The Winter Lodge

It was unexpectedly pleasant, shopping with her sister. And undeniably liberating to start from scratch with a whole new wardrobe. She insisted on keeping purchases to a minimum. “I have a feeling I’m going to be traveling light for a while,” she said. “I still can’t quite believe everything’s gone.”

Olivia’s eyes misted. “Oh, Jenny.” She pulled out her cell phone. “We need to tell Dad, right away.”

“No, we don’t.” Jenny didn’t think of her father as “Dad.” Perhaps she never would. Until last summer, the only information she had about him was the cryptic notation on her birth certificate: “Father Unknown.” Once they had discovered each other, they both made an effort to get to know one another. Still, in her mind, he wasn’t Dad but Philip. A nice enough gentleman who, many years ago, had the poor judgment to fall for Jenny’s mother, Mariska.

“All right,” Olivia conceded. “But you should tell him what happened.”

“I will. I’ll call him later.”

“And …” Olivia hesitated, her cheeks coloring with a blush. “I should also warn you, my mother and her parents—the Lightsey side of the family—are planning to come up soon to help me with the wedding.”

“Of course,” Jenny said. “I appreciate the heads-up, though.”

“Is it going to be awkward for you, seeing them?”

Seeing the woman their father had married after being dumped by Mariska? How could that not be awkward? “We’re all grown-ups. We’ll deal.”

“Thanks. My mom’s parents and Nana and Grandpa Bellamy have been friends forever. I think between the four of them, they decided my mom and dad would marry long before my parents even met. That might be why they ultimately got divorced. Maybe the marriage wasn’t their idea in the first place.”

To Jenny’s discomfiture, she could too easily imagine marrying someone because it was the right thing to do, the practical thing. She had almost done exactly that, long ago. She skirted the thought and accepted the bra. Olivia had excellent taste. Jenny picked out seven pairs of underwear. Though the sexy wisps of lace caught her eye, she selected plain beige hip-huggers. She needed to be practical.

Olivia moved on to a display of pajamas, holding up and then discarding a frumpy high-necked nightgown. She held a pink baby-doll top up to Jenny and nodded her approval.

“Maybe it was meant to be, you staying with Rourke.”

“Believe me, it wasn’t.”

“You never know. Look at me. If anyone had told me I’d wind up living in a trailer with an ex-con, I would have thought they were joking. My mother practically went into therapy when I gave her the news. It was a jolt, you know. Last May I was dating an heir to the Whitney fortune, a guy who was once featured in Vanity Fair. By the end of summer, I’d fallen in love with Connor Davis. So it just goes to show you.”

“Show you what?”

“You don’t always get to pick who you fall in love with. Sometimes love picks you.”

“Why do I get the sense that you’re trying to tell me something?”

“I’m not,” Olivia said, tossing her the pink baby dolls. “Not yet, anyway.”

By the end of the day, Jenny had discovered a new level of fatigue. Until now, she had taken the concept of “home” for granted, as most people did. The simple knowledge that your home—your favorite chair, your stereo, your bed, the stack of books on your nightstand—was waiting at the end of the day was a true source of comfort, something she hadn’t thought about until it was gone. Now weariness dragged at her, and she thought wistfully of her own home, her own bed. The moment she stepped inside Rourke’s house with her shopping bags, the fatigue hit her like a giant wave.

“You look like you’re ready to drop,” he said. The dogs came galloping in from their run in the yard, shaking snow from their fur, tails waving in greeting. Clarence, the one-eyed cat, followed, slipping into the fray.

“Good guess,” she said.

He fed the animals, talking to them as though they were people, which Jenny found unexpectedly charming. “Move aside, boys,” he instructed. “And don’t gulp your food. You’ll get the hiccups.”

Despite her fatigue, she caught herself smiling as the dogs lined themselves up, watching with adoring eyes while he fixed their dinner. Why hadn’t she ever adopted a pet? That unconditional love was incredibly nice to come home to.

“How about you?” Rourke asked her. “What do you want for dinner?”

Oh, boy. “Anything. At this point, I’m not picky.”

“Good, because I’m not much of a cook.”

“You want some help?” she offered.

“Nope. I want you to take a good long shower, because you’re going straight to bed afterward.”

She thought about his cushy bed and felt a wave of yearning as she headed into the bathroom. The shower, like everything else in his house, was meticulously clean yet oddly generic. She resisted the temptation to snoop in his medicine cabinet. There was, she knew for a fact, such a thing as learning too much information about a person. Besides, the more she learned about Rourke, the deeper his mystery seemed.

After her shower, she put on the soft yoga pants and hoodie she’d bought earlier, combed her hair and went to the kitchen, where Rourke was putting dinner on the table.

“So this is the ‘serve’ part of ‘to protect and serve,’“ she commented.

“I take my mission very seriously, even if it’s just canned soup and ham on rye. Made with the best rye bread in the known world,” he added.

“You have excellent taste in bread,” she said, recognizing a loaf of Sky River Bakery’s traditional Polish rye. “Did you know the starter for this bread is more than seventy years old?”

He looked blank. Most people did when asked to consider bread starter.

“It’s a live culture. You use a bit to make the dough, and cultivate more so it never runs out. My grandmother got it from her mother when she was a new bride in Poland. A traditional wedding gift is the pine box the size of a shoebox for the pottery container. Gram brought the culture in its carved pine box to America in 1945, and she kept it alive all her life.”

Rourke slowed down his chewing. “No kidding.”

“Like I would make this up?”

“So some part of my sandwich dates back to Poland before World War II.” He frowned. “Wait a minute. You didn’t lose it in the fire, did you?”

“No. We keep all the bread cultures at the bakery.”

“Good. That’s something, at least. So if you ever lose it or run out or whatever, can you make a new starter?”

“Sure. But it’ll never be exactly the same. Like wine from different vintage years, the aging process adds character. And it’s tradition for a mother to pass it on to her daughter in a chain that’s never broken.” She picked at her sandwich. “Although I guess my own mother took care of that.”

“The stuff’s safe and sound at the bakery,” he said, clearly shying away from the topic of her mother. “That’s what matters.”

“What, a rye bread starter matters more than my mother?”

“That’s not what I said. I didn’t mean to bring up a sore subject.”

“Believe me, she’s not a sore subject, not after all this time. I have bigger worries at the moment.”

“You do,” he agreed. “And I’m sorry if I said anything to upset you.”

How careful he was being with her, Jenny observed. “Listen, I’m going to be okay,” she said.

“I never said you weren’t.”

“That look says otherwise. The way you’ve been treating me says otherwise.”