It, too, was perched on stilts, but where some of the other houses were looming structures of two and three stories, geometrically designed with sharp corners and slanted lines, hers was a simple ranch style with a series of stairways that started on the ground and wound about the house, ending in a square deck placed at the center of her roof.
As they emerged from his car, he heard her keys jingling, Molly barking at nothing and the wind whipping wildly about the softly moaning house. And all of a sudden he felt as if time and the rest of the world had receded into nothing.
“You’re awfully isolated out here,” he said, speaking his earlier observations aloud as they trudged up the creaking steps.
“Yes, I am,” she agreed as she shoved back a fistful of hair that the wind had tossed ferociously down on her forehead. “I love it here.”
The interior of the house reminded Jack of Georgia’s bedroom in the big house in Carlisle, where he had spent many a night as a teenager—unbeknownst to her father, of course—when he’d been too afraid to go home. Soft colors, lots of light and flowers everywhere—in paintings, on wreaths, in the fabric of the furniture, growing in pastel-colored planters. Everything was scented with the subtle fragrance of spring blossoms, made all the more poignant because it was the dead of winter and he knew he should be denied such pleasures at this time of year.
He noted a telescope angled upward in front of the windows that faced the ocean, and remembered that she had always had an interest in astronomy, something her father had insisted she turn into a degree in astrophysics or aeronautical engineering. Jack wondered how things were between her and her old man these days. Although he’d been keeping track of Gregory Lavender from a business standpoint, he knew little about the man’s personal life. Certainly, from the looks of her, Georgia seemed to be out from under his thumb, but there was no way of knowing for sure where father and daughter stood currently.
Wordlessly she closed the door behind them, went to the kitchen to fill Molly’s bowl with fresh water, returned to the living room to shrug out of her coat, and turned to face Jack fully.
“So what’s the real reason you’ve come back to Carlisle?” she asked bluntly.
He removed his own jacket and tossed it onto the same chair upon which she had discarded hers. But he remained rooted on the other side of the room opposite her, not certain exactly how to act. Georgia’s question was a simple one, he told himself. So why did he find it so impossible to answer her?
When he met her gaze, he realized she was studying him intently, much as she had been since he’d pushed through the doors of the restaurant a half hour earlier. “Have I changed that much?” he asked quietly, sidestepping her question for the time being.
She nodded. “Yes. Yes, you have.”
“So have you.”
“It’s been more than twenty years, Jack,” she said with a shrug. “That’s a long time. People can’t help but change.”
He nodded. “I know. I just didn’t expect...”
“What?”
He shook his head and left his statement unfinished.
“He’s dead, you know.”
Georgia couldn’t imagine what made her blurt out the news that way—the words just tumbled out without her even having planned to say them. A muscle twitched once in Jack’s jaw, but he offered no other indication that he’d even heard what she said.
“Buck, I mean,” she added softly. She hadn’t uttered the name of Jack’s foster father for two decades, but it still left a bad taste in her mouth when she did. “He died about three years ago. Finally drank himself to death. Faye is dead, too. About six months ago.”
“I knew Buck was dead, but I hadn’t heard about Faye,” Jack said, a complete absence of any kind of emotion in his voice at the mention of his former foster parents. “Can’t say that I’m sorry to hear it, though.”
Georgia nodded. Although his foster mother hadn’t beaten him up the way his foster father had, she’d never done anything to stop the abuse, either. It was easy to understand why Jack couldn’t forgive either of them.
No other words passed between them for several moments, then Georgia remembered she was playing hostess to someone she hadn’t seen in ages. “Would you like some coffee?” She gestured at the fireplace behind her. “I could switch on the fire. We could spend the whole afternoon catching up on everything that’s happened since we saw each other last.”
“That could take a lot longer than one afternoon,” Jack told her with a sad smile.
She shrugged again, a little more anxiously this time. “Then we’ll just have to give it more than one afternoon.”
He said nothing in reply to that, and Georgia nibbled her lower lip fretfully. This was just too weird. Although she had never forgotten. Jack McCormick, he was frozen in her mind as a boy of barely eighteen. A surly, angry boy at that, one who’d had no money, no prospects and no hope when he’d left Carlisle. The man who stood before her now was like a stranger. He looked like Jack, kind of, and he spoke like Jack, in a way, and he moved like Jack, a bit, but he wasn’t Jack. Not the Jack she remembered, anyway.
That other Jack had been such a big part of her life at a time when she’d needed someone badly. For one full year in her young life Georgia had had someone to care for, someone who had cared for her in return. For one full year she’d felt like a human being, and it had been enough to generate the strength she’d needed to start pulling away from her father’s bullying.
But after one year, just when things were starting to look up—for her, at least—Jack had disappeared from her life completely, and she’d been left alone again.
Not that she hadn’t expected him to leave. From that first afternoon when he’d driven her away from her father’s wrath, Jack had made no secret of the fact that the day he turned eighteen, when he was no longer answerable to the state of Virginia, he was hightailing it from Carlisle forever. He’d made clear, too, that he’d never again—not in a million, trillion years—set one foot in any of the towns where he’d been placed as a kid.
And Georgia had never doubted that he would stick to that vow as if it were sacred. However, she’d always thought he might consider taking her with him when he left Carlisle, even if she wasn’t of legal age. Or that he might come back for her when she turned eighteen, too. At the very least, she had thought he would tell her goodbye before he left.
But none of those things had happened. Back then, she had told herself she would be prepared for Jack’s departure when it came, and that she would somehow manage without him once he was gone. And she had. Although it had been painful to lose him, Jack’s determination to survive and thrive in the face of adversity had infected Georgia enough to keep her going, even after he was gone.
And now he was back, a man full grown, driving a car that cost more than most houses, self-assured, successful, dynamic. He was no longer surly, but there still seemed to be an unmistakable anger about something simmering just beneath his surface. Evidently, these days he had plenty in the way of money and prospects. As for hope, however...
“I’m not going to be in town for very long,” he said in response to her earlier suggestion that they give it more than one afternoon, scattering her ruminations.
“So why did you come back?” she asked again. “You don’t honestly expect me to believe you’re here because I was the only person you could talk to, and I just so happen to still be in Carlisle.”
“Something that surprises me, quite frankly,” he remarked, once again avoiding a response to her real question.
She shrugged. “This is my home, Jack. It’s where I grew up. I have a business here, and people know me. I even have a few friends these days. I like Carlisle,” she told him simply. “In spite of...everything else.”
“And