The Hearts We Mend by Kathryn Springer Read Free Book Online

problem.”
    Jack had a problem.
    But at least now he didn’t have to wonder what Evie thought about his stepping across that invisible line.

C HAPTER 8
    W e’re going to have just enough paint to finish.” Gin stepped back to admire her handiwork. “I hope Raine and Cody like the color we picked out.”
    â€œMe too.” Evie swiped her paintbrush against the plastic tray to catch a drip before it hit the carpeting. “It would have been easier if we’d had more information. Like whether the baby is a him or a her.”
    â€œI hear you, but they want it to be a surprise.”
    â€œDid you know Raine was a girl?”
    â€œNot until the doctor put her in my arms,” Gin admitted. “What about you?”
    â€œWe knew.” Evie didn’t like surprises. The day she’d found out she was going to have a boy she had stopped by the hardware store and picked out a color for the nursery. A pale, barely there blue called Morning Sky, the perfect backdrop for the clouds she then sponge-painted on the ceiling above Cody’s crib.
    Gin rolled another stripe of paint down the wall. “Angela said this shade of green reminds her of new beginnings.”
    Evie smiled. That sounded like something Dan’s mother would say.
    Angela was the one who’d organized a work party after Sunday dinner, the Moretti clan’s weekly get-together. Everyone except Bree, Trent and Jennifer’s one-year-old daughter, had been drafted to fix up the house next door so they could surprise Cody and Raine when they returned from their honeymoon at the end of the week.
    Lisa and Liz were put in charge of removing outdated wallpaper from the rooms, Jennifer and Carissa assigned to the kitchen. Dan’s sisters-in-law had even raided their own cupboards, filling the cabinets with surplus pots and pans and stocking the freezer with enough meals to last a month.
    The men armed themselves with rakes and fanned out across the yard while Angela and her two older granddaughters, Emily and Amanda, planted bright-yellow marigolds along the sidewalk leading up to the front door. Which left Gin and Evie in charge of painting the nursery.
    â€œLooking good, you two!” Liz poked her head through the doorway. The undisputed fashionista in the Moretti family, Dan’s sister had dressed for the work day in a cute pair of khaki shorts and a striped T-shirt that coordinated with the colorful bandana that covered her sable-brown hair.
    â€œThanks.” Evie took advantage of the momentary interruption to knead away a kink in her lower back. “Are you finished with the downstairs already?”
    â€œUh-huh. Lisa and I are about to start taking down the wallpaper border in the bathroom at the end of the hall.” Liz waggled her fingers. “Good-bye, red canoes. Time to take your cute, little pinecones and bear cubs and sail back to the eighties.”
    Gin grinned as Liz ducked out of sight. “I feel like I’ve been transported into one of those home-makeover shows.”
    Not Evie. Evie felt as if she’d been transported back in time.
    She hadn’t been inside Max’s childhood home since . . . for years. The house had gone through several different owners after Betty and Neil sold it and left town, but there were things even new carpeting and a fresh coat of paint couldn’t hide. Like the dent Max and Dan had put in the wall when they’d tried to shoot a potato out of a Nerf gun. The notches in the trim board that surrounded Max’s closet, measuring his height at every birthday.
    Evie wondered if that was the reason Betty and Neil had moved. Because the memories crowding the air made it difficult to breathe.
    â€œ I still can’t believe Raine is going to live here.”
    â€œNext door to Dan’s parents?”
    â€œIn a house.” Gin traced a finger over the windowsill, her gaze drawn to the people in the backyard.
    Dan’s brothers