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

for a decade, but by the time of its
official dissolution, it had unofficially been over for a very long time.
    Now, parked by the side of an icy winter road,
thirty-five-year-old Colleen tried to muster some kind of empathy for her
sixteen-year-old self. After all, she’d only done what women had been doing
since the beginning of time: she’d tricked the boy she loved into marrying her.
Occasionally, that kind of marriage worked out. More often, it didn’t. Especially
when the feelings were all one-sided. It had taken time and distance to clarify
the truth in her mind:  While she’d loved him with the kind of obsessive love
only a young girl can feel, Jesse had never truly loved her. If she hadn’t
gotten pregnant, he never would have married her.
    And what on God’s green earth was the purpose of this little trip
down Memory Lane?  Her marriage to Jesse had ended a long time ago. They’d both
moved on with their lives. As far as she knew, he was happy now, with a new
wife and a new little girl. Their son was eighteen years old, a grown man, older
now than she’d been when she delivered him. Those years, that young girl she’d
been, were long behind her. So why the sudden nostalgia for the good old days? 
Which, if you looked at them closely, hadn’t been all that good.
    It was this place. This damnable town that she couldn’t escape
from quickly enough. A shiver ran down her spine, and Colleen cranked the
heater, which was no match for this frigid winter day. She released her
emergency brake and pulled away from the shoulder, found a driveway a half-mile
down. There, she wheeled the car around, and pointed it back in the direction
of her apartment, her only sanctuary. The only place where, if she was very
lucky, the ghosts of the past couldn’t follow her.
     
    ***
     
    She spent the afternoon cleaning house. After five days of working
8 to 5 and coming home, exhausted, to flop into an easy chair in front of the
television with a frozen TV dinner, there was plenty to keep her busy:  laundry,
dusting, washing the floors, scrubbing the toilet. She borrowed Casey’s Electrolux
and cleaned the carpets, took the small area rugs onto the landing outside her
kitchen door, hung them over the railing, and beat the crap out of them with a
broom, the way Mama had done when she was a little girl. When she was finished,
the small apartment gleamed, and Colleen felt a sense of pride way out of
proportion to what she’d actually done. For the first time, this place felt
like hers. Home . But she steamrolled over those useless feelings until
they were nothing but roadkill. She couldn’t allow herself to grow attached to
anyone or anything; she’d be moving on soon, and she didn’t want any regrets
when the time came.
    At dusk, as she was sipping tea and listening to oldies on the
radio, Jackson Browne rocking her on the water, there was a tap on her door. She
opened it to find Paige, Rob’s teenage daughter, on the other side. Like her
father, the girl was tall, slender, a little gawky. All knees and elbows and
awkward charm, with a cascade of wheat-colored curls that tumbled down her back.
“Casey sent me over to invite you to the get-together,” Paige said. “At
six-thirty, at Trish and Bill’s house.”
    “Come in,” she said. “It’s cold outside. What get-together?”
    Paige stepped into the kitchen and Colleen closed the door. “It’s
a family thing,” the girl said, stamping snow off her boots. “We get together
on Saturday nights, a couple times a month. Sometimes here, sometimes at Aunt Trish
and Uncle Bill’s house, sometimes at Aunt Rose and Uncle Jesse’s.”
    This was the kind of “family thing” she was determined to avoid. “Probably
not a good idea,” she said. “Especially considering that Trish isn’t overly
fond of me, and Jesse’s my ex-husband. You can only take the word family so far.”
    “Hey, don’t freak out on me. I’m just passing on the message.”
    The kid had