Forever This Time Read online

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  For Joshua and Adriana, my tiny angels

  Acknowledgments

  I have so many people to thank for their help in making this book a reality, and I’m thrilled and excited to do so:

  First—and rightly so—huge thanks to my superb agent, Courtney Miller-Callihan. Thank you for your tireless work and undying support. I am a lucky, lucky gal to have found you.

  To Holly Ingraham, my fabulous editor—Thank you for falling in love with Echo Lake, and for your superb guidance and keen eye. I pinch myself every day, and I’m thrilled to be on Team Holly!

  To Lizzie Poteet—Thank you for so graciously stepping in to help when Home-team Holly became an instant foursome! I’m so lucky to get to work with you!

  To my funny, generous friend, critique partner, and newly-minted Golden Heart sister, Jennifer Brodie—You are my Xanax and my Prozac and my champagne … sometimes all on the same day! Thank you … for everything.

  To the Bartlett Bunnies—None of this would be as sparkly and fun without you gals to share it with! Thank you for the late nights, the hundreds of what ifs, and way too much chocolate.

  To Caroline Lyon MD, MPH, for her grace and patience in answering way too many medical questions—Thank you for your help, your friendship, and your support!

  To Jennifer Carroll, PT, for also answering a gazillion questions regarding stroke and recovery—Huge thanks. Any errors are mine alone.

  To my family, who keep me grounded, keep me (usually) sane, and teach me gorgeous lessons of love every single day—Thank you, from the depths of my heart.

  Lastly, to the parents of those who got their angel wings too early—Our journeys differ, but our hearts share a hole. I am in awe of all who survive it.

  Chapter 1

  “Dad?” Josie barely heard her own voice over the beeping machinery dwarfing the ICU bed. “Oh God. Daddy?” The words were strange on her tongue as she stumbled closer. This couldn’t be her father, this motionless shape under hospital blankets. This couldn’t be the man who ran twenty miles a week and crowed his perfect blood pressure and BMI to anyone who’d listen.

  She stared at her father’s face. His skin was sallow, slack, dry as rice paper. Droplets collecting in the oxygen cannula gave the only indication that he was even alive. She felt her knees jiggle as her breath hitched, and she reached blindly for the rail beside the bed.

  “Ma’am?” A sharp voice startled her from behind. “Only immediate family in here.”

  Josie nodded slowly, but couldn’t rip her eyes from the Dad-shaped creature on the bed. “I’m family,” she whispered—that word, too, feeling odd enough in her mouth that she didn’t even attempt immediate. “He just doesn’t know me.”

  Josie felt a hand on her elbow and turned around slowly to face a rotund nurse whose perky blond ponytail tried hard to belie the age lines around her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, then jumped as blood pressure cuffs buzzed awake and made the blanket over Dad’s legs rise upward. “I’m … I’m his daughter.”

  “Daughter?” The nurse’s eyes were quizzical. “Goodness, I’m sorry. We didn’t know.”

  “You wouldn’t have. I’m not really … expected.” Josie winced as she said the words.

  The nurse came around to face her, putting her hand out gently. “I’m Gayle.”

  “Josie.” She shook Gayle’s outstretched hand.

  “Do you want to sit while I check on him?”

  Josie stared at the still face on the pillow, unable to open her mouth and answer. Her feet felt glued to the shiny floor, and the chair right next to her felt twenty feet away. This was the man who spent half his life ho-ho-ho-ing around the family’s Christmas theme park in a Santa suit, for God’s sake. He was never still.

  She glanced up at Gayle, who was checking machines and typing information into her laptop. “So it was definitely a stroke?”

  Gayle nodded, pointing to the side of her head. “Right cerebral hemorrhage.” She closed the laptop and started adjusting some tubing that looked all tangled up at the head of the bed. “I’m almost done here. I can leave you alone if you’d like to stay for a couple of minutes. You can try talking to him. He can probably hear you.”

  Josie shook her head. No, talking was the last thing she wanted to do.

  “You can just tell him about your day. Tell him about the weather. Doesn’t matter. Just let him hear your voice.”

  Josie sighed. “I’m sorry, Gayle, but honestly—if he hears my voice, he might have another stroke.”

  * * *

  Ethan sat in his desk chair checking the news, but when he’d read the same headline four times, he clicked the window closed. He tried not to stare at the empty chair across from him, but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t believe Andy was in the hospital. Couldn’t believe he’d had a stroke.

  Couldn’t believe Josie was on her way back to town.

  He pushed his chair away from the desk and looked back out the window. The sparkle and glitter of Snowflake Village twinkled at him from every tree, every ride, every pathway. Camp Ho-Ho, Josie had always called it. Alternate-reality center of the universe.

  For the millionth time in five years, he thought about what she would say if she saw him sitting in the CFO chair at her family’s theme park, his desk parked head-to-head with her own father’s. He looked down at his red polo shirt with the official snowflake logo on the breast. It was a far cry from the dress blues and military bars he’d always thought he’d be wearing by now, but a Rutland linebacker had altered that life plan with a bone-crushing tackle during the state finals eleven years ago.

