Читать книгу Cooking Up Romance онлайн | страница 25

Her life experience so far had pounded home one major point—she lost the people she loved.

Sadness and longing wrapped around her until it was hard to breathe. She’d always thought of herself as a family person. She’d chosen not to move out of Little River Valley like most of her high school friends had done. Instead, she’d wanted to live close to her father and saw him several times a week. He was all she had, and she treated that bond with great care.

Since he’d died, she’d moved back into her childhood home because she’d inherited it. It felt so empty without him, which forced her to accept that she wasn’t meant to be alone. Yet she’d made no effort to reach out to new people and instead had drawn inward even though she’d always hated being an only child. Truth was, she felt stuck, like running in a dream getting nowhere, longing for something out of her reach.

As far back as she could remember, she’d thought something had been missing. As though they’d been meant to be a bigger family. When she would ask her parents why she didn’t have a sister or brother, they’d get all tongue-tied. Enough so that she’d learned to quit asking and, instead, worked on accepting that they’d simply run out of time. Yet there’d been a big hole in her heart, and she couldn’t deny it, long before Mom had died. As if something else had been ripped away, leaving a huge gap in her life.

What was with the gloomy black cloud hovering low tonight?

Slipping into the dumps certainly wasn’t how she wanted to end her day. Not on the eve of a new start! But her memories had been stirred at the wedding, and something deeper had gotten released. That person had called her Eva and told her she looked exactly like her. So strange. Truth was, when most kids created pretend pals, she’d had an imaginary sister named Jilly—even when Mom was alive, so Lacy couldn’t rationalize that it was because of losing a parent. For as long as she could remember, she’d wished for a sister, as if without one she could never be whole. Jilly helped fill that void until Lacy knew the time had come to grow up and leave her secret sister behind.