Meant to Be Mine (A Porter Family Novel Book #2) (39 page)

She laid her hands in her lap and looked down at them, listening. The point, she supposed, wasn’t whether God answered her question. The point was that
He
was the answer. To every question.

Hard circumstances taught a person valuable lessons. The current circumstance was teaching Celia that even in the center of grief and confusion, God was enough for her.

The burr returned. The one that rubbed against her painfully, convicting. God wanted her to forgive Ty yet again.

She scrunched shut her eyes. “I forgive Ty.” She concentrated on working through all the kinks and knots of her unforgiveness. Over and over she repeated it.
I forgive Ty
.

The word
forgiveness
sounded gentle and round-edged. If it
had been a drawing, it might have been a sunrise. In Celia’s reality, though, achieving that sunrise required dark and dirty work. It meant removing an iron spike of bitterness that had lodged itself in the pit of her soul. The spike was sharp, painful, disinclined to move. With God’s help she’d managed to dislodge it once before. But it had come back and may well continue to come back.

One of the forgiveness verses twined through her memory.
“How many times shall I
forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up
to seven times?”

Jesus answered, “I tell you, not
seven times, but seventy-seven times.”

For her, forgiveness had not been an easy one-time thing. It was a decision she had to make repeatedly. A process.

More dreary days slipped by.

A new
Give Peace a Chance
key ring did not appear.

Her exchange with Ty went even worse than usual when she arrived home from work on Thursday. She found him and Addie in the front room, playing checkers.

He had on a baseball cap backwards, jeans, his sterling watch. The storm of resentments between them made it difficult to look him in the face.

He said his good-byes to Addie. Celia held the front door open for him. When he passed through, she stepped onto the porch after him. “Ty—”

He stopped.

“I . . .”

The mask he wore around Addie had gone. He gazed at her with undiluted anger and pain. By the looks of it, he was still every bit as furious as he’d been the day she’d broken up with him.

Why had she thought talking to him might be a good idea? “How are you doing?” she asked.

“Not well.”

She felt her heart fracturing.
I love you,
she wanted to say. The
words filled her. They swirled, pushing against her from the inside, demanding that she give them voice.

At the sound of children’s voices, both Ty and Celia looked toward the noise. Neill and his two boys were walking toward the gingerbread house for a playdate.

Ty stiffened at the sight of them, his back muscles tightening. Then he strode toward his truck.

Neill lifted his hand to Celia as he approached. “Hey there!”

“Hey.” She tried for a smile.

Her attention cut back to Ty. He swung his head around and gave Neill a look so terrifying that it would have sent Neill into a dead faint if he’d seen it. He climbed into his truck and started the engine.

She invited Neill and his boys into the house. The kids dove into a new game of checkers. She and Neill watched their antics while Neill told her a story about one of the partners in his law firm.

She loved Ty.
I love him
, she kept thinking. She’d been circumventing it and trying to talk herself out of it in every possible way. All her efforts had done no good. She’d fallen in love with the same man three times in one lifetime.

Maybe she hadn’t. Made she’d only truly fallen in love with Ty Porter one time—the day he’d strolled into ceramics class, sat down beside her, and smiled at her for the very first time. When he’d left Texas after graduation and when he hadn’t loved her back in Vegas, she’d done her best to pound her love for him into oblivion. But it had proven stronger than the strongest metal ever created.

Neill kept talking.

Celia’s gaze rested fondly on Addie’s dark blond bob. Her life had been full of her daughter for so long that she hadn’t known whether she could love a man again. It came as something of a surprise to her, not just that she could love a man again, but how very, very much she could.

When Neill and the boys left, Celia got down on her knees in Addie’s room to help her pick up the toys.

“Mommy?”

“Yes?”

“Daddy’s sad.”

Celia pushed a curl behind her ear. “I know.”

“I gave him some chamomile tea today.” She straightened the dress of the Cinderella doll she held. “It didn’t make him feel better.”

“It didn’t?”

She shook her head. “I think he’s sad because you’re not wearing the boots he gave you anymore.”

Addie’s feet were still loyally encased by her pink boots, just as they had been since the day Ty had given them to her. “He’s nice and funny, Mom. I really like Daddy’s house. Whitey’s there.” Her small fingers smoothed Cinderella’s hair. “He has a motorcycle. His bedtime stories are good.”

Celia nodded.

“Cinderella’s happy now that she married Prince Charming. Daddy will be happy when you put on a white dress and a long”—she indicated a veil with her hands—“sheet on your head and marry him.”

Celia didn’t have the heart to launch into a talk about how much she and Ty respected each other or the vagaries of adult decisions or why mommies and daddies sometimes chose to live apart. “I love you, Addie,” she said simply and truthfully. “Ty loves you, too.”

