When Light Breaks Read Online Free Page A

‘troubles,’ and my mother disapproved. Before he left, he told me he loved me and would come back for me. And I knew he would.”
    “Did he?” I glanced again at my watch—one minute remaining until I had to leave to meet the dressmaker downtown.
    Mrs. Mahoney sighed, picked up the book, then placed it back on her lap. “Did he what?” she asked.
    “Come back for you?”
    “Who?”
    “The boy across the lane,” I said, then blew a long breath.
    “You need to find him.” She lifted both hands in the air, as if in supplication.
    “Who?”
    “The boy across the lane.”
    “Mrs. Mahoney, I don’t know the boy across the lane.”
    “Not my boy. Your boy.” She rolled her eyes, as if I exasperated her and not the other way around.
    “He lived next door, not across the lane,” I said. We had obviously steered into the land of confusion. “I’ve got to get going, Mrs. Mahoney. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “Ahya,” she said, “you be thinking about what I said now, won’t you? I don’t want to be the only one telling stories around here. We trade stories, you and I. You know, when you start to think about things, talk about them . . . they happen.”
    “Oh?” I stood.
    “You know, dear, everything happens for a reason. You’ve been sent to me, I do believe. Yes, I do believe that. You look much like me in my younger days—dark waves of hair, green eyes, marrying the right man. Now you be careful what you believe—it is who you are.”
    “What?” I gathered my satchel, looked down at Maeve.
    “You will help me, I know you will.”
    “Well . . . ,” I said, “I will visit you. I promise. I’m not sure how much I can help you, though.”
    “Oh, we’ll get to that in good time. We will. As I tell you the story, we’ll get to that. There has to be a way to find him now.”
    I nodded, not knowing what else to do, and completely unsure who she wanted me to find. She lifted her right hand as though she were giving a benediction. “An áit a bhfuil do chroí is ann a thabharfas do chosa thú.”
    Gibberish, I was sure. So I nodded and smiled at her.
    “It means, Your feet will bring you to where your heart is.” Her eyes slid shut.
    A sinking feeling of inadequacy overwhelmed me. I had no idea what language she was speaking, but it wasn’t mine.
    I left Verandah House and ran out to the car—the Mercedes Daddy had given me when he bought his new Ford F-150 after he decided he was truly a pickup truck kind of man. Which is absolutely not the kind of man he was; a Mercedes was just his style. But what twenty-seven-year-old woman in her right mind tells her daddy she doesn’t need a Mercedes, that he looks like a fool driving back and forth to his law office in a four-by-four pickup truck?
    I drove through Palmetto Pointe to the dressmaker and thought about Peyton Ellers—the man I would marry. And I smiled.
    I once believed love was an elusive emotion—coming and going, leaving and staying whenever it caught a whisper of ocean breeze. The kind of love that stays, that sticks in the chambers of the heart, is the type of love that is only a mere longing or remembering. I believed this because it was all I knew, all I understood.
    I loved Mama, but she was gone. I once loved Jack Sullivan, but he was also gone. I loved Daddy, but he was a changed man, and sometimes I thought I only loved what I knew of him, what I remembered of him from the days before Mama died. I watched couples who professed their true love, and I often, very often, wondered if they really loved each other right then, right at the moment they said it, or only that they had once felt it, experienced it and then convinced themselves it was forever.
    I had come to understand that I would never love enough to marry, enough to say, “Okay, yes—let’s spend the rest of our lives together.” I’d become fond of a couple of men, even forced the word “love” from my lips. But never enough, never quite enough to promise