeling adrift and disconcerted, she let herself into the cottage. The A-frame had two bedrooms, one downstairs and one in a loft reached by a spiral staircase made of beautifully polished and treacherously slick hardwood. The loft overlooked the living area with its small fireplace and grand view of the lake.
A single lamp was lit. Hilda sat under it in an old morris chair refinished to a rich gleam. She still wore the velvet gown, every hair lacquered in place. With both hands on the chair arms, knees together, feet flat on the floor, she looked like a miniature monarch. Caroline half expected a curt, "Off with her head!" as she entered the room.
Needing to sort out her feelings, Caroline intended to slink by and flee up the spiral stairs to bed. A faint glistening on her mother's cheek stopped her. Hilda was crying.
Caroline tried to remember the last time she'd seen her mother cry and couldn't. Maybe never. The tears shocked her, made her awkward and dumb, but she could not ignore them. Kicking off her shoes, she padded across the thick white carpeting and sat on the footstool by her mother's chair. Neither spoke. Caroline wanted to take her mother's hand, offer her some crumb of love and comfort, but she couldn't. She didn't know how.
"I wasn't a good wife to Hamlin," Hilda said, the tears continuing in their course.
"You did-"
"No," Hilda said quietly, "I wasn't. In the begi
"I loved your father." She looked at Caroline for the first time. She needed desperately to be believed; it was in her eyes. So Caroline believed her.
"Those weeks and months when he was dying, I was so angry. He never gave me what I needed and now he was leaving me. Just like that. He seemed so tired, and I couldn't be kind."
The tears fell faster. Hilda made no move to brush them away, and Caroline resisted the temptation to run for the Kleenex box. Her mother needed to cry, long and hard.
"I'm going to miss him," she said simply. "I'm going to miss being the wife I could have been, and now it's too late." Hilda swallowed a shuddering sigh and said, "I haven't been a good mother to you, sweetheart."
The old endearment, seldom used in recent years, struck into Caroline's heart like a firebrand, melting the ice she'd been keeping there. She took her mother's hand. Holding it felt strange but right.
Hilda manipulated. Perhaps it had been the only way she'd known to get what she needed to survive. Caroline had met her grandmother-Hilda's mother-a total of three times as she was growing up but remembered her as a harsh woman wrapped tight in a religion that used God as a rallying cry and the Bible as a bludgeon. Maybe Hilda wasn't acting. She'd married Hamlin when she was nineteen. For nearly four decades they'd slept in the same bed, worried over the same bills and, each in his or her own way, centered their lives around their only child.
Looking at her mother's face, turned slightly as if she looked back down the years, it occurred to Caroline that, to the best of her heart's ability, Hilda might have loved Hamlin, might even now love her. A wave of compassion broke with such force tears came to Caroline's eyes.
Perhaps, here, now, for mother and daughter, a phoenix would rise from the ashes and a new life would begin.
Chapter Two
CAROLINE WOKE DREAMING OF pizza. She'd have sworn she could smell it-that first heady rush of spices and sauce and melted cheese.
It was a huge disappointment to wake in the dark, without the pie. The perfume of the hothouse roses that bloomed out of a crystal vase on her dresser was lovely, subtle, and sweet.
But she couldn't eat the damn roses.
Caroline rolled over in the huge bed and willed herself back to sleep. Hunger was a demon gnawing greedily at her insides, but she'd just have to wait until breakfast to satisfy him. Surely it was nearly time for breakfast by now. She opened one eye, looked at the bedside clock, and moaned. How could it only be two in the morning?
She flopped over on her back and stared at the ceiling. She'd think of something else. Of anything else. Food had never driven her life. Of course, food had always been easily available. It was the absence of it that had changed the complexion of things.
Would a cracker be too much to ask?
No, no, she was here on a program. It would be good for her to be more regimented about her diet and her health, those things she took entirely too much for granted. It would be good for her mother. More, it would be good for their relationship.
Maybe they'd actually have a relationship by the time they went home again.
Her mother was grieving, really grieving, and that was unexpected. It shouldn't have been, Caroline admitted. She hadn't given her mother-perhaps not even her father-enough credit. More than thirty-five years of marriage stood for something, and those outside of it-even a child born from it-didn't always understand what went on inside that intimate bubble.
She'd try to be more sensitive to her mother's feelings, more patient with her a
She'd be a better daughter, a better wife, a better human being. If she just had a damn sandwich.
On a muttered oath, she switched on the light, rolled out of bed. When a desperate search of her purse, her bags, her pockets turned up nothing but half a tin of breath mints and one ancient piece of hard candy, she dropped into a chair, scowling at the walls.
It was a beautiful room, meticulously decorated with soothing pastels and gleaming wood with the added charm of original watercolors of the mountains and valley. She'd have traded it for a six-by-six concrete bunker, if the bunker came with a decent meal.
There was nothing to do but tough it out. She couldn't very well sneak out of the cottage and execute a quick sortie on the spa's kitchen.
Could she?
Of course not. That would be rude-and against the rules. She always followed the rules.
Yes, always, she thought. Always did what she was told, followed directions, behaved as expected. The only time she'd ever let herself follow her instincts and be swept along by feeling, she'd ended up with Douglas.
She'd ended up happy.
And when she started comparing her marriage to a middle-of-the-night snack, she was in trouble.
New life, she reminded herself and got to her feet. All right, then, she was going to take that seriously, take that literally. It was about time Caroline Blessing embraced her new life. If that meant sneaking a chicken leg at two in the morning, so be it.
She shrugged into the thick, soft folds of the spa's complimentary pale green robe, belted it like a woman girding herself for battle. Her heart was pumping fast as she tiptoed out of the room, crept down the spiral stairs to the main level. She could feel the edges of the panic attack scraping along her courage with sly fingers.
Go back to bed. Turn off the light. Be a good girl.
Be safe.
She nearly did. Pausing at the base of the stairs, she listened to the sound of her own labored breathing, felt the rise of that panic fighting to gush into her throat. It wasn't just the hunger that pushed her forward now. It was the need to prove that she could take the step, that she could risk doing something foolish. And fun.