Mara’s smile softens at that. “Mom adored her. Said Bonnie had the rare gift of listening without trying to fix.”
That lands quietly between us.
I think of my mother sitting beside me on fallen logs, letting me talk in circles until I found my own answers. Never rushing. Never dismissing.
“She made me feel… held,” I say, the word coming out before I can second-guess it.
Mara exhales slowly. “Yeah. That was Bonnie.”
For a while, we just walk, two people carrying the same woman in different versions of memory. Sister. Mother. Anchor.
It’s comforting.
And confusing.
Because the Bonnie we’re remembering… the warm, laughing, stubborn woman who sang to bees and cut toast diagonally, doesn’t fit neatly with the silences that followed her.
Doesn’t explain the gaps.
“She was different before she married your father,” Mara continues, like she’s commenting on the clouds overhead. “Lighter. Always sketching, always talking about places she hadn’t seen yet. She used to tape postcards to her wall. Cities, coastlines, little towns she read about in travel magazines.”
My chest tightens. “Leaving Colter Creek?”
Mara lets out a quiet breath through her nose.
“Leavinghim,” she says, without hesitation.
I stop walking. The trail stretches ahead of us, sun-dappled and indifferent, but my feet refuse to move.
Mara takes two more steps before she notices I’m no longer beside her. She turns, brows lifting slightly, impatient but curious.
“You never liked my father,” I say.
It’s not a question. It’s emotion that’s been rearranging itself in my chest since the moment she walked into my kitchen.
Her mouth presses into a thin line. For a heartbeat, just one, I think she might actually say something unguarded.
Instead, she exhales and motions for me to keep walking, as if forward momentum might blunt the edge of the moment. “That’s complicated.”
“It always is,” I say, but I fall back into step anyway.
“He wasn’t a bad man,” she says carefully, each word chosen like she’s laying stones across a stream. “He worked hard, but he was stubborn. Awkward. Sometimes unpleasant.”
“That doesn’t necessarily sound like a villain,” I say quietly.
“No,” she agrees. “It sounds like a man who shouldn’t have married my sister.”
The words sting.
“She loved him,” I say, because that feels like something I need to defend, that needs to be true.
Mara’s laugh is quick and humorless.
“Bonnie loved a lot of things,” she says. “Ideas. Possibilities. People as they could be, if they just loosened their grip a little.”
“And you?” I ask. “Did you see potential?”
Her jaw tightens, the muscle jumping once. “I didn’t trust him.”
