And as far as what she may or may not have felt about Elijah himself… well, she had liked him. At least, he thought she had. But it hadn’t been enough to keep her from leaving. So it was probably for the best that she had gone. After all, he had cared about her enough to want her to stay forever, and if she hadn’t felt the same way, the two of them didn’t belong in each other’s lives. They were in too deep for Elijah to have her here and know that she didn’t return his feelings, and he couldn’t possibly walk them back now.

  He shouldn’t have slept with her. It had been a mistake. If they’d never had that night, he would have felt able to beg her to stay. It wouldn’t have tormented him so much to think that she didn’t want to be here of her own accord.

  CHAPTER 21

  ALEX

  “Lady, I asked for five donuts, not six!”

  Alex did her best to keep the smile on her face as she faced the angry man on the other side of the bakery counter. “You did,” she agreed. “But we sell boxes of two, six, or twelve. I would have had to charge you the same price for five, so I went ahead and threw the sixth one in there for you at no additional charge.”

  “But I don’t want six,” the man snarled. “And I shouldn’t be charged for six if I’m not going to eat them all — that’s outrageous.”

  Alex sighed inwardly. “If you’d like you can pay for your donuts individually,” she said. “But donuts cost two dollars each, and the price for a box of six is ten dollars. So it’s going to come out to the same thing.”

  “You’re cheating me,” he raged. “You’re charging me for something I didn’t order.” He threw the donuts down onto the counter. “I don’t want any of these now. You’ve lost my business. Give me back my money.”

  Alex, who had been through this with her manager enough times now to know how that would turn out, opened the register and handed the man his money back. “I hope you have a nice day,” she said.

  The man growled incoherently at her, turned and stalked out the door.

  Alex glanced at her watch. She wasn’t a fan of this job, though she was able to acknowledge that her last job had spoiled her tremendously. Nothing was going to be as good as working for Elijah and Jack. Certainly food service would never hold a candle to it. But it was the first job she had been able to find in Herald Springs, the town she had decided to settle in.

  It wasn’t like her to stay this close to the last place she’d been. In the past, after leaving a job behind, she would travel to a whole new state to look for something else. That was part of what had made her life so exciting — the knowledge that there was always something new around every corner, that she wouldn’t be settling into a rut. And now here she was, less than a hundred miles away from Hope’s Creek, unable to let go of the past.

  It was just too difficult to think about leaving. Saying goodbye to Elijah and Jack was the hardest thing she had done in nearly a decade. She knew that once she crossed state lines, she would feel a sense of finality about the whole thing. Staying here was a way of delaying that feeling.

  Besides, she had told Jack that she would be here in these mountains. The thought of him looking in this direction and thinking about her, and meanwhile her being somewhere else, felt like a betrayal. Staying in the place she’d told him she would be was the least she could do. She owed him that much.

  At least her shift was over for the day. She’d had enough of being yelled at by angry customers. Her feet were sore, and the smell of donuts was making her feel slightly nauseated. She had hoped she would get used to that smell, having spent three weeks here in Herald Springs. She should have begun to adjust to it by now. But it only seemed to be getting worse.

  She grabbed a bottle of sparkling water from the cooler, rang it in at her register, and swiped her card to pay for it. At least that would help to settle her stomach.

  And it wasn’t as if she didn’t have an appetite. She’d been eating ravenously lately — in fact, she had taken a hit on her grocery budget because she kept finishing everything she’d bought to stock her fridge before the week was out and having to order takeout. Tonight would be no different. She’d used up the last of her boxed pasta last night, and already thoughts of a frozen pizza were on her mind. She decided to stop at the drugstore on the way home and pick one up, and maybe a bag of chips to go along with it.

  Inside the drugstore, she roamed the aisles, lamenting the loss of a personal chef to cook every meal for her. It was the most superficial reason to feel sad about leaving Jack and Elijah behind, but it was still part of what had remained on her mind. There were shallow reasons to regret what had happened, in addition to the deeper ones.

  She picked up a pizza and was deciding on a bag of chocolates instead of chips when it happened. A woman walked by her with a box of tampons in her shopping basket. It caught Alex’s eye, and the first thought she had was, I should really stock up.

  And then she paused.

  She hadn’t had a period since she had come to Herald Springs.

  Of course, that wasn’t all that odd. It had only been three weeks, after all. But now she was thinking back, trying to remember. When had her last one before that been? She couldn’t put a date on it, but she thought it had been very early in her time with Elijah and Jack.

  Too long ago.

  Suddenly, her brain was humming with nervous energy. It had been years since she’d had a pregnancy scare. She had sort of begun to believe those days were behind her, that this was something younger women dealt with. But now, she realized, she was going to have to take a test. She had to know for sure, one way or the other.

