Threading the Needle

Book 4: Cobbled Court Quilts

by Marie Bostwick

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

From New York Times bestselling author Marie Bostwick comes a beautiful novel of sisterhood lost and found—and of the ways we create the rich tapestries that encompass the past and the future.

The economic downturn has hit New Bern, Connecticut, and Tessa Woodruff’s herbal apothecary shop, For the Love of Lavender, is suffering. So is her once-happy thirty-four-year marriage to Lee. They’d given up everything to come back to New Bern from Boston and start their business, but now they’re wondering if they made the right decision. To relieve the strain, Tessa signs up for a quilting class at the Cobbled Court Quilt Shop, and to her surprise, rediscovers the power of sisterhood—along with the childhood friend she thought she’d lost forever.

Madelyn Beecher left New Bern twenty years ago and never looked back. But when her husband is convicted of running a Ponzi scheme and she’s left with nothing but her late grandmother’s cottage, she is forced to return to the town she fled. Unfortunately, the cottage is in terrible shape. Madelyn’s only hope is to transform it into an inn. But to succeed, she’ll need the help of her fellow quilters, including the one friend she never thought she’d see again—or forgive. Now Madelyn and Tessa will have to relive old memories, forge new ones, and realize it’s possible to start over, one stitch at a time—as long as you’re surrounded by friends.

Release date: January 28, 2011

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

August 2009

I try to resist the urge, but as I sit in the offices of Blackman, Janders, and Whipple, located on the forty-eighth floor of the Mancuso Tower, a cathedral of excess located on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-sixth Street, I can’t stop myself from adding it all up in my head and marveling at the true price tag of what Sterling used to call “a lifestyle.” How did I fail to see it before? And how am I going to live without it?

How am I going to live at all?

The Oriental rug that sits under the antique mahogany partners desk of my attorney, Eugene Darius Janders, is hand-knotted silk and worth thirty thousand dollars at least—enough to buy a new car. It’s very fine, though not as fine as the one in the library in our house in the Hamptons. I mean, the house that used to be ours. And if I added up the rest of the furnishings in Gene’s office, it would probably be enough to buy a nice little cottage in the country for cash. Not a cottage in the Hamptons, mind you, but someplace quiet and removed from the city. Connecticut, maybe.

Then there’s his wardrobe. Gene’s suit is summer-weight wool, tan, two button, side-vented, custom made, probably in London, priced somewhere between five and seven thousand, which, even in New York, is enough to pay a month’s rent for a two-bedroom apartment in a very decent part of town. His blue paisley tie, designed by Brioni, retails for one hundred and ninety-five dollars—enough to buy a week’s groceries. I think. It’s been a while since I did my own grocery shopping.

And the shoes. Oh, the shoes! Hand-tooled calfskin, individually and exquisitely custom made by John Lobb for a very small, exclusive clientele—the trust-fund set, celebrities, the upper echelon of Manhattan’s successful lawyers, men like Eugene, a few brokers and money managers, including my husband, Sterling Baron, once one of New York’s most successful fund managers, now one of its most notorious—men who don’t balk at spending five thousand dollars for shoes. Only the very well-heeled can afford to stride down the sidewalks of New York in a pair of made-to-measure Lobb loafers.

Forgive me. That was a terrible pun, I know. But these days I have to take my humor where I can find it. At the moment, nothing about my life is especially funny.

Four months ago Sterling and I spent, for more than it takes to buy a pair of Lobb oxfords, a weekend in the Boathouse Suite at The Point, a very exclusive resort on the shores of Upper Saranac Lake, and we did it without even looking at the bill.

Was that only four months ago? That seems another lifetime, another life . . . because it is.

Exclusive. What a word. I used to think it meant limited to a small number of the “best” people, but I’ve recently come to realize it means limited to whoever can pay, a club to which my membership has just been rescinded, as Eugene was now explaining.

“Bottom line is, Madelyn, you’re broke.”

I laughed nervously. “You mean broke like I’ll have to rent out the house in the Hamptons this summer? Or broke like I’ll have to apply for food stamps?”

“Madelyn, haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said?”

“I’ve been trying very hard not to.”

“You don’t have a house in the Hamptons anymore. The feds have seized it, and the condo in Vail, and the Bentley. The only reason you’re still in your apartment is because I convinced the judge to give you until the end of the month to move out.”

I felt a pressure in my chest. For a moment, I wondered if I might be having a heart attack, but I’m only fifty-six and in perfect health. I wasn’t dying; I was panicking.