  Instead of a military assignment overseas, he had a permanency rating in his right knee and a job running a holiday theme park. Not exactly the life he’d envisioned, but he’d been grateful when Josie’s father had offered him the CFO job after it became crystal-clear that Josie wasn’t going to come back and take it.

  But now she was coming back to Echo Lake. It had taken a life-or-death situation to get her here … but here she’d be.

  He swore softly when he realized he was absently rubbing his left ring finger.

  Quick footsteps on the stairway startled him, and his stomach leaped. Was she here? He caught a flash of flaming red hair coming around the doorway and let out a relieved breath. Not Josie, thank God. Just her old best friend.

  Molly burst dramatically into the office. “You have to save me!” She flopped into Andy’s empty chair, her vivid green eyes sparkling as she peered over her shoulder toward the door. “These blind dates are disasters!”

  Ethan looked at her, then at the hallway, then back at her. Even to this day, he found it amusing that she and Josie had been best friends for their entire childhood. She was as vivacious as Josie was reserved, as loud as Josie was quiet.

  “You being chased by a serial killer? Or an Italian?”

  “B.” She fanned herself with a piece of paper
. “I think I lost him at the Frosty Freeze.”

  “Need me to check the security cameras?”

  She sat up straighter. “Would you?”

  “No, Mols, I will not. Your dating issues are your problem, not mine.”

  “If you’d just marry me, I wouldn’t have any dating issues. One more stupid lousy setup date and I’ll drag you to City Hall myself, just to get Mama off my back.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “As cave-girlish as that sounds, I think I’ll take a pass.”

  “Mama’s convinced I’m going to wither up and die any day now if I don’t find a husband.”

  “I’m not sure it’s quite that desperate yet.” Ethan tried not to smile.

  “Oh, you have no idea. The woman’s gone off the ledge.”

  “What’s she done now?”

  Molly sighed. “Italian love match dot com.” She practically spat out the words.

  “An Italian dating site?”

  “Kill me now.”

  He laughed. “Looks like Mama B’s already got that job wrapped up.”

  “I didn’t even think she knew how to do more than order restaurant supplies on that stupid computer. Now she’s trying to order me a freakin’ husband.”

  “Well, you can’t blame a mom for trying.”

  “Stop laughing.”

  “I really can’t. I’m so sorry.” He rattled his fingers on the keyboard, pretending to type. “Italian. Love. Match. Dot com, you said? Let’s see. Molly Bellini.”

  Her sparkly blue flip-flop hit him in the head before he had time to duck. “Can’t we just pretend to be married or something?”

  “No. Absolutely not. Your family is completely nuts. We’d have terrible children.”

  “But at least we’d have some! I don’t honestly think Mama cares if I’m married. She just wants grandbabies.”

  “Sorry, Mols. You’re on your own with this one. It’ll take a stronger man than me to marry a Bellini.”

  “You’re no fun.” She looked at her watch. “Didn’t we make a pact back in junior high that we’d marry each other if we hadn’t found anyone else by the time we were thirty?”

  “No. And we’re not thirty.”

  Molly got up to peer out the window. “Okay, enough about me. Let’s talk about your dating issues.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “Not ready to let me click save on that dating profile yet?” She winked.

  “Please tell me you didn’t.”

  “You’re right.” She sat back down in Andy’s chair. “I didn’t. So what’s up? You have your serious face on suddenly.” She chewed her pinky nail just like Josie had done long ago when she was nervous. Funny how they’d mirrored each other’s habits without even realizing they were doing it.

  “Andy had a stroke last night.”

  “A—what! Andy? Santa?” She shook her head. “No.”

  Ethan nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

  “How bad?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s sure yet.”

  Molly squeezed her eyes shut, rubbing her index fingers on her forehead. “Do you think Josie knows? I mean, I know she doesn’t have anything to do with them, but…” She looked up. “Should we try to find her?”

  “She knows. Diana apparently spoke to her this morning.”

  “Is she … going to come?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well.” Molly edged her next nail into her mouth, nodding slowly. “Wow. But she’ll be at the hospital, right? Not here. She wouldn’t come back to the park, would she?”

  Ethan took a long, deep breath. “I don’t know.”

  “She wouldn’t. She hates it here. Camp Ho-Ho, right?”

  “I know.”

  “But you look worried.”

  “I’m pretty sure Diana will want her at Mercy. Can’t imagine why Josie would even want to set foot near this place.”

  “Except … Josie hates hospitals. And her mother.”

  Ethan nodded. “That’s what scares me.”

  Molly stood up, pacing the small office. “So what’s your plan?”

  “Haven’t had time to make one. We’ll see, I guess.”

  Molly winced as she got to the window and looked down at the courtyard. “Just a suggestion, but you might want a more concrete plan than ‘we’ll see’ if Josie Kendrew walks through that igloo door down there. It’s been ten years since you’ve seen her.”

