When Light Breaks Read Online Free

chair with a pink-flowered cushion. I attempted not to disturb her as I pulled the wedding files from my satchel and flipped through Southern Bride magazine, scouting ideas for my bouquet until I found just what I was looking for: white and pink peonies with a satin bow tied around the bottom, Swarovski crystals on the end of thin silver rods poking out of the flowers like rain. I reached for my tabbed wedding notebook, turned the plastic-sheathed pages to “Flowers” and stuffed the picture inside. I wrote the details on a lined, legal-sized pad of paper.
    Forty minutes passed as I worked on my wedding, and Maeve slept, making soft snoring noises. Then her voice cracked. “Is that a wedding magazine you’ll be looking at?” There was an Irish lilt to the words.
    I startled, glanced up at her. “Yes, it is. Hello, I’m Kara Larson. I’ve come to sit with you a while . . . maybe read to you or whatever you’d like.” I spoke the words the volunteer coordinator had told me to say.
    Maeve’s wrinkled hands stroked the sides of the chair; she squinted at me and leaned forward, pointed to the magazine. “You getting married?”
    “Yes. In about eight weeks. . . .” I nodded.
    “To your first love?” She pushed a strand of curly gray hair off her face. Her eyes were the color of green sea glass, the kind that has been washed in the ocean for years, worn clear and smooth.
    I laughed. “No, but I love him very much.”
    Her eyes filled with tears, glistening over the green. “No one ever marries their first love anymore. There is just too much . . . else to do. Too many options. Always looking for the next best thing, when it is usually the first best thing that was the best thing all along.” In her Irish accent, her simple words sounded like a poem.
    I took a deep breath—what could we talk about now? “Did you marry your first love?” I asked.
    “Now there is a story,” she said. “A beautiful story of love and betrayal, full of truth.”
    “Tell me,” I said, glancing sideways at my watch.
    “You first, you first. Who was your first love?”
    A twinge of betrayal pinched beneath my chest. I shouldn’t even think about my first love, not with my fiancé—Peyton’s—four-karat princess-cut diamond perched on my left hand.
    “Peyton . . . he’s the man I’m marrying.” Why was I having this discussion with a woman who still had oatmeal from breakfast on her chin?
    “No . . . go back. Before him. Before the first kiss. Before the first time you said you loved him. Back further.”
    “What?” Yes, she was mad. “Before what?” I asked, groping for some appropriate response.
    “Back to the first boy who gave you butterflies. The first boy you wrote about in your diary; the one you loved, really loved. Not the first boy you slept with, but the first boy you dreamed about.”
    “Slept with? Why, Mrs. Mahoney.” I covered my mouth with my palm. Where was she going with this?
    “Yes, before him.”
    I closed my eyes. I didn’t have to reach that far back—he lay like the cornerstone of my memories, as if all the others were formed on top of his. His name rolled off my tongue as though I’d said it yesterday. “Jack Sullivan.”
    “Yes, him. That far back. What happened to him?” Maeve leaned forward in a quick movement.
    “I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen years old.” I looked at her.
    Then a tear dropped from her eye, ran to the top of her cheek and joined the oatmeal on her chin. I reached for a Kleenex on her wooden bedside table and wiped both from her face. A slow wave of something painful and lost long ago overcame me. If I was forced to define it, I’d have called it hopelessness.
    “Why not?” she said, or maybe sang.
    “What?” I threw the Kleenex in the wicker wastebasket.
    “Why haven’t you seen him?”
    I shrugged. I would not discuss Jack Sullivan.
    Mrs. Mahoney took a deep breath. “He lived across the lane. His father and brothers were involved in the