Page 22 of Over the Verdant Hills
“If something happens to her, God’s with you. He’s not going to give you more than what He will help you handle.”
“That’s not helpful,” she said, leveling her gaze at him and not smiling.
He didn’t figure it would be. People knew it, but they insisted on worrying anyway. “I’ll be here to help. Although that might not be any more helpful.”
“I guess it should be. I should be happier about God being with me than you, but… You’re starting to feel like an anchor. Thank you.” She paused for a moment, and then she added, “I’m sorry I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t necessarily at you—it was at the idea that she was volunteering my services and?—”
He waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t annoying. I got that anyway, and?—”
She laughed. “I saw.”
He knew she had, and they laughed about it, which was what he wanted. He didn’t want silent wars behind Miss Mattie’s back where the two of them couldn’t get along. He wasn’t going to take offense at anything she did. He was just going to make up his mind that he wasgoing to get along. If she chose not to, she’d have a hard time fighting with someone who had already decided they weren’t going to fight. Now, if he could only live that out somehow.
“I guess just talking to you somehow made me feel better. Thanks,” she said as she turned around and started walking away again, disappearing around the corner of the house.
He had the flower beds mostly fixed, although the ones alongside the house needed to have new weed fabric put down. He was going to wait until after Claire was done scraping the paint off that side before he got into a job like that.
The railing on the back porch needed to be fixed, and that would be a job he could finish before he went home today.
Thinking it was funny that maybe he and Claire were going to be friends after all, he found himself whistling as he stepped off the walk and followed her around the house.
Chapter Nine
Grandma was on Claire’s mind the next week as she started her normal morning walk along the lake. As she stepped onto the path that took her down around the cliff, her phone buzzed, and she looked to see a text from her ex.
She wanted to slap herself. She’d talked to Josiah about adding an extra week after school and adding an extra week before school started, but she had totally forgotten to message her ex about it and see what he thought.
Now, this text did not sound happy.
Are you ignoring me? When does school end? Do we need to do this through the courts?
He was a lawyer, and part of the reason she really didn’t want to go through the courts was because he knew most of the judges. He knew the judge who would be handling their case, and she thought he might get special treatment.
He was so good at charming people, and that judge didn’t seem immune to his charms. In fact, she wouldn’t be surprised if that was oneof the people he had cheated with. He really liked appearing before that judge.
He’d made no bones about that during their marriage, although it hadn’t been until the last year or so that Claire had realized what the reason for that might be.
She held her phone in her hand for a moment and thought about what she should say. She didn’t want to appear too conciliatory or like she was begging him to forgive her. But at the same time, it was an honest mistake.
She figured an apology wouldn’t show too much weakness, although Ted was very attuned to attacking a person at their weakest point. It was a lawyer thing, she was pretty sure.
She reprimanded herself. Just because Ted was a terrible person didn’t mean all lawyers were bad. Still, she knew she was going to have trouble believing that for a long time to come.
I’m sorry. I totally forgot. The last day of school is May 17. I was wondering if you might be okay if the kids stayed with me for an extra week after school ends and came back a week before school begins? I thought of doing this rather than having them over for the July 4th holiday in the middle of the summer. That will save them the long, two-day trip from here to there. It seemed fair, since you get them for all the holidays during the school year.
It was a lot to text, and Ted was likely to skim over and miss most of it, but at least in text, she had a record of actually saying something to him, where she could point to it and he could understand that it was his fault that he didn’t know rather than trying to blame her, as he always did.
She much preferred texting over phone calls because he could totally charm her and lay all the blame at her feet.
It was a while before he texted back, and she was down the beach, her face lifted to the wind, the Gospel of John being spoken in her ear.
That works for me. So we need to figure out a place to meet on May 24. Here’s where I thought:
Then he sent her a map with a pin drop somewhere in Pennsylvania.
She didn’t even look. Knowing him the way she did, he would have found the route, figured the total miles, and pinned the halfway point exactly. There probably wasn’t even a rest area there.
She messaged back,