  “I’m well aware of that, Mols.”

  “Are you going to head up to Mercy to see her?” Ethan could tell she was trying to keep the hurt out of her voice, but he could hear it anyway.

  He shook his head, picturing an unworn tux, a set of shiny new wedding bands in a ten-year-old box.

  “I don’t know, Molly. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Chapter 2

  “Have a happy ho-ho day!” chirped a big plastic reindeer head, startling Josie as she ducked through the arched igloo entrance to Snowflake Village two hours after she’d fled the hospital. The jangle of Christmas carols spewing from the ceiling speakers still made her twitch, even after ten years away.

  It might be August everywhere else in America, but in this little alternate-reality retreat in Vermont, it was Christmas. Always Christmas. Three hundred sixty-five freakin’ days of Christmas.

  “Stuff it, Rudolph,” she grumbled as she tried to wrangle her way through the little turnstile. She’d been sitting in the parking lot for a full forty minutes, baking in the August heat, trying to convince herself to walk through the stupid igloo. It was shaping up to be one of the worst days of her life, and she didn’t need a big fake reindeer-on-Prozac recording to remind her what a good mood everyone else was in.

  “Uh-oh. Is someone having a cranky day?” The reindeer head bobbed toward her, its glassy eyes freakishly focused on her face as she stopped dead and whirled around.

  That fake head had been talking since she was a kid, but it had always been just a recording, not a camera with ears. Fantastic. She hadn’t even gotten into the park yet, and she was already insulting Rudolph.

  “I’m sorry.” She grimaced. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

  “I’m not supposed to hear a lot of things. You have a happy ho-ho day, now.” The mechanical head turned toward the family coming in behind her.

  Had the fake eye winked?

  She headed through the arched doorway that dumped guests into the central courtyard, and dug for her sunglasses. She told herself it was because it was sunny, not because she was hoping to disguise her presence here for as long as possible while she got her bearings.

  She’d driven here from the hospital on autopilot, and she still wasn’t even sure why she’d come. The psych major in her recognized some deep-seated need to find a way to reconnect with a dad she didn’t know anymore—to return to the place where he was so … alive—but the angry teenager still buried deep inside couldn’t believe she’d just walked back through that igloo after all this time.

  After all, this was the place where reality sat happily stowed in the back seat. It was the place where she’d found hope and love … and then lost both in one fell swoop.

  She hadn’t been back here in ten years—had been happy to put the going-nowhere town of Echo Lake firmly in the rearview mirror and head off to Boston to make a new life.

  But now? Now the dad who’d been in a Santa suit last time she’d seen him was lying in a hospital bed with more questions than answers in his medical chart. Now, the mom who’d spent most of Josie’s childhood in a fog was waiting for her to come back to that wretched hospital.

  And instead of facing either of those things, she was here, where at any moment she could run smack into a muscular, gorgeous, six-foot-two memory.

  Josie took a deep, shaky breath as she looked around. As much as she’d spent the entire drive from Boston trying to prepare herself to be here in Echo Lake again, she wasn’t at all sure she could handle it. At all.

  Yes, she was an adult now. And yes, she’d l
eft a long time ago. So presumably, she’d had plenty of time to steel herself against the past—especially against the man who’d figured front and center in that past. She’d certainly be able to see him again, talk to him, look into his eyes without regretting the fact that she’d left him practically at the altar.

  Wouldn’t she?

  She shook her head. Maybe that’d be true if the man had been anyone but Ethan, whose secretive smile and smoky blue eyes had threatened to undo half the females at Echo Lake High. Maybe it’d be true if he wasn’t the guy whose quarterback pedigree and sharp wit could have chosen any female in town, but instead had filled her senior year with flowers and silly notes and hot nights at the lake.

  Ethan had been her first … and she’d thought he was going to be her forever.

  She looked to her left, where the igloo entrance gave way to a row of brightly colored cottages. First was the Pepto-Bismol-colored penny candy store, then a tropical-blue gift shop with a rainbow-painted door, and then a sunny yellow ice cream parlor with tiny patio tables out front. The colors practically screamed, Isn’t this just the most happy-happy place in the universe?

  She sighed and adjusted her sunglasses, trying to mute the buildings.

  A breeze picked up the ends of Josie’s hair again as she reached the edge of the courtyard. Her eyes caught on the polka-dotted umbrella tables at the ice cream parlor, then skated inadvertently toward the administration building, aka Elf Central, a white Victorian with deep purple shutters on every window.

  It actually looked cool and inviting on this already hot morning, set back from the courtyard on a grassy lawn with two huge sugar maples out front, but there was no way she’d walk through its double-sized front door before she had to. Ethan was probably in there, sitting at his desk on the second floor—the desk Dad had always said would be hers.

  Josie forced her eyes to the other side of the courtyard, trying to focus on anything but Ethan. A split-rail fence still extended outward from the igloo, running behind a portico full of strollers, a Snow White–style cottage that housed restrooms, and what looked like a new medical building with a bright red cross on the door.