The deep irony of looking for a fresh start here. This place that had made her, then unmade her. Tearing out each and every stitch that had held her together so she’d been forced to go off in pieces and find a way to repair what was.
It wasn’t holding. That was the problem.
All these years later. Nothing was healed, just hidden.
She felt like she’d left pieces splintered of herself all over the country. On rivers and lakes in the Midwest, in the Atlantic Ocean. In different towns and different cities, different jobs and groups of friends.
She’d been searching for things there, but it had only left her more fragmented. And none of it had brought her healing.
She’d been everywhere else looking for it. But she hadn’t been back home, not really. Visits with her parents, the will reading, the funeral, that wasn’t the same as really being here. When she came back she didn’t spend time on Main Street in town, didn’t visit old friends. She usually holed up in her parents’ house and went between there and The Miner’s House to spend time with Gram.
“If you can open this shop, you’ll stay?” Her mother’s expression was neutral, and Lark couldn’t really tell what her feelings were on the subject.
“Yes,” she said.
“Then try it,” Mary said. “Why not?”
“A ringing endorsement,” Lark said. “What about you two?”
“I figured I’d just line up the renovations for The Dowell House,” Hannah said, in her typical, straightforward fashion. “Avery and I have already gone back and forth on furniture, and I ordered some.”
“You didn’t ask me?” Lark asked.
Avery and Hannah both had the decency to look slightly guilty. “I didn’t think you’d care,” Avery said.
But they hadn’t asked.
Their skepticism about her ability to run a business combined with this felt...
Like something you’ve earned?
She ignored that. Even if it was true.
She felt nearly divided sometimes, into before and after. Before she’d left home, and after. When she’d been young she’d been...well, young. And probably a little bit spoiled because she was the youngest. She’d always wanted to have fun, to have good feelings because bad ones had been unbearable and she didn’t know how to keep them in, and when they came out it was always a whole meltdown.
And then after...
She’d just stopped letting herself show those feelings. She’d stopped...letting herself want so much. And if her family thought she was sort of a shiftless drifter then fine. It suited her. It kept her a little mysterious, which also suited her.
Except now you’re mad about it. And hey, you’ve moved home. So much for your distance.
“Do whatever you want with The Miner’s House,” Hannah said. “I can’t run a shop and I don’t need a little house.”
It was, maybe, the most tepid unanimous yes of all time, but Lark would take it.
She put her hand on top of the swatch book, and held the silver Christmas ornaments to it, looking at the silver glinting against the worn leather. Her grandmother would approve of the idea, she knew she would.
Gram had loved art. And she had fostered the love of it in Lark. In all of them, really. The Miner’s House had been the only place the three of them had ever gotten along.
“I’ll keep a bowl of candy on the counter,” she said.
Because her Gram would want the kids to be able to come in for candy still.
She just knew it.
“What’s that?” Mary pointed to the book that was on the table next to Lark.
“It’s not your business plan, is it?” Hannah asked.
Lark rolled her eyes. “No. Even I’m not a big enough hipster to put my business plan in a leather bound book.”
“I don’t know about that,” Avery said.
“I don’t know what it is. I grabbed it off the top of the craft boxes before I came down. I wanted to see what was in it.”
It was worn, the edges looking chewed and tattered. The leather cover was pale in the places where someone’s hands might have rested while holding it. She opened it up, and saw small, neat handwriting on the first page.
Memory quilt.
On the next page was a graph. A design for a quilt, with each piece laid out on the grid.
“Grandma was making a quilt,” she said. “This is...”
She turned the page. There was a scrap of lace affixed to it, and underneath it in that same handwriting it said: wedding dress.
“It’s like a swatch book. With fabric for the quilt.”
“That’s interesting,” Hannah said. She got up from her seat and move down to the end of the table, peering over Lark’s shoulder. “What else?”
She flipped the page where there was a very colored fabric in silk and velvet. “‘Parlor curtains.’” She went to the next page, which had a fine, beaded silk. “‘Party dress.’”
“There’s all kinds of stuff like this up in the attic,” she said. “Remember when Gram used to let us go through her collection and choose things to craft with? Broken earrings and old yarn and fabric. And always tons of unfinished projects lying around. Obviously she intended to make this quilt. Maybe she even started it. And it’s somewhere up there with all of the...the unfinished things.”
Unfinished.
Because it was why she was here. She was one of the unfinished things.
Being here, opening the café, it would give her a chance to finish some of what her grandmother had started.
Maybe along the way she’d manage to join up some of the unfinished pieces inside her own soul.
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Confessions from the Quilting Circle
Available May 2021 wherever HQN books and eBooks are sold.
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Copyright © 2021 by Maisey Yates
From USA TODAY bestselling author
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ISBN-13: 9780369701152
Copyright © 2021 by Maisey Yates
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Copyright © 2021 by Jeff Johnson, interior illustrations
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