Page 1 of Through The Rain
CHAPTER 1
It was foolish to hope there was a perfectly good reason for a silver Subaru belonging to anybody but his soon to be ex-wife to be parked in front of their lakefront cabin, but Scott Ferguson hoped for it anyway.
Right up until the woman he’d spent the last two decades married to stepped out of the shadows of the deep porch, her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. Emily wasn’t any happier to see him than he was her, and he let loose a weary sigh as he climbed out of his truck.
Twenty-two years ago, not quite to the day, he’d stood in front of their family and friends and vowed to be Emily’s husband until death did they part.
That hadn’t really worked out.
“What are you doing here?” they asked each other at exactly the same moment, and it was probably the first time they’d been in sync about anything in half a decade.
“I needed to get away,” she said, her chin lifted defensively. “I just wanted to be alone for the weekend and relax.”
He could tell she hadn’t been sleeping well. Usually she wasted a lot of time and gunk straightening her cloud of dark blonde hair, but today it was just pulled into a thick ponytail. And she looked pale and, while that could be partly because she wasn’t wearing any makeup, there were shadows under her hazel eyes.
“So you thought you’d come out here and open camp all by yourself?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, that was the plan, because I’m actually a capable, grown-ass woman.”
Scott recognized the defensive reflex to defend himself and squashed it. He hadn’t meant to imply she wasn’t capable of opening the camp for the year. He’d merely been surprised she would be comfortable being out here alone. But he didn’t bother trying to explain that because he knew from years of experience the ensuing conversation would just continue to go downhill.
And there wasn’t a lot to opening the camp, anyway. When power had gone in on the road, they’d paid the exorbitant amount to get lines run down their driveway. There was an unofficial caretaker of the camps on this side of the lake, and they paid him to close it up in the winter—draining down the water, winterizing and boarding up the windows—and then to reverse the process in the spring, along with checking out the chimney. Since the caretaker had both email addresses on his send list, they’d both gotten the email earlier that week letting them know the cabin was open for the season. It was a bare bones service, though, so Emily would have had lights, heat and running water, but everything else, she would have had to figure out for herself.
“Did one of the kids tell you I was coming?” she asked.
“No. I had no idea you’d be here, and I thought I’d do some work on the place.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked around the property, his gaze falling on all the things he’d meant to fix up over the years and never gotten around to. He had to do them now. “We won’t have any trouble selling the property because it’ll be the only camp for sale on this lake, but putting a weekend of work into minor repairs and some cosmetic stuff will raise the price.”
When she pressed her lips together for a long moment before turning away, he knew she was trying to keep her emotions in check. So was he, though he was a lot better than she was at hiding his feelings. According to her, he was incapable of sharing his emotions.
Whether that was true or not, he felt them. This had been his family’s happy place since the kids were little. It had been a chance meeting, running into an old friend whose godfather had passed, and nobody wanted the old camp. By the end of the week, he and Emily had fallen in love with the place based on a few photographs emailed to them and they bought it before it even went on the market.
“The kids are doing their own thing now,” he said in a low voice. “They’ve only been here a handful of times since they started working and driving. I don’t want to come here alone. And even though you wanted to get away this weekend, I don’t really see you doing it very often, either.”
Emily wanted to argue the point. He could see it on her face when she turned back to him. But it would be arguing for the sake of not agreeing with him because he was right and she knew it. Instead, she walked to the back of her car, opened the liftgate and pulled out a big cooler.
“I know it’s time to sell it,” she finally said. “I guess I wanted to say goodbye. And just be alone.”
Being alone sucked as far as Scott was concerned. He spent too much time alone in the two-bedroom condo he’d rented. The kids were grown, so there were no custody battles to fight, and they stopped by when they could. Since they still lived at home, they spent most of their down time with Emily while he watched television shows he didn’t care about and tried not to miss his family too much. It didn’t work.
“I already brought the rest of my stuff in,” Emily said, “but I… We can’t stay here together.”
As much as he wanted to dig in his heels and point out that doing work to raise the value of the camp was more important than her relaxing, he didn’t want to stay anymore. Being at the cabin was going to be hard enough, but now he’d seen her here and he wasn’t going to be able to get her out of his head. Watching her drive away and leaving him alone in this place would be too painful.
“I’ll go. I can do the work another weekend,” he said. “But I just drove three hours to get here, so I’m going to wait until the storm blows over before I leave.”
“What storm?”
“The storm that’s been in the forecast for at least two days,” he said, and the way her mouth tightened told him she’d taken that as a shot at her for not checking the forecast before heading north. And maybe it was. He hadn’t said the right thing to his wife in what felt like years.
He hadn’t known what to say to keep her. He hadn’t known what to say to stop her from leaving him. So there wasn’t much chance he was going to come up with the right words to get her back. And even if he did, he hadn’t made her happy the first time around, so what was the point?
Losing her once was killing him. He couldn’t even think about the possibility of losing her a second time. It was better left alone.
* * *
Scott had barely gotten the words out when the first raindrops started falling, so Emily hefted the cooler and hauled it to the covered porch. The last thing she wanted to do was spend an hour or two alone with him, trapped in the cabin together, but she couldn’t exactly send him on his way in an early spring storm, either.
Not that he would go. Scott was one of the most stubborn people she’d ever met.
