The Presence of Grace (Love and Loss #2) Read Online Free Page A

ridiculous, I felt guilty for planning to meet with a woman. And as if my guiltometer needed to be calibrated, my phone rang in my pocket. It turned out to be Evelyn calling. I’d dodged her phone call earlier in the week and couldn’t bring myself to ignore her again. She didn’t deserve that.
    “Hey, Evie,” I answered, trying to sound upbeat.
    “Devon, hi. How are you?”
    “Good. Just leaving a conference with Jaxy’s teacher.”
    “Oh, yeah? Are the kids there?”
    “No, they’re with my mom.”
    “Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “But that’s probably good. Do you have a second?”
    “Yeah, sure,” I replied, pushing the doors of the school open and walking out into the warm air of the night. The tone of Evie’s voice worried me though; she sounded like she had bad news. Or news she thought I wouldn’t take well.
    Evie and I had been on better terms since she’d come to visit us a few months before. There’d been a period when we didn’t really communicate. I let her talk to the kids whenever she wanted, encouraged it even. Evie was one of the last connections Ruby and Jaxy had to their mother and I would never keep her away, but it was too difficult to talk to her myself. But a lot of good had come of her visit. Seeing her happy and healthy went a long way to making me feel like we’d all made the right decisions, like we’d actually done what was best for everyone.
    “Nate and I want to fly to Florida during the kids’ spring break and take them to Disney World.” Evie pushed the words out rapidly and I knew she was nervous. I could tell by the tone of her voice she had her eyes squeezed shut and her cheeks bunched up, bracing for the worst. I could picture her in my head. “We don’t want to intrude, so if you already have plans, I completely understand. I just miss them and thought it would be something fun—ˮ
    “Evie, slow down. Breathe.” I heard her give a sad and nervous laugh, but then she inhaled and exhaled, loud enough for me to hear her. “Okay, so you’re coming to Florida and you want to go to Disney World?”
    “We thought it would be fun. Have they been yet?”
    “Yeah, but it was almost two years ago and I mean, come on, it’s Disney.” The air in my SUV was stifling. Even after almost three years I hadn’t learned to crack my windows. I started the car and cranked the air-conditioning.
    “So you wouldn’t mind if we came for a visit?”
    “Of course not.” I heard a girly squeal and could picture Evie bouncing up and down, her blonde ponytail swinging behind her. It had taken a while for the ache to go away every time I thought about her, so I was glad when picturing her didn’t make me uncomfortable. Quite the opposite, in fact. Hearing Evie happy made me happy. We could add that to the list of things we never thought would happen: perhaps I’d managed to release the weird hold I’d had on Evie since we were in college. But then again, I never actually had her to begin with.

Chapter Three
    Grace
    “You’ve made a terrible mistake,” I said to myself, turning my car into a spot at Marco’s. I’d been telling myself variations of that same sentiment the entire drive there. “Nothing good can come of this,” I mumbled, putting the car in park and pulling the keys from the ignition.
    He’d looked almost exactly as I remembered him, which was surprising seeing as how the last time I saw him he was standing in the dark, crying. His hair was blond. He was tall and broad. Well-built. Big, but not overly bulky. Back in Fairbanks he’d been wearing a light jacket when I found him crying against the wall of the school, but tonight he’d just been wearing a polo shirt. My eyes had immediately been drawn to the way his sleeves stretched across his biceps, which were large and defined.
    “Oh, my goodness. This is a terrible idea.” I let my forehead rest against the steering wheel, trying to give my thoughts an opportunity to settle. I couldn’t not go