The Marriage Contract

“He did, but they always stumbled across the false trails my friend laid. She stepped outside the lines for me.”

Clair turned and dropped the towel on the desk.

“Maybe I owe you gratitude, but I don’t know what to say.”

“I don’t expect you to trust me, but I’m glad you’re home. I’m sorry about the way I talked downstairs. I just knew you’d inevitably run into Nick Dylan, and I thought I’d test the waters, find out how you’d respond.”

“I already saw him.” She closed her eyes against that nagging image of his shocked face when he’d seen her. “I don’t care about him.”

“You don’t?”

Clair shook her head, trying to convince herself. From the moment she’d accepted Mrs. Franklin’s invitation, she’d wondered if it might be time to come home. She’d given her resignation to the landscaping firm she’d worked for in Boston. Whatever happened, she was ready for more-southern climates. “I don’t ever have to see Nick Dylan.”

“Don’t fool yourself. He wants this community to accept him. He doesn’t keep to his side of the Dylan hill.”

“I’m not afraid of him.” Clair lifted her chin, and Mrs. Franklin planted her hands on her hips.

“Why would you be with all of us behind you? We’re on your side.”

Clair considered. Why would she want to stay in a place where people she’d trusted had developed feet of clay?

Because she wasn’t fourteen anymore. She could reason beyond a fourteen-year-old’s pain, and she didn’t care about clay feet or disappointment. She’d been happy in Fairlove. Her mother and father were buried in the ground her family had lived on for generations. She belonged in Fairlove.

She dropped her company manners. “Is my parents’ house still standing?”

Mrs. Franklin looked puzzled, but Clair held her breath, waiting for an answer that meant everything to her. Jeff Dylan had stood in the dusty dirt driveway while she and her father and mother packed the last of their things into a rental truck. Jeff swore he’d never touch the house again. He just wanted to watch it decay until the earth claimed it.

He’d always talked like a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher.

“It stood for over a hundred years,” Mrs. Franklin said at last. “It wouldn’t crumble in a mere twelve years, but it looks neglected. Let me drive you out there.”

Clair struggled to add kindness to her tone. She’d rather rebuild relationships than choke them all off just because they hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped.

“Thank you, but no. I need to see it on my own the first time.” Living in foster care, she’d stopped depending on anyone for support. Truthfully, she wanted to believe someone on the face of this earth would back her up if she needed help, but she’d long since forgotten how to reach out and trust.

“If you haven’t already had breakfast, I’ll make it for you when you get back.” Mrs. Franklin touched her throat again, a nervous gesture Clair remembered. “You’ll come back?”

Nodding, Clair flipped open the top of her backpack and plucked out the small purse that held her driver’s license. “I want to come back, Mrs. Franklin. And no, I haven’t had breakfast.”

“Clair, I’m so sorry about the past—about everything.” The other woman folded her arms across her stomach.

Clair nodded, uncomfortable with her own need for a relationship as much as with Mrs. Franklin’s. “You don’t have to apologize. I think we both want to start again from here.”

“I do.” Eyes filled with surprising tears, Mrs. Franklin scooped the hand towel off the desk. “Go on, and I’ll start breakfast. Good Lord, I forgot I have other guests.”

She vanished through the bathroom door, and Clair made her escape. She’d like to forgive and forget, but she had to be sure she could before she made a move. Every breath she took here in Fairlove made staying more important to her. For twelve years, she’d taken action to keep from indulging in self-pity. Often action had translated into running away. She needed a more mature attitude if she was going to make a home here.

She drove out of town to the familiar road that led to her family’s old house. She saw the roof first, rising above the trees. It looked surprisingly intact, but time, neglect and peeling paint had colored the clapboard siding a dreary gray. Clair nosed her car onto the old graveled drive, sparsely covered now in patches of thin grass. She got out and picked her way through ruts onto Dylan property, property that had once been Atherton.

Suspended above the oak door her grandfather had carved, a wooden sign banged against the house. Normally this sign hung from an iron arm attached to one of the clapboards. Rust had decayed the chain at the end farthest from the house, and the sign had scraped a rut in the wood.

Clair read the sign, even though she knew every curlicue in the burnt engraving. The Oaks. An ancestor had named the house for the great gnarled trees that surrounded it. Clair’s father had burned its name into the current sign one hot summer day when she was still too small to reach the top of his workbench. Once in every generation an Atherton had to make a new sign for their home. Responsibility for renewing the sign had passed down through the family with the house.

Fresh grief swamped Clair, but she choked back tears, unwilling to waste any more valuable seconds. She’d ached too deeply to surround herself with the familiar sensations, the sigh of the breeze that wound a loving embrace around the corners of her home, the click of branches that seemed to tap each other in secret conversation a human couldn’t understand.

Ahead of her, something moved in the long uncut grass. A bird rose with a startled cry, and a wiry black feline sprang into the air.

“Hey!” Clair raced for the cat to shoo it away, but the bird had flown out of reach.

Clair stopped abruptly. Its original prey gone, the cat sagged into a crouch, seemingly more interested now in her than in the liberated meal that mocked him from the air.

“Go away.” She firmed up her voice and wondered about rabies. Had this feral feline had its shots? The cat growled. Who knew a cat could growl? “Go away!”

Throwing its entire scrawny body into a hiss, the cat looked painfully hungry. Half its right ear was gone, and something had nipped out patches of its coat. Just as Clair began to feel a sense of sympathy for a fellow stray, it turned and streaked out of sight. The grass closed, and she stood alone.

She turned slowly in the new, unnatural silence. Wildlife rustled in brush that had taken over her mother’s once carefully landscaped lawn. Twelve years of neglect gave the house a lost look, which Clair connected with.

She wanted to fix the house, make it a home again.

She could look all she wanted, but she was a trespasser here. She had no rights. She wasn’t allowed to change anything—couldn’t help a bird, feed a wild, hungry cat, or clean up the bits of trash that had blown against the kitchen wall.

Fighting a sense of futility, she understood the crippling failure that had hounded her father to his grave after he’d lost the house to Jeff Dylan. She didn’t dare go close enough to peer through a dirt-stained window. Emptiness inside her left her unable to look at the bare spaces inside those walls.

WHEN SHE RETURNED to the bed-and-breakfast, Julian Franklin met her at the top of the steps. Decked out for court, he reminded her of the old days, when her father had teased him about his “litigious” wardrobe.

“Hello, Judge.”

His smile, lacking his wife’s nervous edge, greeted her. “Selina told me you’d arrived. I wanted to welcome you.”

He held out his hand, and Clair clasped it. “Your house is lovely.”

He turned toward the door and opened it for her. “All due to Selina’s reconstruction plan. I always do what she tells me when she makes a plan.”

Clair laughed. “You’re subtle, sir. Are you saying she’s made a plan for me?”

He took her hand again. “I don’t have time to be subtle. I declared a recess to give myself a brief break from court. I wanted to tell you we’d love to have you stay here as long as you can.” He let her go and reached back for the door. “God, you look like Sylvie. I’ve missed you and your mom and dad. There’s been a hole in my life ever since you left.”

“Mine, too.”

Grinning, he looked back one last time. “You listen to my wife. She’s rarely wrong.”

Clair smiled back at him as he headed out. If Selina was never wrong, she’d been better off in foster care. Hard to believe.

She glanced into the dining room. It looked empty, but a man’s husky voice came from around a paneled corner.

“I won’t do it, Wilford. I don’t care who finds out about the will or anything else Jeff did. You’re an executor and my attorney. Get me out of this. Give everything to my mother.”

“You know it doesn’t work that way. Your cousin will inherit and move her out like yesterday’s rubbish.”