“It’s not as picture-perfect as you might think. Jackson gave up his job to take over the place and save it from crumbling into the dirt. He could see what needed to be done to make the place a viable business in a busy market, but his grandparents didn’t want change. Jackson and Walter—they locked horns a million times when he was trying to upgrade this place. In the end he brought in Kayla. She worked for a company in Manhattan. He decided an outsider who could view the whole thing without considering the emotional elements might be the answer to the problem.”
“So she stayed and never left.”
Ethan grinned. “It wasn’t quite as smooth as that. From what Tyler told me, Kayla was a city girl and arrived in her elegant coat and heels. Took a while for her to warm up to the place. Literally.”
“But she did. And she fell in love with Jackson.” It sounded perfect to her. “How did Tyler meet Brenna?”
“They virtually grew up together. Brenna lived in the village.”
“And they run the ski side of things?”
“Yes. They all pulled together to make this place what it is now. For a while it didn’t look as if it would happen.”
“But they got there in the end. They found a way.” And that was how it should be, Harriet thought. She wasn’t stupid. She didn’t expect picture perfect. She never had. What she’d always dreamed about was a family who stuck together and supported one another through thick and thin, as the O’Neils had. Anyone could be there for the good bits. That was the easy part. The part that mattered, the part that really tested love, was to be there for the bad. “Do they mind that their mother is marrying again?”
“They want her to be happy. It helps that they like Tom. And he fits in well. This place has been home to him forever.”
“Did you bring Alison here?” She told herself that she wasn’t jealous. She was interested, that was all. She wanted to know him better and somewhere deep inside her she knew the key to understanding him was to understand what had gone wrong with his marriage.
“Once. It was too quiet for h
er. Not enough going on. She’s a city girl. And she had no interest in skiing, so that didn’t help.”
“You don’t talk about her very often.”
“There’s not much to talk about. She’s my ex-wife. We tried. We failed. That’s it.”
He condensed it into a few short sentences. A few weeks ago she might have left it at that, but she wasn’t the same person she’d been a few weeks before. “Why do you see it as failure?”
“I didn’t win any awards for husband of the year.” He pushed her hair away from her face. “Did I mention that I love your new haircut?”
“Good. Why do you blame yourself?”
“Because I was already married to the job. I couldn’t give her the relationship she wanted.”
“But didn’t you meet her when she was filming you in the ER?”
“Yes.”
She lifted herself onto her elbow so she could look at him. “And she fell in love with the handsome hero who saved lives.”
“Maybe, but that isn’t what the job is. Not really. They can make it look glamorous on TV, but the reality is something different.” He lay back against the pillows, taking her with him so that they snuggled together looking at the trees beyond the wall of glass. “Growing up, my dad was my hero. He was a respected part of the community. Everywhere we went, people greeted him. Going to buy a loaf of bread from the store turned into a half-hour trip instead of the ten minutes it should have been. People would stop him and ask him things and I never saw him impatient. Never once saw him turn them away or tell them to see him in clinic hours. If someone was distressed, he was there. Time and time again, I saw him step up. When a kid went under a truck at the County Fair, when a man was beating his wife and the police wanted my dad to go with them. My dad was there. And I wanted to be exactly like him. I wanted to make a difference.”
“Were you ever tempted to work in the community like him?”
“No. Because I wanted my home life to be separate. I didn’t want to bump into my patients every time I left the house. My parents’ marriage worked because my mother understood the man he was, and she never tried to change him, not even when she was scraping burned dinners into the garbage or hosting a dinner party by herself because my dad was out helping someone else. Of course it helped that she was a doctor too.”
“Why would she try and change him?”
“Because that’s what usually happens.”
She asked a question that had been on her mind for a while. “How long were you and Alison together before you decided to get married?”
“A year and a half. Maybe a little longer.”
“And during that time you didn’t stop working?”
He frowned. “Of course not.”