When Lark Ashwood’s beloved grandmother dies, she and her sisters discover an unfinished quilt. Finishing it could be the reason Lark’s been looking for to stop running from the past, but is she ever going to be brave enough to share her biggest secret with the people she ought to be closest to?
Hannah can’t believe she’s back in Bear Creek, the tiny town she sacrificed everything to escape from. The plan? Help her sisters renovate her grandmother’s house and leave as fast as humanly possible. Until she comes face-to-face with a man from her past. But getting close to him again might mean confessing what really drove her away...
Stay-at-home mom Avery has built a perfect life, but at a cost. She’ll need all her family around her, and all her strength, to decide if the price of perfection is one she can afford to keep paying.
This summer, the Ashwood women must lean on each other like never before, if they are to stitch their family back together, one truth at a time...
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March 4th, 1944
The dress is
perfect. Candlelight satin and antique lace. I can’t wait for you to see it. I
can’t wait to walk down the aisle toward you. If only we could set a date. If
only we had some idea of when the war will be over.
Love, Dot
Present day—Lark
Unfinished.
The word whispered
through the room like a ghost. Over the faded, floral wallpaper, down to the
scarred wooden floor. And to the precariously stacked boxes and bins of
fabrics, yarn skeins, canvases and other artistic miscellany.
Lark Ashwood had
to wonder if her grandmother had left them this way on purpose. Unfinished
business here on earth, in the form of quilts, sweaters and paintings, to keep
her spirit hanging around after she was gone.
It would be like
her. Adeline Dowell did everything with just a little extra.
From her glossy
red hair—which stayed that color till the day she died—to her matching cherry
glasses and lipstick. She always had an armful of bangles, a beer in her hand
and an ashtray full of cigarettes. She never smelled like smoke. She smelled
like spearmint gum, Aqua Net and Avon perfume.
She had taught
Lark that it was okay to be a little bit of extra.
A smile curved
Lark’s lips as she looked around the attic space again. “Oh, Gram…this is
really a mess.”
She had the sense
that was intentional too. In death, as in life, her grandmother wouldn’t simply
fade away.
Neat attics,
well-ordered affairs and pre-death estate sales designed to decrease the
clutter a family would have to go through later were for other women. Quieter
women who didn’t want to be a bother.
Adeline Dowell
lived to be a bother. To expand to fill a space, not shrinking down to
accommodate anyone.
Lark might not
consistently achieve the level of excess Gram had, but she considered it a
goal.
“Lark? Are you up
there?”
She heard her
mom’s voice carrying up the staircase. “Yes!” She shouted back down. “I’m…trying
to make sense of this.”
She heard
footsteps behind her and saw her mom standing there, gray hair neat, arms
folded in. “You don’t have to. We can get someone to come in and sort it out.”
“And what? Take it
all to a thrift store?” Lark asked.
Her mom’s
expression shifted slightly, just enough to convey about six emotions with no
wasted effort. Emotional economy was Mary Ashwood’s forte. As contained and
practical as Addie had been excessive. “Honey, I think most of this would be
bound for the dump.”
“Mom, this is
great stuff.”
“I don’t have room
in my house for sentiment.”
“It’s not about
sentiment. It’s usable stuff.”
“I’m not artsy,
you know that. I don’t really…get all this.” The unspoken words in the air
settled over Lark like a cloud.
Mary wasn’t artsy
because her mother hadn’t been around to teach her to sew. To knit. To paint.
To quilt.
Addie had taught
her granddaughters. Not her own daughter.
She’d breezed on
back into town in a candy apple Corvette when Lark’s oldest sister, Avery, was
born, after spending Mary’s entire childhood off on some adventure or another,
while Lark’s grandfather had done the raising of the kids.
Grandkids had
settled her. And Mary had never withheld her children from Adeline. Whatever
Mary thought about her mom was difficult to say. But then, Lark could never
really read her mom’s emotions. When she’d been a kid, she hadn’t noticed that.
Lark had gone around feeling whatever she did and assuming everyone was
tracking right along with her because she’d been an innately self focused kid.
Or maybe that was just kids.
Either way, back
then badgering her mom into tea parties and talking her ear off without
noticing Mary didn’t do much of her own talking had been easy.
It was only when
she’d had big things to share with her mom that she’d realized…she couldn’t.
“It’s easy, Mom,”
Lark said. “I’ll teach you. No one is asking you to make a living with art, art
can be about enjoying the process.”
“I don’t enjoy
doing things I’m bad at.”
“Well I don’t want
Gram’s stuff going to a thrift store, okay?”
Another shift in
Mary’s expression. A single crease on one side of her mouth conveying
irritation, reluctance and exhaustion. But when she spoke she was measured.
“If that’s what you want. This is as much yours as mine.”
It was a four-way
split. The Dowell House and all its contents, and The Miner’s House, formerly
her grandmother’s candy shop, to Mary Ashwood, and her three daughters. They’d
discovered that at the will reading two months earlier.
It hadn’t caused
any issues in the family. They just weren’t like that.
Lark’s uncle Bill
had just shaken his head. “She feels guilty.”
And that had been
the end of any discussion before any had really started. They were all like
their father that way. Quiet. Reserved. Opinionated and expert at conveying it
without saying much.
Big loud shouting
matches didn’t have a place in the Dowell family.
But Addie had been
there for her boys. They were quite a bit older than Lark’s mother. She’d left
when the oldest had been eighteen. The youngest boy sixteen.
Mary had been
four.
Lark knew her mom
felt more at home in the middle of a group of men than she did with women.