“But where am I supposed to go? Can’t you get the judge to change his mind? I had nothing to do with this! I didn’t cheat the investors out of their money, Sterling did. The investigators have cleared me of any wrongdoing. I knew nothing about it.”

It’s true. I didn’t know anything about it. Sterling was rich when I met him, rich when I married him, and as time went on, he just got richer. He never talked to me about his business. There was no point, he said; matters of high finance were way over my head. “You can’t be smart and beautiful, Madelyn, so why don’t you stick to beautiful? That’s what you do best.” When we first married, he said it with a laugh, but after a few years, with a sneer.

Sterling was one of the most successful fund managers in New York. Even in years when the market was down, Sterling’s investors made ten percent minimum. Nobody cared how, not until Bernie Madoff was exposed and suddenly the success of money managers with the Midas touch, people like Sterling, was called into question.

I didn’t even know Sterling was under investigation until we came home from our weekend at The Point. I remember everything about that weekend, how strange it felt, not because we hadn’t been there before—we go to The Point at least two or three times a year—but because of the way Sterling was acting. He was . . . how shall I explain it? Attentive. He looked at me, looked me in the eye the way he hasn’t looked at me in years. I wondered what he wanted. I kept waiting for him to say something, or do something, or ask for something. But he didn’t. He just kept looking at me. And he held my hand when we walked to dinner. He hadn’t done that since . . . well, not for a very long time. And he didn’t bring his cell phone along. He didn’t make or take any calls for the entire weekend. Maybe that doesn’t seem unusual, but that’s because you don’t know my husband. Once, we went to dinner at the White House and Sterling left during the salad course to take a call from his secretary. Of course, he was sleeping with his secretary at the time, but that particular call, I believe, was about business.

Anyway, Sterling didn’t talk on the phone once that weekend. He talked to me. He listened to me. And for a little while, it was nice, almost like it was in the early days, when he cared, back in the days when I cared too. So long ago.

We didn’t talk on the drive home. Sterling seemed to pull into himself. I kept going over the weekend in my mind, thinking that maybe, just maybe, we might be happy, that Sterling had undergone some transformation, decided to be a real husband to me. I wondered if that could be true. And I wondered if it wasn’t too late.

Returning home, we were met by stern-faced FBI agents who handcuffed my husband and took him away while I stood watching, hoping I’d wake up from this nightmare soon. I didn’t.

Sterling seemed unfazed. With his hands behind his back, half hidden by the starched whiteness of his French cuffs, he calmly told me to call Mike Radnovich and cancel their golf game and then to ask Gene to meet him at the police station.

Gene has never liked me. The feeling is mutual, but he’s very good at his job. If anyone could get us out of this mess, it was Gene.

“Seriously, Gene, can’t you do something? Talk to the judge, get me some more time? You did it before. I didn’t do anything wrong, so why am I being punished? Where do people expect me to live? On the street?”

Gene leaned forward, his forearms resting on his desk. “Madelyn, don’t you get it? No one cares. Over the years, Sterling took twenty billion dollars from his clients, told them he was going to invest it for them, all but guaranteed them a minimum ten percent annual return, and then sat on the money. Compared to Madoff, Sterling is small potatoes, but still . . . a billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money. People are angry and they’re looking for someone to blame.”

None of this was news to me, not anymore. Gene had given up referring to the charges leveled against Sterling as “allegations” weeks before. Eugene Janders is a brilliant litigator, but he’s not a magician. Even his talent has its limits. After looking at the evidence, Gene said that Sterling’s only chance of not dying in a prison cell was to plead guilty, display remorse, and hope for a lenient judge.

He was probably right. Even so, I couldn’t help but notice that Gene offered this advice right after our bank accounts had been frozen. You can call me cynical (and you’d be right), but I couldn’t help but wonder. Would Gene have been quite so ready to throw in the towel if Sterling still had access to an almost unlimited supply of cash to pay for the services of Blackman, Janders, and Whipple? Sterling’s admission of guilt might be his best shot for a lighter sentence, but it was also the cheapest way for Gene’s firm to rid itself of an unwinnable case and a client whose pockets weren’t nearly as deep as they’d been. It was all very convenient.

“Sterling kept the game going by reeling in new fish and using their money to pay off his longer-term investors. As well as,” Gene said after a dramatic pause—he had a habit of always speaking as if he were addressing a jury—“financing his lavish lifestyle . . . and yours.

