A Hickory Ridge Christmas Read Online Free Page A

times since he’d arrived in town on Friday. He’d studied that familiar dwelling, wondering whether she was inside and hoping she would pick that moment to go out to her car.
    Todd closed his hand over the slip of paper. “Thanks, Andrew.”
    â€œWill you do me one favor when you talk to Hannah?” Andrew waited for his nod before he continued, “When you’re talking, will you be sure to listen, too?”
    Of course he would listen, Todd thought as he climbed in his car and turned out of the church lot onto Hickory Ridge Road. He would listen, but he couldn’t imagine what Hannah would have to say. She had nothing to apologize for; that was his department alone. Yet, an uncomfortable sensationsettled between his shoulder blades. Why did he get the sense that Andrew knew something he didn’t?
    Â 
    â€œWhat are you doing, Mommy?”
    Hannah turned from the medicine cabinet mirror where she was repairing her makeup. Rebecca, dressed only in a pair of red cotton tights, underwear and a lace-trimmed undershirt, stared up at her from the bathroom doorway.
    Quickly, Hannah turned her back to her daughter and brushed the last of her tears away with the back of her hand. “Nothing, honey. You go ahead and finish changing your clothes. Remember to lay your dress out on the bed so I can hang it up, okay?”
    â€œOkay,” Rebecca answered, though she would likely forget and leave the Christmas plaid dress in a pile on the floor. She started to leave and then stopped, turning back to her mother. “Are you crying?”
    â€œNo. Not really.” Hannah pressed her lips together. Now she was even lying to her daughter. When would it all stop? “I guess I am a little sad.”
    â€œDon’t be sad, Mommy.” Rebecca wrapped her arms around her mother’s thighs and squeezed.
    â€œGo on now,” she said, fighting back another wave of emotion.
    As soon as Rebecca skipped down the hall, Hannah started swiping at the dampness again. She’d managed to hold herself together all through the ritual of collecting her daughter from her church program and through the drive home, but Hannah’scontrol had wavered the moment she was alone, changing out of her church clothes.
    Todd? In Milford again? Come to think of it, she didn’t even know why he was in town. She might know that answer now if she’d given him a chance to speak. But how could she? Without any notice, she wasn’t prepared to face him. Who was she kidding? Even with six months notice, she wouldn’t have been able to come up with a valid explanation for what she’d done.
    All of her excuses for not telling him—her anger for his leaving, her choice to never reveal the identity of her child’s father, her rationalization that Todd didn’t deserve to know—now sounded like the incoherent ramblings of a teenage girl.
    That was what they were.
    How could she ever have thought she had the right to withhold the information from him that he was a father? No one had that right to wield so much power over other people’s lives.
    She had to tell him; that was a given. And she would. Soon. She just needed a little time to regroup first. After that, she would ask around and find out whom he was visiting and how long he would stay. She would tell him everything then, but she would do it on her terms.
    Hannah nodded at the mirror, her thoughts clear for the first time since Todd appeared at her church and tilted her world on its axis.
    A knock at the front door, though, set her thoughts and her newly settled world spinning once again. Was it Todd already? No, it couldn’t be. He wouldn’t evenknow where she lived, although he would only have to ask her father to get that information. Reverend Bob, who still didn’t know the whole truth, either.
    Rebecca reappeared in the bathroom, this time wearing a reindeer sweatshirt with her tights. “Somebody’s