  Her mind still wasn’t quite processing the implications as she walked over to the appropriate aisle and picked up the little blue box. She felt as if she was on autopilot. And the feeling remained as she went to the self-checkout to pay for her items, thankful that this was a store that offered a self-checkout so that at least she wouldn’t have to cope with the moment of handing a pregnancy test to a clerk and wondering what he was thinking as he rang her up.

  She drove home in a stupor, feeling as if her mind was drifting somewhere outside her body, unable to bring herself back down to earth. This couldn’t be happening. She hadn’t wanted to relinquish her connection to Elijah — she’d been devastated by the fact that it had become necessary to let him go. But she had never intended to maintain their connection in this way. It was overwhelming.

  What would she do if this test came up positive? Her lifestyle was so erratic. It was hard to imagine adding a baby to the equation. It would have no sense of stability. And there was Elijah to consider — would she tell him?

  Don’t do this. Don’t borrow trouble. Maybe it’s nothing. Take the test.

  When she got home, though, she couldn’t bring herself to do it at first. She put her pizza in the oven and sat down at the kitchen table, waiting, hoping that her head would clear. It didn’t, and after a few minutes she got to her feet, picked up the test, and went into the bathroom.

  It was the longest three minutes of her life.

  But when the time was up and she stood staring down at the test results, there was no mistaking the little plus sign in the window. Her suspicions were realized. She was pregnant.

  She was going to have Elijah’s baby.

  She drifted back into the kitchen and sat down heavily, wondering what she was going to do now. She couldn’t go back to Hope’s Creek. Even though she thought Elijah would want to know about this, telling him seemed like to big a risk. She couldn’t forget about the way he had treated her when she’d called him out for not attending family day at Jack’s school. How would it be if they shared a child? How could she hope to be the kind of parent she wanted to be if she wasn’t even able to speak to her child’s father about his well-being without fear of him exploding at her like that?

  She couldn’t raise a child with Elijah. At the heart of it, that fact was the reason she’d left Hope’s Creek in the first place — it had been too hard to balance what was best for Jack with the way she and Elijah always seemed to interact with each other. She wasn’t going to be able to navigate that with a new baby, either, so it was best to keep her distance.

  She shivered.

  She was alone in the world. She had no one. There was no place she called home, no one she could rely on for help. And she was going to have a baby.

  If the last nine years had taught Alex anything, though, it was that she could rely on herself. She was strong and self-sufficient, and she knew she was equal to the challenges that lay ahead for her. She would manage this, one way or another. She would be the parent her baby needed, even if that meant making some compromises to her own life. She would find an apartment somewhere — not here, she couldn’t bring herself to stick with this donut job long-term, but somewhere. She would find a support network of friendly neighbors. She would find childcare options and register her baby for school.

  I can do these things. It’s going to be hard, but I know I can do it.

  Alex took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing her body to relax. This was going to be all right. It was unexpected and terrifying, but it wasn’t beyond the scope of what she could handle. She could do this, and she knew it.

  She got up and took her pizza out of the oven, reflecting on the insane fact that the entire world had shifted around her in the twenty minutes since she had put it in. Nothing was what it had been earlier this evening. She might as well have been a completely different person when she had woken up in the morning. She hardly knew herself anymore.

  She found herself aching, suddenly and fiercely, for her family. They would have been so excited to know that she was going to be a mother. They would have rallied around her, supported her completely. If they had been alive, she would never have missed having a father for her baby, because her own family would have been enough for her.

  But I’m going to have a family again, she realized. After all this time on my own, I won’t be alone in the world anymore. I’ll be able to say that I belong to someone.

  She felt a thrill at that. She’d had a hint of that feeling during her time with Elijah and Jack. Being with them had reminded her of what it had been like to be part of a family, and it was something she hadn’t felt in a very long time. It was, she realized, part of what made her so sure that she wanted to go ahead with this pregnancy. That despite the unusual circumstances, she was ready to have this baby.

  In that way, I suppose Elijah will always be with us. He’s the one who made me realize I wanted to be a part of a family again — that I was ready for that. Whatever I build from now on, I’ll always owe him for waking up that part of me.

  It was tragic that they couldn’t be together. But she didn’t know if he even would have wanted that, and she didn’t trust him enough to try.

  She would just have to handle this situation the way she did every other — on her own.

  CHAPTER 22

  ELIJAH

  Jack had been sitting outside in the yard all afternoon, playing with a stick in the dirt and intermittently staring off at the distant mountains. Sitting up in his office, Elijah had been looking down at his son every now and again, hoping that Jack would do something — get up and kick a ball around, maybe — anything to show that he was in a decent state of mind. But Jack didn’t move, and eventually Elijah couldn’t ignore it any longer. He got up and went outside to see what was going on.

  As he came up behind Jack, he glanced over his son’s shoulder to see what he had been drawing in the dirt with the stick he held — but it was nothing coherent. Elijah supposed he’d been hoping for words. It would be nice if Jack would provide some clear and obvious sign about what he was thinking. But parenting had never been an easy task.