“Oh, Mom. You really need to start wearing his boots.”

“Jerry and I have something we’d like to discuss with you,” Donetta said to Celia the next day.

“Oh?” Celia continued sweeping the front room of the bakery.

“It’s the kind of talk, Celia, that you’re going to want to sit down for.”

She glanced at Donetta, worry immediately rising. “What’s the matter?”

Donetta took the broom from her and indicated the table at the rear of the bakery. “Jerry!” she hollered.

Celia sank into a chair, uneasy.

Jerry emerged from the kitchen and the two of them took the seats across from her. “You know that Jerry and I have been wanting to retire for a while now.”

“Yes.”

“We were planning to work a few more years, then put the place on the market.”

Jerry regarded Celia steadily. The sympathy in his face sent a chill of foreboding through her.

“More than a week ago,” Donetta continued, “we got a call from a longtime friend. Out of the blue. He told us he wanted to buy Cream or Sugar.”

No
, Celia thought.
Please, God, no.

“It took us by surprise.” Donetta shrugged. “We didn’t know he had an interest in owning a donut shop. But then, you never can tell about people. He offered us a pretty penny for this place.”

A sliding sensation of fear moved through Celia’s abdomen. They were going to sell Cream or Sugar to a stranger.

“Our friend offered above what we would have asked for the shop if we’d put it on the market,” Donetta said.

“The two of us have spent a lot of time talking about it,” Jerry put in.

“We know you depend on this job, and we don’t take that lightly. But we also have to think about our retirement.” Donetta moved some of the frosted feathers back from her face. “We told our friend that we’d take his offer. Signed the paper work last night.”

No!
Celia wanted to wail. Why hadn’t they told her about this sooner? She’d have offered to buy the shop. She adored this place. She’d painted the walls, baked pastries for it, and cleaned every surface as lovingly as if Cream or Sugar already belonged to her.

Looking into Donetta and Jerry’s faces, she could see that they knew all that. They also knew what she didn’t want to admit to
herself: She’d never be able to get a loan for an amount that would enable her to buy Cream or Sugar.

No
. Panic began to tighten around her throat. “What does the new owner plan to do with Cream or Sugar?”

“We’re not really sure,” Donetta answered.

“Will he keep it a coffee shop?”

“We just don’t know,” Jerry said.

“We care about you, honey. We’ll help you. You’re smart, and you’re going to be just fine.”

She didn’t want to be just fine. She wanted to go on working here. It was her dream, this shop. The loss of Cream or Sugar on top of the loss of Ty felt like a staggering weight stacked onto a load already too heavy to bear.

No,
she thought again, uselessly. She hovered on the verge of tears as her gaze traveled over the interior of her beloved bakery.

No!

Ty had propped his boots on his living room coffee table. He had the
Wall Street Journal
open and had been trying and retrying to read an article about a hedge fund manager. His concentration was shot. His brain only wanted to think about one destructive thing.

Celia.

He thought about her last thing at night. First thing in the morning. While he showered. As he was getting dressed. Driving.

She’d made his life not worth a nickel to him. She’d made him furious. She’d made him doubt his sanity.

His cell phone rang. He checked caller ID. “Hi, Meg.”

“Hi, Ty.”

“What’s up?”

“I’m just leaving Celia’s.”

The concerned tone of her voice had him setting aside the newspaper. “And?”

“She’s really upset. The people that own Cream or Sugar . . .”

“Donetta and Jerry?”

“Right. They told her today that they sold the shop.”

Ty froze, his brain struggling to comprehend. They’d sold Cream or Sugar? Donetta and Jerry had owned it for as long as he could remember. As far as he knew, it wasn’t even for sale.

“Ty?”

“I’m here.” He rose to his feet in one angry motion, yanked his reading glasses from his face. “Who did they sell it to?”

“Celia doesn’t know who. What do you think we can do to help her through this? She absolutely loves that shop—”

“Meg, I’ll have to call you back later.”

“Sure.”

He disconnected and scrolled through his contacts. He hit Donetta’s name and paced while the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Donetta, it’s Ty Porter. I heard that you sold Cream or Sugar.”

A pause. “It’s not common knowledge around town yet, but yes. We did.”

His grip on the phone tightened. At this point it wouldn’t do any good to rail at her for not telling him about her plans. “To whom?”

“Now, you know I have a deep fondness for you, Ty. But I can’t see as how that’s any of your business.”

“Donetta, God love you, I’m about to have a stroke. Please tell me right this minute who you sold the shop to.”

“An old friend of Jerry’s and mine. He’s lived in Holley forever.”

“His name?”

“Howard Sanders.”