The Truth About Love and Lightning Read Online Free

he’d walked out the door, mumbling something about crashing with Myron until she came to her senses. His head low, he’d dragged his heels down the hallway as though, any second, she would call him back and tell him she didn’t mean it, that having a ring on her finger didn’t matter.
    But it did. It really did.
    So Abby had shut and bolted the door behind him, thinking that any minute she would hear his key in the lock, that he’d come back and blubber that she was most assuredly the One and he couldn’t live without her.
    Five minutes passed, then twenty more, until an hour had gone by and Abigail had ascertained that he wasn’t returning. At least not right away. She had messed up her bed and now she had to lie in it.
    That fight seemed so long ago, especially since her call from Dr. Epps. Two weeks apart from Nate felt like years; fourteen long days in which they had spoken only a few times when he’d phoned to say he needed to drop by to pick up a gadget or more underwear. Abby had been careful not be anywhere around when he did. That would have only confused her all the more.
    Despite the fact that she considered herself an independent woman, she felt unsettled and weak without him, as if she’d removed an internal organ required to properly function. Then to hear that she was having a baby. Nate’s baby.
    It was almost too much to take.
    Abby knew she couldn’t stay in the apartment alone, not while she was so aware of the new life taking root inside her, the tiny seed of a baby that was partly Nate’s too. If she was going to get through this, if she was going to figure things out, it wouldn’t be here. She couldn’t tell Nate. She refused to have him beholden to her because of her pregnancy. If he came back—if they decided to make a go of it again—it had to be because of love and love alone.
    She couldn’t explain to her friends in Chicago, because they were Nate’s friends, too. They would spill the beans to him, and she wasn’t ready for that yet.
    The only place where she could take refuge was home. She craved a chance to pause and draw in a deep breath. Lots of deep breaths. Becoming a mother changed everything, and she was sure her own mom would understand better than most. When Gretchen had given birth to Abby, she had done it alone, and Abby needed reminding that such a fate wasn’t the end of the world.
    Besides, she felt inexplicably drawn to the farmhouse where she’d been raised. She yearned to soak in its calm and sleep in her old bed in the room that had once been her father’s—the father she’d thought about so often as a child, the one she’d wished so hard would return every time she’d blown out a candle on a birthday cake. Though she’d never met the man, he still loomed large in her life. Samuel Henry Winston, son of a walnut farmer, grandson of a rainmaker, and “the best friend I ever had,” according to her mother.
    Abby had only his photograph, one Gretchen had given her ages ago, of a teenager in overalls with a long face, dark hair, and piercing eyes. “He was like no one else, attuned to nature in ways most folks aren’t,” her mom had said. “When Sam wept, the clouds would open wide and cry with him,” Gretchen would explain while Abby ate up every word like she was listening to a favorite bedtime story. “And when he smiled one of his rare smiles, the sun beamed so brightly it was blinding.”
    “Do you figure he can see me?” Abby would frequently ask, and her mother had replied with an ebullient nod. “I have a feeling he’s watching you always and that he’s much nearer than you think. If he could find his way back, he would, I’m sure of it.”
    Just as Abby needed to find her way back now.
    Perhaps the baby was a sign that she’d gotten off track, that she’d lived her life according to Nate for so long that she’d pushed aside what was most important. Her mom and her aunts. The farm. The family. Her dad.
    “We’re going home,” she