She’d been raised in a house of men. With burned dinners and repressed
emotions.
Lark had always
felt like her mother had never really known what to make of the overwhelmingly
female household she’d ended up with.
“It’s what I want. When is Hannah getting in tonight?”
Hannah, the middle
child, had moved to Boston right after college, getting a position in the
Boston Symphony Orchestra. She had the summer off of concerts and had decided
to come to Bear Creek to finalize the plans for their inherited properties
before going back home.
Once Hannah had
found out when she could get time away from the symphony, Lark had set her own
plans for moving into motion. She wanted to be here the whole time Hannah was
here, since for Hannah, this wouldn’t be permanent.
But Lark wasn’t
going back home. If her family agreed to her plan, she was staying here.
Which was not
something she’d ever imagined she’d do.
Lark had gone to
college across the country, in New York, at eighteen and had spent years living
everywhere but here. Finding new versions of herself in new towns, new cities,
whenever the urge took her.
Unfinished.
“Sometime around
five-ish? She said she’d get a car out here from the airport. I reminded her
that isn’t the easiest thing to do in this part of the world. She said
something about it being in apps now. I didn’t laugh at her.”
Lark laughed,
though. “She can rent a car.”
Lark hadn’t lived
in Bear Creek since she was eighteen, but she hadn’t been under the impression
there was a surplus of ride services around the small, rural community. If you
were flying to get to Bear Creek, you had to fly into Medford, which was about
eighteen miles from the smaller town. Even if you could find a car, she doubted
the driver would want to haul anyone out of town.
But her sister
wouldn’t be told anything. Hannah made her own way, something Lark could relate
to. But while she imagined herself drifting along like a tumbleweed, she
imagined Hannah slicing through the water like a shark. With intent, purpose,
and no small amount of sharpness.
“Maybe I should
arrange something.”
“Mom. She’s a
professional symphony musician who’s been living on her own for fourteen years.
I’m pretty sure she can cope.”
“Isn’t the point
of coming home not having to cope for a while? Shouldn’t your mom handle
things?” Mary was a doer. She had never been the one to sit and chat. She’d
loved for Lark to come out to the garden with her and work alongside her in the
flower beds, or bake together. “You’re not in New Mexico anymore. I can make
you cookies without worrying they’ll get eaten by rats in the mail.”
Lark snorted. “I
don’t think there are rats in the mail.”
“It doesn’t have
to be real for me to worry about it.”
And there was
something Lark had inherited directly from her mother. “That’s true.”
That and her love
of chocolate chip cookies, which her mom made the very best. She could remember
long afternoons at home with her mom when she’d been little, and her sisters
had been in school. They’d made cookies and had iced tea, just the two of them.
Cooking had been a
self-taught skill her mother had always been proud of. Her recipes were hers.
And after growing up eating “chicken with blood” and beanie weenies cooked by
her dad, she’d been pretty determined her kids would eat better than that.
Something Lark had
been grateful for.
And Mom hadn’t minded if she’d turned the music up loud and danced in some “dress up clothes”—an oversized prom dress from the ’80s and a pair of high heels that were far too big, purchased from a thrift store. Which Hannah and Avery both declared “annoying” when they were home.
Her mom hadn’t
understood her, Lark knew that. But Lark had felt close to her back then in
spite of it.
The sound of the
door opening and closing came from downstairs. “Homework is done, dinner is in
the Crock-Pot. I think even David can manage that.”
The sound of her
oldest sister Avery’s voice was clear, even from a distance. Lark owed that to
Avery’s years of motherhood, coupled with the fact that she—by
choice—fulfilled the role of parent liaison at her kids’ exclusive private
school, and often wrangled children in large groups. Again, by choice.
Lark looked around
the room one last time and walked over to the stack of crafts. There was an old
journal on top of several boxes that look like they might be overflowing with
fabric, along with some old Christmas tree ornaments, and a sewing kit. She
grabbed hold of them all before walking to the stairs, turning the ornaments
over and letting the silver stars catch the light that filtered in through the
stained glass window.
Her mother was
already ahead of her, halfway down the stairs by the time Lark got to the top
of them. She hadn’t seen Avery yet since she’d arrived. She loved her older
sister. She loved her niece and nephew. She liked her brother-in-law, who did
his best not to be dismissive of the fact that she made a living drawing
pictures. Okay, he kind of annoyed her. But still, he was fine. Just… A doctor.
A surgeon, in fact, and bearing all of the arrogance that stereotypically
implied.
One of the saddest
things about living away for as long as she had was that she’d missed her
niece’s and nephew’s childhoods. She saw them at least once a year, but it
never felt like enough. And now they were teenagers, and a lot less cute.
And then there was
Avery, who had always been somewhat untouchable. Four years older than Lark,
Avery was a classic oldest child. A people pleasing perfectionist. She was organized
and she was always neat and orderly. And
even though the gap between thirty-four and thirty-eight was a lot narrower
than twelve and sixteen, sometimes Lark still felt like the gawky adolescent to
Avery’s sweet sixteen.
But maybe if they shared in a little bit of each other’s day-to-day it would close some of that gap she felt between them.
Excerpted from Confessions From the
Quilting Circle by Maisey Yates, Copyright ©
2021 by Maisey Yates. Published by HQN Books.
About the Author
New York Times Bestselling author Maisey Yates lives in rural Oregon with her three children and her husband, whose chiseled jaw and arresting features continue to make her swoon. She feels the epic trek she takes several times a day from her office to her coffee maker is a true example of her pioneer spirit.
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