“Okay, so open a bakery. At least you’d keep more normal hours.”
“Something to think about, but bakers have to start work about four in the morning. I’m not sure that’s for me.” Baking was fine, but she loved the challenge and range that creating main courses offered.
“You could do charity work,” he suggested. “You know Mother would love to have you on some of her committees.”
Eliza wrinkled her nose, not that he could see. “I don’t think that’s my thing.” They’d had this discussion once before. She thought she’d made her position clear. Sometimes Stephen heard what he wanted to hear, not what she said.
As for Stephen’s mother… Eliza adored Adele Cabot. She was all Eliza wished her own mother had been—loving, elegant, devoted to her only child. And she was more than welcoming to Eliza. At one point Eliza had wondered if her feelings for Stephen had grown out of her liking for Adele and her hopes to have her for a mother-in-law.
“It beats working nights and never having time for a normal social life,” he said easily. “Speaking of which, Mother is having some friends down at the Cape this weekend. I told her we’d join her.”
This wasn’t the first time he’d made plans for them without consulting her. She wasn’t up to dealing with it tonight.
“Stephen, you need to check with me before accepting invitations.”
“This is just a weekend at home. No big deal.”
“I’m working Friday and Saturday nights, but I could make it there Sunday in time for brunch,” Eliza said. She loved spending time at the old Cabot family home on Cape Cod. It was totally different from what Eliza was used to. She’d been a foster child in a small Mississippi town—no family, no background, no money. But her lack of background hadn’t stopped Stephen from proposing, or Adele from accepting her into the family with welcoming arms. Eliza’s childhood seemed distant—as if it had happened to someone else. Boston had been her home for the last ten years.
“Switch with someone like you did two weeks ago,” Stephen suggested.
“I can’t do that very often. That was for that special opening at the museum you wanted us to attend. I traded with Paul, but I can’t keep asking him. He has his schedule and I have mine. Once in a while maybe.” Didn’t Stephen realize that many people came to the restaurant solely because of her cooking?
“It would give us time together,” he said in that sexy Bostonian accent that still sounded exotic to her ear.
“I’ll see about switching Saturday night. Then I could get there Saturday morning, but I can’t switch two nights.” Eliza was firm.
“Deal. I’ll take what I can get. We’re leaving Friday afternoon and will return Monday morning. Shall I drive back and pick you up?”
“No, I’ll get there on my own.”
“I’ll drive Mother’s car and leave you mine. That way you and I can come back together.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“And maybe while we’re there, we can discuss setting a date for the wedding,” Stephen suggested.
“We’ll see.” Eliza hated to feel pressured, but she was too tired to argue tonight. “I’ve got to get out of my wet clothes. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Her bare feet felt like blocks of ice. She had plonked the bag of food on the counter beside the mail. Thankfully the soggy paper sack had held up. She didn’t know what she would have done if she’d dropped her dinner in some puddle blocks from home. She popped the meal into the oven, set on a low heat, and headed for the bedroom and some warm clothes.
A quick hot shower and sweats, that’s what she wanted. That, plus peace and quiet for at least twelve hours!
Ten minutes later she was toasty warm in fleece sweats and thick socks. Her hair was slightly damp, but she hadn’t wanted to spend a lot of time drying it. She was starved!
Passing through the living room, she picked up the ruined umbrella and stuffed it in the trash. She ran a practiced eye around the room. It was tidy. Immaculate, actually. Just the way she liked it.
She returned to the kitchen to eat a late dinner. People sometimes teased her about being a neatnik, a control freak. But she liked order. She felt able to cope with anything as long as there was a certain amount of harmony in her life. In Eliza’s mind, order equaled harmony.
Sitting at the breakfast bar, she riffled through the mail as she ate the warmed roasted squab. She could almost feel the storm inside the eighth-floor apartment. Rain sheeted down her windows, the wind howled. She pitied anyone still out in the tempest.
Once she’d finished eating, she took her hot tea and the newspaper that had come in the mail and went to sit in her cozy chair in the living area. The Maraville Bugle arrived weekly—a hometown paper for a woman who hadn’t been to Mississippi in ten years.
Boston had been her home since her second set of foster parents had moved to the city a couple of years after she’d graduated from high school. While Eliza was not technically a part of their family, they’d invited her along and she’d gone. After high school she’d tried a semester of college, but it wasn’t what she’d wanted. She had felt restless and had had no direction, so had been happy to move east. She’d lived with the Johnsons until they’d been transferred to California six years ago. Eliza still missed Dottie and Al and kept in touch.
A couple of years ago, before she’d met Stephen, Eliza had given in to a bout of nostalgia and had begun a subscription to the weekly paper from her hometown in a vain hope of feeling connected to her past.
At first, it had been strange reading about places and people she remembered but hadn’t seen in so many years. But as the months went by, she began to feel a tenuous connection. She had even taken a chance and contacted her former foster mother, Maddie Oglethorpe. Maddie’s house in Maraville was the closest thing to a real home Eliza had ever had.
She thought about the old Victorian house on Poppin Hill, in her mind envisioning a weathered clapboard building standing in lonely splendor atop a small knoll on the outskirts of the sleepy southern town.
For a moment a kaleidoscope of images flooded her mind. The shock of losing her mother when she’d been only four. The uncertainty and fear when she’d suddenly been thrust into the foster home on Poppin Hill to live with strangers. People often said young children didn’t remember much, but she recalled every day at Maddie’s with her foster sisters.
April, Jo and Eliza. Wild girls with no place else to go, they’d carried chips on their shoulders the size of elm trees as they’d grown into rebellious teenagers. But they had ended up closer than sisters. There had been laughter and shared confidences, plans and dreams.
Jo had dealt with her anger at the world by challenging authority every chance she got. April had seemed vain and conceited to those around her, but underneath was a girl desperate to know her family. Eliza’s own insecurity had been covered by a brash bravado and clinging dependence. A jumble of images from those days—poignant, funny, bleak—flashed through Eliza’s mind now.
Their lives together had ended abruptly when Eliza was sixteen. In the space of two days, the world as she’d known it had changed. Nothing had ever been the same.
She shook off her somber mood and scanned the front page. Opening up the paper, she stopped in surprise. There in a sidebar column on page two was a report of Maddie Oglethorpe’s stroke and hospitalization.
For a moment, emotions swelled in Eliza. She felt like the uncertain sixteen-year-old she had been all those years ago—alone, adrift, afraid—after being forced from Maddie’s home. The last twelve years might never have been. She was transported back in time to the last day she’d seen her foster mother.