Out in the Country by Kate Hewitt Read Free Book Online Page A

using her name--not newbie--for the first time. “You’ll burn out before Christmas if you do.”
    “How do you make yourself not care?” Molly asked a bit desperately. She took a sip of wine.
    “You care about the students, you want them to succeed, but you don’t let yourself be hurt when they don’t care. When they fail. When they knife each other in the hallway.” He smiled a bit crookedly, and Molly tried to smile back.
    “How long did that take you?” she asked. “To stop caring?”
    Luke was silent for a long moment. “Years,” he said finally, and he sounded a bit sad. “And it’s still going on.”
    Molly looked at him in surprise. Was Luke admitting to a certain tenderness underneath his cynical apathy? The thought was like a squeeze to the heart, and she suddenly smiled, feeling oddly encouraged.
     
     
    “That birch tree is completely bare,” Jess remarked as they turned off the highway onto the narrow road that led to Hardiwick. It was two weeks after their first visit there, and they were returning to begin preparations to turn Kathy and Graham’s house into a bed and breakfast.
    Lynne glanced at the tree’s stark branches, her expression preoccupied and a little bit harassed. Jess knew her friend was buzzing with ideas; their plans for the weekend included a visit to the local bank to apply for a business loan, a walkthrough of the house with a local zoning commissioner, and of course helping Graham and Kathy move to a bungalow on the outside of town. Just the thought of all that activity crammed into a few days made Jess feel both tired and overwhelmed.
    Yet Lynne didn’t look overwhelmed; she looked determined. Ever since they’d returned from Vermont, she’d been focused on the inn. Jess had found sketches and random notes scattered over the apartment, and in the middle of a completely separate conversation, Lynne would suddenly say something like,
    ‘Weekend specials, during peak foliage season. Do you think we can be open by next fall?”
    Jess didn’t miss the ‘we’, and although it warmed her heart, it also made her nervous. She loved Lynne’s enthusiasm, but she didn’t share it... yet. She still felt too raw, too uncertain, knocked for six as she had been by Rob’s betrayal. He hadn’t been in touch in the month since he left, not a note, phone call, or e-mail message. Nothing. It trivialised their two years together, Jess thought sadly. Something that had been life-altering for her was obviously next to nothing for Rob.
    Lynne had argued over the last few weeks that a new project would be just the thing to get Jess on the right track and over Rob, and while Jess saw the wisdom in this, she wasn’t sure her heart and head worked that way.
    She wasn’t ready to leap in feet-first... and have everything fall apart as it did before.
    “I don’t even know if I can get a visa, Lynne,” she’s said the night before, as they’d chatted before bed.
    “Details,” Lynne had replied with an airy wave of her hand. “We’ll sort something out.”
    Jess had suppressed a sigh. Yes, it was a detail, but an important one.
    Why , she wondered now, as they drove into Hardiwick, red maple leaves fluttering onto the sidewalk outside The Mountain Cafe, am I such a stick in the mud? Why can’t I be as excited as Lynne?
    A moving truck was parked outside the old yellow house as Lynne pulled up.
    “Looks like they’ve got a start,” she said, smiling. Kathy waved from the front porch as they walked up the curving drive.
    “Everything that we’re taking is nearly packed,” she said. “Just a few odds and ends left, really. Of course you’ll have to go through the house and decide how much of the old furniture you want to keep, Lynne.”
    “As much as possible,” Lynne replied firmly. “I don’t want to change the house too much, Kathy.”
    They walked into the cool, dim hallway, and Jess noticed the new bare patches on the walls, the empty spaces where there had once been a