Tribute

pregnant.”
    “Flowers,” Ford suggested. “Buy her flowers on the way home. She’ll still be hot, but she’ll be happy.”
    “Maybe I’ll do that. I’ll check, make sure the flooring’s coming in on Tuesday. Barring another screwup, we’ll start hammering it out up here. Roses always work, right?” he asked Ford.
    “They’re a classic for a reason.”
    “Okay. I’ll let you know about the flooring, Cilla.”
    As Matt went down, Ford stepped over, tapped Cilla’s chin up, kissed her. “The pale silver up here, the dull gold in the master.”
    She cocked her head. “Maybe. Why?”
    “Streams better with the bathrooms than your other choices. And while they’re both warm tones, the gray gives a sense of coolness. It’s an attic, however jazzed up you make it. And in the bedroom, that color’s restful but still strong. Now tell me why Buddy’s putting a faucet over your stove.”
    “To fill pots.”
    “Okay. I talked to Brian.”
    “You often do.”
    “About the letters. His grandfather.”
    “You . . . you told him?” Her mouth dropped open. “You just told him I think his grandfather might have broken commandments with my grandmother?”
    “I don’t think commandments were mentioned. You wanted a handwriting sample. Brian can probably get one.”
    “Yes, but . . . Couldn’t you have been covert, a little sneaky? Couldn’t you have lied?”
    “I suck at sneak. And even if I gold-medaled in the sneak competition, I can’t lie to a friend. He understands I told him in confidence, and he won’t break a confidence to a friend.”
    She blew out a breath. “You people certainly grew up on a different planet than I did. Are you sure he won’t say anything to his father? It’s a stew pot of embarrassment.”
    “I’m sure. He did have an interesting comment though. What if Hennessy wrote the letters?”
    Cilla went back to gape. “Kill-you-with-my-truck Hennessy?”
    “Well, think about it. How crazy would you get if you’d been having an affair with a woman, then the son of that woman is responsible—in your eyes—for putting your son in a wheelchair? It’s way-fetched, I agree. I’m going to reread the letters with this in mind. Just to see how it plays.”
    “You know what? If it turns in that direction, within a mile of that direction, I don’t think I want to know. Imagining my grandmother with Hennessy just gives me the serious eeuuwws.”
    She sighed, started downstairs with him. “I talked to the police today,” she told Ford. “There won’t be a trial. They did a deal, Hennessy took a plea, whatever. He’ll do a minimum of two years in the state facility, psychiatric.”
    Ford reached for her hand. “How do you feel about that?”
    “I don’t honestly know. So I guess I’ll put it aside, think about now.”
    She moved into the master, studied the paint samples. “Yeah, you’re right about the color.”

TWENTY-FIVE
    C illa used Sunday morning to pore through home and design magazines, scout the Internet for ideas and vendors and tear out or bookmark possibilities and potentials. She could hardly believe she’d reached the stage where she could begin considering furniture.
    Weeks away, of course, and she needed to add in trolling antique stores, even flea markets—and possibly yard sales—but she was approaching the time when ordering sofas and chairs, tables and lamps, wouldn’t be out of line.
    Then there was bedding, she mused, a kitchen to outfit, an office, window treatments, rugs. All those fun, picky little details to fill in a house. To make a house a home. Her home.
    Her first real home.
    The closer it came to reality, the more she realized just how much she wanted home. All she had to do was step outside, look across the road and see it.
    Sitting here now, at Ford’s counter, with her laptop, her magazines, her notebooks, she thought of just how far she’d come since March. No, well before March, she corrected. She’d started this journey on that long-ago trek through the Blue Ridge, one she’d taken specifically, deliberately to see, firsthand, her grandmother’s Little Farm, to see where her own father sprang from, and maybe to understand, a little, why he’d come back, and left her.
    And she’d fallen in love, Cilla thought now, with the hills that bumped their way back to the mountains, the thick spread of trees, the little towns and the big ones, the houses and gardens, the winding roads and streams. Most of all, she’d fallen in