Brianna sighed at the painful memory, swiped at a tear, checked her watch and saw that she still had another ten minutes before the pizza delivery. While Vegas might be a 24/7 city, when it came to takeout, weekend nights were especially heavy. So rather than have to interrupt her movie when the delivery guy finally arrived, she took another sip of wine and impulsively clicked on the link to the town’s real estate listings.
When she saw the Victorian on the bluff overlooking the harbor at the top of the For Sale column, Brianna’s heart, which had been hurting for her lifelong friend and former crush, took a leap.
Despite the unfortunate color choice someone had chosen for the exterior, it was her house! Growing up Catholic, with a high school principal for a mother, Brianna had tended to be a rule follower. One exception had been all those times she’d sneak into the abandoned three-story house with her brothers and Seth. Her brothers had claimed the house was haunted. Brianna hadn’t believed in ghosts, but even if it did have a resident wandering spirit or two, she wouldn’t have cared. The creaky old Victorian spoke to her in some elemental way. Much as that first amazing taste of a Ding Dong had done.
Even in those days, as she’d wandered through the dusty, cobweb-strewn rooms, she’d pictured it as it must have once been. And could be again. All it had needed, she’d believed, was some love and tender care. The house, named Herons Landing by its original timber baron owner for the many great blue herons that would roost in nests in the property’s towering Douglas fir trees, was, quite literally, Brianna’s dream home. But, like her youthful dreams of Seth Harper, it would remain someone else’s reality.
The doorbell rang, signaling the arrival of her spicy buffalo chicken pizza with Greek yogurt dressing. She logged out of the computer, paid for the meal and settled down to watch the opening of the Dragonfly Inn Gilmore Girls episode, which had inspired her to get into the hotel business. By the time all the first guests had arrived, Brianna had managed to put her encounter with the rude, gambling doctor behind her.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t going to prove that easy.
THE LEAF RESTAURANT was located on Rainshadow Road in a bungalow in the center of town across from Discovery Square.
In contrast to the Victorian gingerbread exterior—which the town’s historical planning commission had refused to allow to be modernized—the owner of the restaurant, a transplanted chef from the San Francisco Bay area, had opted for a clean and simple Scandinavian look. Posters of vegetables, framed in light wood, brightened the glacier-white walls. Harper Construction had done the work, and although the furniture chosen by the Portland designer made Seth feel as if he were having dinner in an IKEA store, he was, nevertheless, pleased with how it had turned out.
He spotted the couple as soon as he came in. They were seated at a white table by the window overlooking a garden from which the chef sourced much of the restaurant’s herbs and vegetables. When Mike Mannion leaned across the table to take hold of his mom’s hand, Seth felt a very familiar twinge of loss.
There were too many reasons he’d missed Zoe two years after her death to catalog, but one of the worst was those random, impulsive moments when the two of them would get lost together in their own private world. He missed touching her. Tasting her...
No. Don’t go there. Remembering making love to his wife while having dinner with his mother and her maybe boyfriend, who she might even be having sex with (and didn’t that idea make him want to wash his mind out with bleach?), made this already awkward situation even weirder.
He cleared his throat as he approached the table. They moved apart, but easily. Naturally. Not at all as if they’d been caught in any inappropriate display of affection. Yet another possible indication that they’d moved beyond dinner dates that ended with a chaste good-night kiss at the door.
“There’s my handsome boy now!” Looking like a wood nymph in a long green suede dress and some sort of colorful stone hanging on a black velvet cord around her neck, his mother rose with a warm and welcoming smile. It had been a long time since he’d seen that smile. Having been wallowing in his own dark pit of grief for two years, Seth hadn’t paid all that much attention to gradual changes in his mother.
Seeing her now, so vibrant and joyful, as she’d been while he’d been growing up, he realized that her vibrancy had been fading away the last few years.
“I’m so glad you could join us!” Despite having lived nearly four decades in the Pacific Northwest, Caroline Harper’s Southern roots occasionally still slipped into her voice, bringing to mind mint juleps on a wide wraparound porch while a paddle-bladed fan spun lazily overhead.
Seth had visited his mother’s childhood home a few times as a kid, but hadn’t been back to the South since his grandparents had died. Both on the same day, he remembered now. His grandmother had died of a sudden heart attack while deadheading roses in her garden. Her husband of sixty years had literally died of a broken heart that same evening.
Maybe, he considered now, deep, debilitating grief ran in his family’s DNA. If so, his grandfather Lockwood had been more fortunate than he. At least the old man he remembered always smelling of cherry tobacco from his pipe hadn’t had to linger for years and years, suffering the loss of his soul mate.
Unlike so many in the Pacific Northwest, whose wardrobes tended toward hoodies, flannel, T-shirts and jeans, his mother had started dressing all New Agey, which could have looked ridiculous, but suited her perfectly.
Going up on her toes, she kissed his cheek. Then leaned back and sniffed what he realized was undoubtedly the aroma of grilled beef he’d brought with him from the pub. Laughter danced in her green eyes. “Seems this is your second meal of the night.”
“Consider yourself busted,” Mannion said on a laugh as he stood up and held out a hand. “I stopped in Port Angeles on the way back from the coast last week for some ribs and brisket and I’d no sooner walked in the door of your mother’s place when she asked me if I had a death wish.”
“You smelled of pit smoke,” she scolded him. “And that barbecue platter is a heart attack waiting to happen. At our age, we have to start taking care of ourselves. I don’t want you keeling over on me.”
“Not going to happen,” the older man countered. “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”
His mother’s obvious concern, along with that casual mention of him spending personal time at the apartment she’d moved into, as if they might already be a couple, was yet more indication that she’d moved on. While meanwhile her husband continued to insist that his wife had merely gone menopause crazy and would return home any day.
“What do you mean, at your age?” Seth asked, determined to stay out of his parents’ personal lives as much as possible. “You look as terrific as you did back when I graduated high school.”
“And isn’t that exactly what a dutiful son is supposed to say,” she said, dimpling prettily. He’d heard it said, down at Oley Nilsson’s barbershop, that when Caroline Lockwood had hit town, there’d been a stampede of single men vying to pass time with the pretty Georgia peach. But for some reason he’d never figure out, his gruff, uncommunicative contractor father had won not just Caroline Lockwood’s hand, but apparently her heart, as well.
Until recently.
As he slipped into the booth next to Mannion, she turned toward him, her smiling eyes turning as serious as a heart attack as they moved over his face. “How are you?”
“Fine.” Another thing that might be in his Harper DNA was that the men in their family would rather have their fingernails pulled out with a pair of needle-nose pliers than ever talk about their feelings.
He’d