“A lot of people have lost a lot of money, Madelyn. Little old ladies don’t have enough to pay rent at their assisted living communities. Folks who were looking forward to a secure retirement on a golf course are realizing that they’re going to have to keep working for years to come. Parents who had scrimped and saved to make sure their kids could go to college are filling out applications for educational loans that will leave them in debt for years. Families are losing their homes. Charities that entrusted their endowments to Sterling are being forced to cut back programs or even close—”

“I know that!”

Gene shook his head sorrowfully and continued, ignoring my interruption. “And every time those people turn on the television, or boot up the computer, or flip through a tabloid, they see a picture of Sterling coming through the door of his private plane—with you behind him. Or Sterling at the helm of his yacht—with you sitting next to him. Or Sterling, in his custom-made tuxedo, walking down the red carpet at a Broadway premiere—with you on his arm, wearing a diamond choker from Harry Winston—”

“I don’t have it anymore! I had to give it up. All my jewelry, everything Sterling ever gave me. Even my engagement ring,” I said through gritted teeth. The loss of the ring didn’t bother me. If I hadn’t had to surrender it to the court, I’d have happily thrown it in Sterling’s face.

“No judge who cares about public opinion,” Gene droned on, “and that’s all of them, is going to stick out his neck to help the wife of Sterling Baron right now. No one cares about your problems, Madelyn. People have problems of their own.”

“I understand that! And I feel terrible about it, but it’s not my fault. If I’d known what Sterling was up to, I’d have left him, or stopped him, or . . . something, but I didn’t know! I’m as much a victim of his schemes as anyone else,” I said, ignoring the twitch at the corner of Gene’s mouth.

“I’ve lost everything too. What am I supposed to do now? Where am I supposed to go? The government has seized all our assets, frozen all our accounts.”

“So you were paying attention.”

“Yes!” I snapped. “I know I’m not a Rhodes Scholar, Gene—Sterling was always so quick to remind me—but even I can understand words like ‘Madelyn, you’re broke’!”

Gene reached into the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Don’t bother getting out your handkerchief, Gene. I’m not going to cry.”

He stared at me, to see if I meant it. I stared back.

“Just tell me what I’m supposed to do now. What have I got left? There must be something.”

Gene’s eyes flitted over the surface of his desk as he looked for and eventually found a blue file folder. “There is,” he said, opening the file. “You’ve got an account in your name, and your name only, which is a good thing, at the Connecticut National Bank.”

“I do? Oh, wait! I do! I remember now. The money I’d saved before I married Sterling. I’d forgotten. It’s been sitting there all this time?”

Gene nodded. “And gaining interest.”

“Really? It can’t be that much, though.”

“It isn’t,” he said. “New Bern National is pretty conservative. Still, your average return over the last thirty years was a little more than seven percent, which means your little nest egg is now worth $119,368.42.”

A hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Less than the cost of my surrendered diamond choker. Less than the annual maintenance fee on the penthouse apartment I had to vacate by the end of the month, leaving everything behind—my furniture, my paintings, my china—everything but my clothes and what few possessions I could prove had been mine before my marriage.

“Cheer up, Madelyn. It could be worse. You could have invested your money with Sterling. Then you’d really be broke.” Gene started to chuckle, but I shot him a look filled with such loathing that he dropped his eyes and mumbled an apology.

“I was just trying to help you see the bright side.”

“I’m sure.”

He cleared his throat and shuffled the papers in my file. “I’ve got some more good news,” he said officiously. “I lit a fire under my associates, got them to hurry along the probate of your grandmother’s estate. It’s done. You can claim your inheritance free and clear. Good timing, don’t you think?”

My inheritance?

“What are you talking about? She cut me out of her will years ago, even before I met Sterling.”

I felt a flush of heat in my chest. Even from the grave, Edna Beecher, the meanest, most disapproving old woman who ever walked the earth, could still upset me.

“She was bluffing? I can’t believe it. How much did she leave to me?”

Gene held up his hand. “No money. She split that between her church and the Humane Society. Not that there was much to begin with. She left you the house—”

“The house? On Oak Leaf Lane?”

“Yes.” Gene drew his brows together. “Did she have another house?”

“No . . . I just . . .” I said quietly, laying my hand over the warm place on my chest, “I’m just surprised. It’s known as Beecher Cottage. Our family is distantly related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous abolitionist who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her father, Lyman Beecher, and Henry Ward Beecher, her brother, preachers who were nearly as famous as Harriet in their day. They lived in Litchfield, east of New Bern.