  He knelt down beside his son. “What’s going on?” he asked. “You’ve been out here for a while.”

  “I’m just looking at the mountains,” Jack said.

  “The mountains?” Elijah looked off into the distance. “I didn’t know you were interested in mountains.”

  “I’m not interested in mountains, Dad. But that’s where Alex is.”

  Elijah frowned. It wasn’t healthy, the way his son’s thoughts kept returning to Alex. “What makes you think that’s where she is?”

  “She told me that was where she would be,” Jack said. “She told me that when I missed her, I could look at the mountains, and she would look back at me sometimes.”

  Elijah’s heart skipped a beat. “She told you that was where she was going?”

  It changed everything. It shouldn’t have — he had told himself he was committed to letting Alex go. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it, not completely — especially having seen the way Jack was hung up on her. How could he possibly move on while his son wasn’t able to?

  And Jack’s accusation had been rolling around in his mind for over a week now. What if it was true that Alex had only left because Elijah hadn’t fought hard enough to convince her to stay? What if she could have been convinced, and he had simply failed?

  What if he could still bring her back?

  If Jack knew where she was, that meant there was a chance.

  He put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “What else did she tell you?” he asked. “Did she mention anything about what job she was going to be doing? Did she say what town she would be in?”

  “No,” Jack said. “Nothing like that. She just said she would be in the mountains and that I could look for her there.”

  “Okay,” Elijah said.

  It didn’t feel like a decision, though he knew it was one. Rather, it felt inevitable. It felt as though this had always been what was going to happen. Was there ever a possibility that he might have learned this information about Alex’s whereabouts and not wanted to follow up on it? He didn’t think so. He couldn’t imagine turning away from her now that he knew.

  The key thing was to not tell Jack what they were doing. After all, there was no guarantee of success, and Elijah couldn’t let his son’s heart break again.

  It meant waiting a full two days, although he didn’t want to. Jack had a long weekend from school, and Elijah was able to come up with a story about wanting to take a road trip together during the break. Jack was dubious, of course. “Don’t you have to work?” he wanted to know.

  “I don’t have to work this weekend,” Elijah said. “I got a bit of time off, and you know there isn’t anyone I’d rather spend it with.”

  Jack frowned. “Why are we going on a road trip?”

  “Aren’t you having fun?”

  “We’ve just been in the car.”

  “We’re almost to our first stop.”

  The first stop was the little town of Tirsdale, on the outer edge of the mountains. It was a place Elijah had driven through before, but he had never actually stopped here. Now he pulled into a roadside motel. They’d stay the night and spent tomorrow canvassing the town. He would ask around — strangers and newcomers were sure to be noticed in a town of this size. If Alex had been here, someone would know and might be able to give him an idea of where to find her. And once he found her — well, he wasn’t quite sure what he would do then. Beg her to come back? Was there a chance she would listen to that?

  He supposed he was going to have to try. The time they’d spent apart had shown him beyond doubt that he didn’t want to live without her. It wasn’t just for Jack’s sake, either, although that was certainly part of it. But everything had been better when she’d been around. He had felt so much less alone in the challenges of raising a child. He had finally had a partner again.

  And it hadn’t hurt matters that he had developed very real feelings for her. He would have expected those feelings to fade in her absence, but if anything, they seemed to be getting more intense. He found himself missing her every day, and that feeling only seemed to grow stronger as time went on. It left Elijah feeling deep regret about the fact that he’d ever let her go. Even if Jack hadn’t been part of the equation, he knew, he would have come looking for her now. He would have wanted to bring her back.

  He just hoped she would be willing to listen — and that he would be able to find her. Both seemed like a bit of a long shot from where he sat tonight.

  “That place was boring,” Jack said as they drove away from Tirsdale. “There wasn’t anything there!”

  “You’re right,” Elijah agreed, even though he knew Jack was commenting on the lack of entertainment in Tirsdale and his own concern had more to do with the lack of Alex. “But I think you’ll like the next place we’re going. It’s at the top of the mountain!”

  “We’re going all the way to the top?”

  “There’s a little town called Herald Springs up there.”

  “Who’s Harold?”

  “Not Harold like the name. Herald. It’s a word.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” Jack said. “What does it mean?”

  “Um.” Elijah thought about it for a moment. “I guess it means something like… news. A herald is a messenger.”

  “So do the people in that town send a lot of messages?”

  “Maybe they do,” Elijah said. “We can ask them while we’re there.”

  They made good time up the mountain pass, which pleased Elijah, because he knew that people tended to drive slowly on these roads. It was still light outside when they reached Herald Springs and got checked into the bed and breakfast they’d found to stay in. It was a much nicer place than last night’s motel, and Elijah couldn’t suppress a surge of optimism. Things here already seemed to be going a bit better than they had in Tirsdale.

  “Why don’t we go out to dinner?” he asked Jack once the two of them had dropped off their things. “It’s about that time, and I think I saw a diner on the way in.”