Read Online Summer of Two Wishes by Julia London - Free Book Online Page B

heavy for her to lift, and Macy had cried and cried waiting for Luke to come. The dog had died with his head in Macy’s lap before Luke could get there.
    A few weeks later when the first calf got sick, she’d felt completely helpless.
    “Your dad and Brodie and Luke tried to help out when they could,” she said quietly. “But they have their own lives and Luke was opening the clinic, and Brodie had started a new job, and they couldn’t come around as often as I needed them, and then some of the cows got sick and we had to destroy some. The ranch was bleeding money and I couldn’t seem to stop it.”
    “No need to explain,” Finn said.
    “No, I need to explain,” she insisted, desperate to justify a decision that had seemed so right at the time. “I know better than anyone how much the cutters meant to you. It killed me to do it, you have no idea. I felt like I was abandoning a part of you .”
    He snorted and glanced impatiently over his shoulder. “You mean the part of me you could remember?”
    “What?”
    Finn looked up; his eyes were flashing with…anger? Disappointment? “Just going back to what you said, Macy. You said I started to disappear from your memory. My hands, my feet…So when did I disappear completely? When you sold my horses?”
    “That…that is so not fair,” Macy said, her voice low. “You are misconstruing what I said. You never disappeared, Finn, not for a moment. You were always in my thoughts and in my heart,” she said, pressing her hand against his heart.
    He covered her hand with his, squeezed it. “Until Wyatt Clark showed up, anyway,” he said.
    She pulled her hand from beneath his. “Please don’t do that. You cannot begin to understand how deeply I mourned you and how ecstatically happy I am that you are alive.” But as the words left her mouth, she realized how hollow they must sound. “Losing you hurt worse than anything I have ever felt. People would ask, How are you coping, Macy? and I’d say fine. But I wasn’t fine. I wasn’t coping. And I didn’t tell anyone because words couldn’t describe the pain I was feeling.”
    Finn nodded. “You know the thing I keep wondering? I wonder when you decided to move on. How long did you mourn me—mourn us—before you were ready for someone else? You’ve been married seven months, so somewhere between three years ago when you thought I died and seven months ago when you remarried, you said, okay, I’m ready,” he said, gesturing between those two invisible dates.
    “You’re being unfair.”
    “Macy.” He sighed and raked a hand through his hair. A chunk of it fell back over his eye. “I’m only trying to understand how long you gave it before you let me go and let him in. It’s a fair question.”
    “Finn, stop —”
    “I can’t help but ask! You helped me get out of there! I had this fantasy of you, and all the things we’d do when I was free. I’d imagine how many dogs and horses and cows we could fit on the ranch.” He laughed wryly and looked down. “I had this fantasy that we’d travel, and we’d have this great life with lots of kids, and I imagined Christmas mornings with them, or teaching them to ride, or watching them play football or act in one of those little kid plays they do in elementary school.”
    He looked up again, his expression sad and angry. “But then I came home and found you married to someone else, and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around that. Sorry if I ask some hard questions, but I think I’m entitled to know.”
    Macy’s belly began to roil.
    “Did he come around looking for a grieving widow?” Finn asked curiously.
    “No,” Macy said. Wyatt wasn’t like that. “Dad introduced us.”
    Finn snorted at that. “So the old man just showed up one day and introduced you to your next husband?”
    “Finn, please,” Macy said, pressing a hand against her abdomen. “We had buried you.”
    “Just tell me how long you waited after you thought I’d died before