“You see what pious Yankee stock I’m descended from,” I said with a hollow laugh. “My grandmother was almost as proud of her Beecher heritage as she was disappointed in me. The cottage is the last remnant of that heritage. I never thought she’d leave it to me.”

“According to her will, she didn’t want to,” Gene said, picking up a yellowed paper and scanning it. “But it seems the old lady couldn’t bear to leave the family house in the hands of strangers, so, as the last Beecher standing, she felt she had no choice but to leave it to you. Along with many admonitions about avoiding the bad end she felt sure you’d come to.” He lifted his gaze. “Shall I read them to you?”

“No, thanks. I’ve heard them all—a million times.”

Gene closed the folder. “Ghostly harangues aside, it’s all good for you. Gives you somewhere to go.”

“Somewhere to go? Where?”

Gene blinked and shook his head slightly, as if amazed by my denseness. “New Bern, of course. You need a place to live and now you’ve got one—Beecher Cottage.”

The hot spot on my chest grew hotter and larger, spreading up my neck to my cheeks. “New Bern? I’m not going back to New Bern!”

“I don’t see as you have a lot of choice, Madelyn. You’ve got to live somewhere. Why not New Bern? I hear it’s very picturesque. Lots of trees. Lots of scenery . . .”

Lots of memories.

“Most people would be thrilled to inherit a nice cottage in Connecticut.”

“I’m not most people!” I snapped. “And I’m not going back to New Bern! Call a Realtor. Tell them to sell the house. Tell them I’ll consider any offer.”

Gene took off his glasses, revealing his impatience. “Don’t be an idiot, Madelyn. The housing market has hit rock bottom. Or hadn’t you heard?”

“Yes,” I said, loathing Gene at least as much as he loathed me, “but there’s got to be someone out there who is willing to buy it if the price is right.”

Gene shook his head. “I talked to your grandmother’s attorney, Franklin Spaulding. He told me that there hasn’t been a real estate closing in New Bern for the last seven months. Nobody is buying, not at any price.”

“But . . . there has to be . . . surely there’s . . . I can’t live in New Bern. . . .”

Gene smacked his hands against his mahogany desk. I jumped, startled.

“Madelyn! Will you listen to yourself? Not five minutes ago you were asking where you were going to live and what you were going to live on. I’ve gotten you a check for a hundred grand and a house and all you can do is gripe! If not for me, you’d be living in the state women’s prison. I think a little gratitude is in order here, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry, Gene,” I said stiffly, knowing he was right, hating him for it.

I’ve been around the block enough times to know that the truth isn’t always enough to protect the innocent. If I’d had a lawyer less talented than Eugene Janders, it was possible Sterling and I would both be living at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

“I don’t mean to appear unappreciative, but this is hard for me. I haven’t had time to adjust.”

“You’d better adjust, Madelyn, and quickly, because the party is over.”

His tone was unsympathetic and his speech was frank. Clearly he thought this would be our last meeting and felt no need to mince words.

“You had a good ride with Sterling. When he married you, I thought you’d last a couple of years. Five, if you were lucky.” He looked me up and down, slowly, insultingly. “Clearly you possess talents that can’t be seen with the naked eye.”

Four months ago, he’d never have dared to look at or speak to me that way. The balance of power had shifted. He knew it. I knew it. I said nothing.

Gene stood up at his desk. The meeting was over. He handed me a manila envelope.

“What’s this?”

“A check, made out to you; a deed to the house; contact information for Wendy Perkins, the Realtor who is holding the keys; and a bill for legal services.”

I looked at the papers. My jaw dropped open. “Nine thousand dollars?”

“I gave you a discount. No need to thank me.”

I didn’t.

I picked up my purse and my papers and turned to walk across Gene’s hand-knotted silk rug, out the door, and into a future that would force me to return to the one place I’d hoped never to see again—New Bern, Connecticut.

Thirty-four years ago, Lee Woodruff and I promised to love each other till death did us part, in sickness and health, for richer or poorer. As a bride, I’m not sure I fully grasped what that was all about, but I do now. There’s a reason they make you take vows—to hold you together through times like these.

It’s not the fact that we’re celebrating our anniversary over breakfast at the Blue Bean Coffee Shop and Bakery instead of dinner at a white tablecloth restaurant that’s bothering me. I don’t mind that. But I do mind that there’s very little celebrating being done. We’ve never had an anniversary like this.

Lee rubbed his chin and narrowed his eyes as he stared at the legal pad. “I’m going to have to pull some money out of the 401(k) to pay Josh’s tuition.”

