Page 1 of Below the Far Horizon
One
Grace Tyack pulled into the driveway at her mother’s house in Raspberry Ridge, the town in which she grew up, and pulled in a deep breath of cool, fresh lake air.
Everything still looked the same. Large trees shaded the street that dead-ended at the edge of a cliff, the base of which was surrounded by Pebble Beach, that rocky stretch of shore that lead to Lake Michigan.
The healing garden that was now at the end of the road, before the cliff, hadn’t been there when she’d been growing up, but that was one of the few changes.
A couple big houses on the hill she remembered from childhood looked lived in and cheerful rather than old and imposing the way she remembered them, but it could be her different perspective as an adult rather than any specific changes that had been made.
Her mother’s house was a block back from the dead end. Grace had been dreading the end of her trip, so she’d driven to the healing garden, sat there for a bit, and turned around.
She’d been tempted to park and walk through it, but she didn’t want to meet anyone she knew.
She was saving all of her courage to face her mother.
It seemed the time had come.
Her sisters, Stacy and Jill, would be there too. They had been taking care of their mother during her hip replacement from the beginning at the hospital with her and had gone through the first week of dealing with the aftermath of surgery and the hardest part of the pain.
They both needed to go back to their jobs, and Grace… Grace didn’t have a job to go back to.
Taking another deep, cleansing breath, dreading the conversation she was going to have to have with all of her heart, Grace forced herself to touch the handle of the door before she yanked it and stepped out.
It was a BMW, and she owed too much on it to sell it and get out from underneath it. So she kept it, although she had no idea how she was going to make the payments. She’d missed last month, and late notices were piling up in her mailbox.
That was one of the reasons she did not leave a forwarding address.
That, and while she knew her mother would be fine with her moving in permanently, her mother did not yet know that her husband had cheated on her and left, that the papers for her divorce were signed.
Her mother also didn’t know that she was currently unemployed.
Yeah. Some success story she was. Her mother was sure to be proud.
Gritting her teeth and flexing her lips, practicing a smile that felt more like a snarl, she lifted her head and put her shoulders back. She wasn’t going to go slinking into the house. She had her pride after all. And she’d left town full of sass and confidence, sure that she was going to take the world by storm, beat it into submission, and come out on top.
That wasn’t exactly what had happened.
Tulips bloomed along the wall, the same tulips that had come up every year of Grace’s life. Red and purple and yellow and pink. Pretty and regal, the day they poked through the ground was always the day she finally felt she had evidence for the promise of spring.
Winters along the shores of Lake Michigan could be cold and brutal. To put it mildly. Grace thought anyone and anything who could grow up enduring those kinds of conditions would have to be strong and hardy.
But she hadn’t exactly been strong and hardy as she fumbled andmumbled her way into the city, married the wrong man, got a job that she hated, and basically made a mess of her life.
Just the fact that you survived all of that means you are strong and hardy.
The voice spoke in her head as she put one foot on the porch step.
Really? Was it just the idea that she hadn’t been brought to her knees, begging God for mercy, that meant that she was stronger than she thought she was?
Or maybe it was the idea that it wasn’t her strength but the Lord’s. Because that was the one thing that the events of the last year had taught her. The religion of her childhood had a place in her life.
She continued on the steps and then paused at the door. Should she knock?
She’d been back a couple of times for Christmas, staying only as long as necessary.
Her husband had come with her once, but the second time she’d come, he’d insisted that he needed to stay and work and couldn’t take the time away from his job to accompany her to her home for Christmas.
She hadn’t given him a hard time, because he hadn’t been back to see his parents the entire time they’d been together. She’d never met them. She didn’t even know if they really existed or if he’d hatched or maybe been dropped out of an alien spacecraft, considering all the lies he told her over the years. Lies that hadn’t come out until she figured out that he had been cheating on her, regularly, behind her back. His late nights of working had actually been meeting other women at bars. His work-related expenses had been hotel bills, sure, but they were for the women that he’d hooked up with behind her back.
