.

died when she was a young girl, and that Theresa had inherited the house and many acres of prime property in the heart of Northbridge. Because her only other relative—an aunt—had been ill and unable to take her in at the time, Theresa had spent eleven months after the deaths of her parents as the houseguest of local lumberyard owner Hector Tyson and his wife Gloria.

      During those eleven months she’d had virtually no contact with any of her friends, and at the end of them—three months before her eighteenth birthday—she’d finally left Northbridge to live with her aunt in Missoula. Before she left she sold Hector Tyson her land for a quarter of its value. Hector Tyson had subsequently become wealthy dividing the land into lots, selling those lots, then selling all the building materials to erect the houses that now stood on them.

      When Theresa had been discovered three weeks ago in the house where she’d grown up, she’d been demanding that what had been taken from her be returned. Originally Wyatt had believed she’d been talking about the land. But since the nightmares had begun—and since Theresa had dismissed the notion that this had anything to do with the land—her grandchildren had started to wonder what else she might be referring to. If it might even have been a baby she’d had by Hector.

      “Which is why we’re not thinking it’s the land that she wants back, right,” Wyatt repeated what Ry had said.

      “And why it seems like it might be a baby,” Marti said, summing up what they’d all touched on through recent phone calls. “But you still haven’t asked her straight-out if that’s what was taken from her?”

      Wyatt shook his head. “It hasn’t seemed like a good idea. She’s been in one of her really bad funks—she’s weepy, withdrawn, disoriented. Her memory has been worse than usual—she even forgot who Mary Pat was last week. Today—knowing you two were coming—is the first really good day she’s had since that first nightmare.”

      “And you still haven’t talked to this Hector Tyson?” Ry asked.

      “He’s been out of town this whole time. I understand he gets back on Monday, so it looks like it’ll be up to you, Marti. Ry will be on his way to Missoula right after the wedding to take care of business there, and I’ll be on my honeymoon. Do you think you can handle it?”

      Marti knew her afternoon dizzy spell had them thinking she couldn’t but she wasn’t about to accept that. “Of course, I think I can handle it,” she said as if it were ridiculous for him to ask. Then, because she wanted them to know that everything should be business as usual, she returned to the subject of their grandmother. “And Ry, you have a meeting with the lawyers to see if there are any legal options for restitution from the sale of the land, right?”

      “Right,” Ry answered.

      “Then you and I will take it from here while Wyatt lies on the beach,” she concluded.

      Her brothers exchanged a glance that she would have been able to read even if they weren’t triplets and inordinately in tune with each other.

      “Knock it off,” she ordered.

      “Knock what off?” Wyatt asked.

      “This whole can-I-handle-it, is-Marti-all-right thing. Because I am all right. Yes, Jack’s death hit me hard. Yes, maybe it’s a little over the top to decide to have a baby on my own. But seriously, I’m okay.”

      “You didn’t look okay sitting on the ground this afternoon,” Ry said, never one to mince words.

      “Dizziness—no big deal. I also sometimes throw up if I so much as get a whiff of breakfast sausage—it just comes with the territory.” That seemed like something Wyatt would know, since his first wife had been pregnant when a household accident had taken her life and the life of the baby. But she didn’t say that. Instead she said, “I’ve been to the doctor, I’m healthy as a horse, the baby is doing fine and having it is a sure sign that I’m moving forward. That I’m putting Jack’s death behind me.”

      “It took Wyatt two years after Mikayla died to give in to his feelings for Neily,” a clearly concerned Ry put in. “It’s only been nine months—”

      “Nine and a half, actually,” Marti corrected.

      “Okay, nine and a half months since you lost the guy you’d been madly in love with since you were both kids,” Ry persisted. “The love of your life, Marti. The guy we all thought was your other half. Come on, if you were in our shoes, wouldn’t you be worried that you’re acting out of some kind of grief mania and maybe not thinking straight or handling anything well?”

      “I know how it looks,” Marti said calmly. “It looks like I’ve gone a little nuts. But I haven’t. In spite of the dizziness and the rest of the pregnancy annoyances, I feel good about this baby. I feel better than I’ve felt since Jack died and I can’t believe that’s anything but positive, so that’s how I’m going to look at it. If you have qualms—”

      “Keep them to yourself,” Wyatt advised.

      “I was going to say get over them, but that’s good, too,” Marti said. “And as for staying in Northbridge a while to be with Gram, and checking out the site Wyatt found for the new store here, I’m as capable of doing all of that now as I was before I was pregnant. End of discussion!”

      Neither of her brothers looked convinced. They both just sat there with worried expressions on their faces.

      “I appreciate that you guys care. I really do. But I haven’t gone off the deep end. It was just meant to be that I have a baby at this point—with Jack or without him,” she said, pushing on to get through this. “Yes, it’s sad that it isn’t Jack’s baby or that he isn’t here to have it with me and make up the family we thought we’d have…” She took a deep breath to steady herself. “But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with this new path. It’s just a new path.”

      And with that she couldn’t possibly have said another word on the subject without breaking down. So she stood and said she was tired and was going to bed.

      She’d made it to the bottom of the stairs when she heard Ry say to Wyatt, “I told you, ever since the Expo she’s been different.”

      Marti pretended she hadn’t heard and went up the creaky old stairs, maintaining her air of confidence until she was behind the closed door of her current bedroom.

      The first floor was beginning to show signs of im provement and after the wedding Marti intended to move into the downstairs den. But until then she was staying upstairs in what had been her grandmother’s room as a girl, and almost nothing had been done to that. While the room was clean, it showed its age in the canopy bed that was missing its canopy due to decay, an ancient, scarred bureau and matching dressing table and a large cheval mirror that was cracked in one corner.

      Marti went to the bed and collapsed in a heap, letting a long sigh deflate that phony facade she’d been keeping up for the last few days since she’d invented the artificial insemination story for her brothers. The facade she’d had to kick up a notch since that afternoon when yet another curveball had been tossed at her in the form of Noah Perry.

      “Am I the only one you can knock around?” she muttered to whatever unseen forces seemed to be at work in her life for the last nine-and-a-half months.

      Regardless of how she was presenting everything to her brothers, underneath it all she was a wreck.

      She’d hoped never to go through anything more stressful than the death of her fiancé. But the last few weeks had rivaled it.

      Pregnant. She’d done one dumb thing in her life and had she been allowed to just get away with it? No. She’d gotten pregnant!

      It wasn’t as if she’d planned to go to Denver that last weekend in March and sleep with a stranger. It wasn’t as if it had even crossed her mind. She’d volunteered to oversee the Hardware Expo just to escape for a few days. To escape the constant reminders of Jack everywhere she looked, everywhere she went, every which way she turned.