“That’s supposed to be our retirement.”

“The way things are looking, we’ll never be able to retire anyway.”

“Won’t we have to pay a penalty if we take it out early?”

Lee looked up. “Can you think of another plan? If you can, I’m all ears.”

“Honey,” I said gently. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. We’re not the only ones this has happened to. A lot of people are in the same boat.”

Lee picked up his coffee cup. “I should have seen this coming.”

“How? You’re an accountant, not a fortune-teller. Even the economists didn’t see this coming.”

Lee shook his head before taking a slurp of coffee. I looked at his plate. He’d hardly touched his food.

“My dad always said a man’s first and last job is to protect his family. Right now, I’m almost glad he’s not alive to see how far off the job I’ve fallen.”

“Hey!” I said, giving him a nudge under the table. “This isn’t all your doing. We’ve worked hard, side by side, all this time. Up until now, we’ve done all right. In fact, I think we make a pretty good team.”

I smiled, hoping to steer the conversation onto more romantic ground. Lee wasn’t picking up on my cues.

“We should have played it safe,” he mused. “We should have stayed in Boston and let well enough alone instead of putting everything on the line for a crazy dream.”

“Don’t say that! I mean it, Lee! Don’t ever say that!”

Lee put down his cup and looked at me with surprise. I’m not generally given to emotional outbursts. “I just meant that . . .”

“I know what you meant, but you’re wrong. Moving to New Bern, finally working up the courage to start living our own dream instead of somebody else’s, is the best thing we’ve ever done. When I look back and think what our lives were like before we started talking about the farm and the shop and what we wanted out of life . . .”

I shook my head and smeared a piece of toast with strawberry jam. “It’s practically a miracle that we got to be married this long.”

Lee frowned. “What are you trying to say? You think we’d have ended up divorced if we’d stayed in Massachusetts? You never said anything about being unhappy. . . .”

“I’m saying I didn’t even know I was unhappy. And so were you. Admit it, you were.”

“Well,” he said slowly, “I don’t know if I’d have put it in those terms exactly.”

“How about bored? How about wondering if this was really all there was to life?”

Lee looked at me, a little smile of admission crossing his lips. “Well. Maybe sometimes. But I never thought of divorce.”

“Neither did I, but you’ve got to wonder if, eventually, we might have. It’s happened to so many people we know—Lena and John, Caroline and Stan, the Willises from across the street. They all said they’d ‘grown apart.’ I can’t help but think that the problem was that they stopped growing together.

“Maybe this is a crazy idea,” I said earnestly, “and maybe it won’t work out, but I’m proud of us for trying. And if we end up broke, I can honestly say that I’d rather be broke with you than anyone I know. . . .”

Lee laughed. “Aw, shucks.”

“I mean it, Lee Woodruff. I love you. More today than I ever have.”

“But only half as much as tomorrow?”

“Are you trying to flirt with me?”

“I am. Is it working? Because I love you, too, Tessa. Now more than ever.”

Our kiss was interrupted by the lilt of Charlie Donnelly’s Irish brogue. “Ah, the lovebirds!” he called out as he approached our table, holding Evelyn’s hand. “Lee is so overcome that he hasn’t touched his pancakes. It’s true love, I tell you, true love.”

Evelyn laughed. “It would be for you, Charlie. I can’t imagine the day when you’d ever be too overcome with anything to miss a meal.”

Charlie is the owner of New Bern’s most elegant restaurant, the Grill on the Green. He’s a serious foodie, though you couldn’t tell it to look at him. Charlie is as skinny as a rail. Evelyn owns the Cobbled Court Quilt Shop. It’s located just a hop, skip, and a jump from For the Love of Lavender, my herbal gift shop. We know Charlie and Evelyn from various community and Chamber of Commerce gatherings, but not well, not enough so you could call us friends. After all these months, we still haven’t made any close friends in New Bern. We’ve got to make more of an effort in that regard.

Evelyn and Charlie have recently returned from their honeymoon in Ireland. Not that they told us this personally—but New Bern is a small town. News travels fast.

“The waitress says congratulations are in order,” Evelyn said. “How many years is it?”

“Thirty-four,” Lee replied.

Charlie whistled in admiration. “Good for you! I hope we’ll be able to say the same someday, and that when we do, we’re both still able to walk.”

“I’m sure you will,” I said. “You look young and healthy enough.”

“Being married to Evelyn is making me feel younger every day.” Charlie beamed as he turned to Evelyn and gave her a loud smack on the lips.

