Redemption Road (Jackson Falls #5) by Laurie Breton Page A

north, she couldn’t continue to drive around on summer tires
as smooth as a baby’s butt. Four new tires with treads deep enough to take a
bite out of snow and slush pretty much cleaned out her checking account, but
there was nothing she needed before next payday. She had a roof over her head,
a warm bed, food in the cupboard, and the means to earn her keep. It might not
be quite the lifestyle she’d lived in Palm Beach, but then, she’d never been
greedy. She’d fallen in love with Irv not because of his wealth, but in spite
of it. As she’d reminded him often, she would have loved him even if he’d been
a ditch digger.
    Halfway home, she saw the sign for Quarry Road, and without making
a conscious decision, Colleen clicked on her blinker, made a sharp right turn,
and took a journey into her past. Down a narrow paved road coated in black ice,
past a couple of ramshackle farms, to a nondescript trail, little more than the
width of a car, that led into the woods beneath old leaves and new snow. She
parked the Vega at the edge of the blacktop, thought about getting out of the
car and walking in. But at this time of year, even wearing boots, she’d have to
be suicidal to attempt the two-hundred-yard walk to the quarry. Instead, she
sat behind the steering wheel and watched the memories play like a movie reel
behind her eyes.
    A steamy summer night. The two of them, she and Jesse, stretched
out on the hood of his old red F-150, leaning against the cracked windshield,
sharing a can of warm Pepsi while they gazed at the canopy of stars overhead. She’d
been sixteen years old that summer, the summer her sister left Jesse at the altar,
the summer she was waiting to catch him when he fell.
    And fall he had, right into her waiting arms. She’d wooed him with
kisses and sympathy, this wonderful, amazing man, so kind, so handsome, with
that silver-blond hair, those cheekbones carved from granite, those dark eyes
that saw everything. How could her sister have walked away from him?  It
astounded her. It elated her. And it terrified her, because she’d loved him for
so long, and now that this opportunity she’d never expected to see had fallen
into her lap, she had no idea what to do with it.
    This had been their place. They’d spent hours at the quarry,
parked beneath the stars, just the two of them. Here, he’d introduced her to
alcohol. Here, they’d gone skinny-dipping. Here, they’d lost their virginity
together, one hot August night after she’d pushed him, for weeks, until he
reached the breaking point. At sixteen, she’d thought she was an adult, thought
she knew everything. But she’d been woefully naïve to the ways of the adult
world. All she could think about was being with him forever. Waking up next to
him every morning for the rest of her life. She hadn’t thought about the
consequences, hadn’t thought about what he might want, hadn’t thought beyond
her own selfish desires.
    It was here, at the quarry, where Mikey had been conceived. And it
was here, on a cool night in fall, where she’d told Jesse she was pregnant.
    The marriage had been a disaster right from the start. At
seventeen, she’d been too young to settle down with a husband and a baby, too
young to have given any thought to what kind of life she wanted. In her
naïveté, she’d somehow believed she would get married, and that would be it. She
would have achieved her life’s goal at the age of seventeen.
    Looking back, it seemed ludicrous. But she knew she wasn’t the
only girl her age who’d felt that way, who couldn’t see beyond the wedding to
what might follow. Wasn’t getting married the be-all and end-all to existence? 
In small-town Maine, that was what young girls of her generation, whose role
models had been their stay-at-home mothers, had thought. By the time she
realized it wasn’t—that life continued after marriage—it was too late. She had
a husband and a baby and a noose around her neck.
    The marriage had lasted