Page 95 of A Beach House Beginning

He didn’t miss the way her shoulders suddenly seemed more tense. “Must it?”

He shot her a swift glance. “Look around! It’s every kid’s dream. Room to explore, horses to ride, that beautiful view out your window. What’s not to love?”

She was silent for a long time. “I hated it,” she finally murmured. “I couldn’t wait to leave.”

Before his grandmother rescued him, Jace would have given every single one of his precious few belongings to spend his childhood someplace like this, somewhere he could be safe and warm and loved. He couldn’t quite grasp the concept that anyone would throw this away.

“How could you possibly hate it?”

She shrugged. “Lots of reasons. Hick towns and big dreams don’t always mesh. I was stupid and thought the real world started just outside the Sage Flats town boundaries. Plus, my mom and I fought all the time. That didn’t help anything.”

He stared, unable to imagine Ellen fighting withanyone. To him, she had always been kind and serene, and he had never once seen her lose patience with her granddaughter, no matter the provocation.

Christa gazed through the window at her mother, still sitting by Hope’s side on the couch. Hope rested her head on her grandmother’s shoulder, and the older woman seemed perfectly content to let her stay there, though he guessed it couldn’t be comfortable.

“Sorry. I’m still trying to process that,” he finally said. “What on earth would you have to fight about with Ellen, just about the sweetest person I’ve ever met?”

If he hadn’t been standing so close to Christa, he might have missed the sorrow that flickered in her eyes, then was gone just as quickly.

“Lots of things. My clothes, my hair, my attitude. I couldn’t stand her rules or, worse, her expectations. Mostly I was just a stupid, selfish girl who couldn’t believe her mother knew anything about the world.”

“Sounds like a typical teenager.”

“Maybe.” She paused and that sorrow and regret flickered again. “Should I tell you the worst thing I’ve ever done?”

He didn’t know why she seemed in the mood for confession—or why he had this urgent need to pull her into his arms and whisper in her ear that everything would be all right.

This tenderness scared the hell out of him, so he covered his reaction with glibness. Anything to wipe that sadness from her features.

“Okay,” he drawled, “but I’ve heard and seen some pretty rotten stuff in my worthless life. I’vedonesome pretty rotten stuff. This better be good.”

She nudged him with her shoulder, a brief smile playing at her mouth, but it slipped away quickly and she let out a long, sighing breath. “It’s not good. It was cruel and heartless. That’s all it was. Now that my own daughter is only a few years younger than I was when I left, I can see clearly just how cruel it was.”

She turned around and looked through the window into her family room, at her mother and her daughter sitting together on the couch. “I told you about the worthless cowboy I ran off with. I didn’t tell you that I left in so much anger that I didn’t bother to contact my parents for a year. No postcard, no letter, no phone call. Nothing. They didn’t know where I was or that Kip had dumped me or that I was pregnant or anything. They didn’t have any idea whether I was alive or dead. I think I was just so ashamed of the mistakes I had made I was afraid to face them. But, whatever the reason, I put them through hell. No parent deserves that. It’s so hard to come back from something like that and establish a healthy relationship.”

“But you and Ellen seem to have done just that.”

She seemed surprised by his comment, then she smiled again, a little more genuinely this time. “It’s taken a lot of work. I finally gathered all my nerve and called the day Hope was born to tell them they had a new granddaughter. Do you know, my dad closed the store for the first time I remember and they both caught the next flight down to Austin. Just like that, they were willing to forgive everything. I understand that kind of love much better now that I have my own child.”

The echo of an old ache spasmed through him, but he pushed it away.

“What about you?” she asked. “You said you’ve done horrible things. What’s the worst thing you ever did to your parents?”

Does being born count?It sounded so melodramatic he knew he could never say it aloud without sounding like an idiot. Instead he shrugged. “I didn’t know my dad at all. Like your cowboy, he took off before I was born. And my mom wasn’t...healthy most of my life.”

Whitewashing the stark truth the way he’d done Ellen’s fence posts didn’t seem right, not when Christa had just confessed her darkest regret.

“She was a drug addict,” he said quietly, words he didn’t think he had ever willingly told anyone else in his life.

“Oh, Jace.”

This was the reason he didn’t tell anyone, that mixture of pity and compassion in her eyes. He wasn’t good at being on the receiving end of sympathy and he didn’t quite know what to do with it.

“We moved around a lot. California, Georgia, New Mexico. I think I figured once that we’d spent time in just about every state in the union except Utah.”

He didn’t add that he’d often wondered if that explained why the clean, quiet pace here appealed to him so much, why he had been quick to buy property near Hank and Junemarie even though he didn’t spend much time in Sage Flats.

“My grandmother was finally able to track me down when I was eight and kept me with her in Nevada. For the most part, anyway. Nancy—my mother—tried to clean up her act a few times and came back for me, but the good intentions never quite stuck. She died when I was twelve and Junemarie got full custody.”

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