“Behave yourself,” Evelyn said, though not with any real conviction.

“Why? I never have before.”

The door to the café opened and Jake Kaminski, owner of Kaminski’s Hardware, came in. Jake is a big man, tall but trim, with broad shoulders and a long stride, the kind of guy people call a “man’s man,” though he’s pretty popular with the ladies. Jake was a year ahead of me in school. He did a tour in Vietnam and has a glass eye to prove it. Even so, Jake is considered the most eligible bachelor in New Bern.

Jake lifted his hand when he spotted our group and walked toward the table.

“You’re back! Can I get a kiss from the bride?” He gave Evelyn a big bear hug and a peck on the cheek. “How was the honeymoon?”

“Idyllic. Ireland is so beautiful. And Charlie’s family was just wonderful. His sisters are just the kindest, sweetest women in the world.”

Jake looked at Charlie and raised his left eyebrow. “Sweet? Really?” He winked at Evelyn. “You sure they’re Charlie’s sisters, related to him by blood and all?”

Charlie grinned. “Oh, yes. Grania, Maura, and I share the Donnelly DNA. The girls are carbon copies of my dear old dad, the kindest, most soft-spoken man in the county. Whereas I take after my mother, the woman who nagged him to an early grave.”

Jake slapped him on the back and laughed. “Ah, Charlie, I’ve missed you. Welcome home. You both look great. Marriage must agree with you.”

“I highly recommend it,” Evelyn said, looking lovingly at her groom. “You should give it a try, Jake. With Charlie off the market, you must be New Bern’s last bachelor standing. You’ll wear yourself out.”

“It’s a tough job, Evelyn, but somebody’s gotta do it. As far as marriage, the third time was the charm for me. Can’t see risking a fourth,” Jake said, then deftly changed the subject. “Lee, the water pump you ordered came in.”

“Thanks. I’ll pick it up later today.”

“So, what’s going on here?” Jake asked. “You having a secret meeting of the Chamber of Commerce or something? Between us, we own about half the businesses in New Bern. Speaking of business, how’s yours? Mine’s off.”

Lee tilted his head and sucked some air in through his teeth. “Could be better. Tessa and I were just talking about that. Seems like no one is buying.”

Charlie’s grin faded and he nodded understandingly. “Don’t worry too much. I’ve been in the restaurant business longer than you’ve been married. These things go in cycles, you know. Things will rebound.”

“I hope so,” I said. “And soon. If they don’t, I’m not sure my store will be around by our next anniversary.”

I felt Lee’s eyes on me and turned to see him staring at me, his mouth a thin line.

Charlie glanced at Lee and said quickly, “Lee, I hear you’re keeping chickens now. Have you got any eggs to sell to the restaurant? Or extra produce . . .”

“Eggs? Sure. We’ve got a lot of nice tomatoes and zucchini too. Of course,” Lee said, “this time of year, so does everybody else.”

“Yeah.” Charlie laughed. “If you forget to lock your car, you’ll come back and find your front seat filled with squash. What about cucumbers? Onions?”

“I’ve got plenty. Green beans too.”

“Good! Bring some over today, will you? After the lunch crowd thins out.”

“I’ll be there,” Lee promised.

“Tessa,” Evelyn said, “Margot said you were thinking about taking her lap quilt class. I hope so. It’s her first time teaching and she’s so excited.”

“I think I’m going to have to bow out,” I said apologetically. “Business is so slow that I’m going to let my part-time girl go. Soon there’ll be no one to run the shop but me. Anyway, it’s probably not a great time for me to take up an expensive hobby. . . .”

Lee interrupted me. “Don’t be silly. Take the class.”

I shifted slightly in my chair and lowered my voice so the others wouldn’t hear. “The class is sixty dollars. Plus, I’ll need supplies and fabric. I don’t think it’s a good . . .”

Ignoring my whispered protests, Lee looked at Evelyn and said, “I can help out at the shop if need be. Don’t worry. You can count her in.”

I don’t like having people speak for me. Lee knows that. I’d have said something but I didn’t want to have an argument in public—especially on our anniversary. Evelyn and Charlie exchanged an uncomfortable glance.

“Well. Good,” Evelyn said. “Come over when you get a chance and I’ll help you choose your fabric. You’re going to love quilting. It’s a great way to get to know people.”

We said our good-byes. Charlie and Evelyn left the café hand in hand. Jake went to the bakery counter and bought a coffee and muffin to go. We waved as he left.

The tension was thick between us. I was still miffed, but for the sake of the day, I decided t