Mountain Sanctuary Read Online Free

garden. Her daddy was out there with Kyle, trying to clip the wisteria back before it took over the studio. Her mother had loved wisteria. But as beautiful as the purple, scented blossoms were this time of year, Stella knew even wisteria, left untamed, eventually suffocated everything in its path. The same way her mother had filled a room and suffocated everyone and everything in it, taking over, demanding, manipulating, the sweet scent of her perfume mixed with the charcoal smell of cigarettes wafting through the air until Stella would almost choke with the pain and grief of not measuring up, of not understanding that her mother was both brilliant and a bit mad.
    “Flighty.” That’s what her father had called his Estelle. Flighty and scatterbrained and tormented and talented. Not a woman made for maternal instincts, not a woman made to stay with one man. Not a woman to want her only daughter to bother her when she was working. One simple, hardworking man and one small, scared little girl, left behind, with only the scent of wisteria to comfort them.
    And yet, they’d both willingly come here to the home where the woman they’d loved had lived alone amongst strangers. And died alone, all of her guests gone. Maybe they were each hoping to catch a bit of Estelle’s elusive spirit, to be near the places she’d been near, to touch the things she’d touched.
    Stella hoped her father tamed that wisteria vine, once and for all. And she had to wonder for the hundredth time why she’d even bothered coming here. Did she want to be reminded of all that her mother had given up in order to have her freedom, her art? Did she want to be here so she could remember, or had she brought her son and her father here to start over, to forget?
    Daddy would tell her to put her trust in God. Daddy was a good, Christian man with a solid work ethic, but he’d had his heart broken long ago. Had that been a part of God’s grand plan for him?
    Stubbornly, Stella put her nose to a white lace-trimmed pillowcase, closing her eyes to take in the freshness of it. New, clean, washed. She prayed God would one day make her feel that way. And then she thought about Adam Callahan and wondered what his story was. What was he running from, to come here to this sad old house, to ask to be able to stay here? He’d called the Sanctuary a good place to lay his head. Maybe he was right there. It certainly was a place for confused, wayward travelers. Even if some of those travelers thought they were coming home.
    “Mama, why you got your nose in that pillow cover?”
    Her son’s words jarred Stella out of her musings. Opening her eyes, she tried to focus. “Oh, I was just enjoying the nice smell.”
    “Papa and me are thirsty. He sent me for lemonade. That store-bought stuff is pretty good. Papa said we can keep buying it, since the last time we tried to make it fresh, you poured the juice down the drain by accident.”
    Stella remembered. Five crushed lemon rinds and no juice to show for it, since she’d somehow managed to pour out the juice instead of the rinds. “I kind of got things backward that day, didn’t I?”
    Kyle grinned. “It’s okay. The kind we get at the store is powdery and already squeezed.”
    Stella looked down at her child, her heart unfolding toward him with a maternal surge of hope and pride. She loved her son, had loved him enough to fight for him, and she couldn’t imagine leaving him, ever. His daddy had been bad to the bone, but so good-looking and persuasive, so intense, that Stella had somehow overlooked that one big flaw. Stella had married Lawrence Forsythe on an impulsive whim, tinged with a passionate need to love and be loved.
    But their son, ah, their son was priceless, as perfect and pure as a fine piece of porcelain. As sturdy and strong as the timbers in this old house. He’d had to grow up too fast after his father’s death, but soon Kyle would have better. Kyle would survive and thrive, because Stella had her