She swallowed. Look at her, sitting here and getting distracted with buried memories when there were problems to be solved at present—like what Thomas was doing back in Eagle Harbor.
She took her scissors and bent back over the green satin fabric to snip her first wayward stitch, then another. Thomascouldn’t truly expect her to upend her life in Michigan and move to South Dakota, could he?
Of course he could. He was still her husband. She set her scissors on the small table beneath her sewing machine and hung her head in her hands.
Herhusband.
The word made her stomach twist.
Why couldn’t he have stayed away longer? Claire and Megan were still so young, so vulnerable. Olivia had asked over the years why her pa had left. Why he never wrote. Why he’d never come back when all her friends had pas. But Claire and Megan were too young to notice how different their family was from any of their friends’.
Or rather, they had been. Except Claire understood some of what happened today at the doctor’s and had peppered her with questions as soon as they got home.
Jessalyn stood and turned down the wick on the lamp above her sewing machine, then picked up the lamp on the nearby shelf. She may as well head upstairs to bed, even if getting sleep proved as fruitless as sewing.
She swept her gaze over her shop, filled with tables and piles of clothing, bolts of fabric, scraps, buttons, lace, and ribbons. One day she’d clean it out and organize it. Surely she didn’t need to save every last bit of extra fabric, or the buttons she’d never be able to match with others. But as haphazard as her shop might be, it was hers. She’d built her business from the ground up, all without a smidgeon of help from her husband. If she and the girls hadn’t needed him for the past five years, then why let him back into their lives now?
Especially when he was so very likely to hurt them again.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Thomas opened his eyes and glanced around the small white room, then muffled a groan with his pillow. Light shone through the window to his right, but a quick glance told him that though the storm had stopped, the day was cloudy and windy—just like every other winter day he remembered from when he’d lived in Copper Country.
Thump. Thump. Thump.The knocking sounded again, but not on his door, from somewhere else in the apartment.
“Morning, Isaac.” A masculine voice carried from the other side of the wall.
“Hi, Uncle Isaac.” A small child’s voice followed.
Thomas groaned and rolled out of bed, the movement causing his shoulder to protest. Had he slept late? That’s what happened when a man stayed up half the night thinking about his estranged wife next door. He glanced out the window at the building where his wife evidently ran her seamstress shop, but no flicker of movement shown in the windows.
“How long until they get here, Pa? I want to build a snowman.” A child’s voice again, followed by the muted sound of her father’s response.
Thomas rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stretched his still-aching shoulder. Then he opened the door and headed into the living area that served as both kitchen and parlor. “Morning.”
A clunk sounded from the table, and he looked over to find a hulking man bunched into one of the chairs. His coffee sloshed from his mug onto the table as though he’d set the cup down too suddenly.
“Didn’t tell me you had company,” the burly man muttered.
Isaac shrugged as he poured a cup of coffee. “Seemed like the thing to do, Mac.”
Mac? As in Mac Oakton? Isaac and Elijah’s adopted brother? Thomas narrowed his eyes. The man had filled out since he’d left, from tall, gangly youth into a man with muscles thick enough to rival his own. And if the two brown-headed girls dancing around the man’s chair were any indication, he’d also gotten himself a wife.
“That still doesn’t explain why you allowed a man that walked out on his wife and children into your home.” Bitterness dripped from Mac’s words.
Thomas winced. Mac’s pa had walked out on him a decade or so back, resulting in the Cummings family taking the boy in. But did Mac really think him no better than Clive Oakton, the swindler who had skipped town with half the townsfolk’s savings? “It’s not what it seems with me and Jessalyn, but it’s good to see you again, Oakton.”
“The way I figure it, maybe Thomas here left his wife and girls when he shouldn’t have. But he seems ready to make things right now, and that’s a good thing.” Isaac handed him a cup of coffee. “With Mrs. Kainer’s boardinghouse filled up and Jessalyn needing some wooing, I figured it might help if he was living next door to her.”
“Appreciate it.” Thomas took a sip of the strong, dark brew and scanned the two bright-faced girls with their wavy dark hair and syrup-colored eyes. “Looks like you found yourself a Mrs. Oakton while I was gone, Mac.”
“I did.” Mac’s eyes, the same shade as his daughters’, pinned onto him. “She happens to be best friends with your wife—not that you would know.”
Thomas winced again. No, he wouldn’t know, and he had no one to blame but himself.
“Tressa was a mite bit concerned when Elijah stopped by the lighthouse last night, saying you’d sailed into town with the snowstorm, then insisted Jessalyn pack up for South Dakota.” More accusation seeped from Mac’s voice.
Thomas hid his next wince behind a sip of coffee. “I didn’t insist she move, I… asked.”Rather insistently.
