Page 5

"Aww, but he's so appreciative. Look at him. He's smiling at me."

With the corners of his mouth pulled back as his tongue lolled out, she supposed it did look like his scrunched up little face was grinning.

And it made her mom smile, which was rare these last several months, so maybe slipping the dog a few treats wasn't such a bad thing.

Suddenly a foul odor drifted up from the floor. "Oh, God." Colleen waved her nose in front of her face.

"Frankie, you need to go outside if you're going to make bad smells."

"The only reason he's making bad smells is because you keep feeding him human food!"

Her mother dismissed this with a wave of her thin hand. "I've heard it's part of their breeding. Frenchie's have a delicate constitution."

Exactly why he shouldn't be eating your dinner every night, Colleen didn't bother to say out loud. Instead, she asked her mother if she had any plans for the day. Predictably, Eileen shrugged and said something vague about sorting through more of Bill's things.

Colleen stifled a sigh. She knew that rather than sorting through Bill Murphy's clothes, papers, and knick-knacks, deciding what to keep, what to give to relatives, and what to give to Goodwill, her mother would spend yet another day sitting among a pile of his things, picking them up one after another as she stared off into space.

"Why don't you meet me for lunch? We can go to Adele's."

Her mother shrugged noncommittally. "Sweetie, would you mind going to the office to get me some stamps?"

"Sure." Colleen pushed herself off the stool and started for the hallway that led to the office.

"I think they're in the center drawer."

Her footsteps echoed off the worn hardwood floors. The same hardwood floors, she was pretty sure, that had been installed when the house was built nearly a hundred years ago. Much of the furniture too was antique, lovingly refurbished by her parents over the years.

The house, and the land it was built on, had been in her father's family for four generations. The once two-hundred-acre parcel had been winnowed down to just twenty over the years as the earlier generations had sold it off, but her parents had managed to hang onto the house and the last bit of land.

Not for the first time, she wondered how her mother was going to manage out here alone. Even when her father had been alive, the house had seemed too big for just two people.

That had been okay when her brother Liam had intended to move back to the house with his wife, Kristie, and his eight-year-old son, Colin. At that point he would help his parents build a smaller, one-level house on the property that would be more manageable for them as they got older.

Of course, that was before Kristie decided that not only did she not want to live with, or even next door to, Liam's parents—she didn't want to live with Liam anymore either.

At that point, all talk of Liam moving back to the property stopped. Colleen had asked him about it shortly after she'd moved back.

"It's one thing for a married man and his family to move back with his parents into a house he's eventually going to inherit. It's another for a divorced man of thirty-four to move back in with his mommy and daddy. Makes me look like a loser."

"Thanks a lot," replied Colleen, who had just finished unpacking and putting her things away in her childhood bedroom.

"You know what I mean."

"Divorced. Moving back in with Mom and Dad. Feeling like a loser. Sounds about right."

"It's different and you know it. You came home to help with Dad. He and Mom need you."

And, Colleen admitted to herself, she had needed this. She needed to be home, surrounded by people who loved her, living and working among friends who didn't see her as just the poor, pathetic wife who was too clueless to realize her husband was cheating with someone they all worked with.

Although she was sure many of her friends and coworkers in Big Timber wondered how the girl who once seemed to have it all had fallen so far.

She shook off the maudlin thought as she pushed open the door to the office. It was a small space, with just an antique secretary style desk and a wooden chair with a leather padded seat. A telephone sat on the desk and, in a nod to modernity, a wireless router rested on the floor. A handwoven rug gave the room a cozy feel, and the single window overlooking the creek offered plenty of natural light, as well as the soothing sound of running water when it was open.

Not the worst place in the world to write letters and pay bills.

Colleen pulled open the center drawer of the secretary, jiggling it a little as the old wood stuck on the runners.

It was the same as always. A jumble of stationery, pens, paper clips. But no stamps.