Confessions from the Quilting Circle by Maisey Yates (ebook reader color screen txt) 📕

There was a heavy wooden bar where a shiny counter had once been, with tall stools positioned at it. Antique lights hung over the top of it. The entire thing felt warmer. Older and newer all at once.

Mary was in awe of what her youngest daughter had accomplished. It wasn’t just all the work it had taken, it was...

It was the bravery.

Taking this place and turning it into something new.

Mary had always had complicated feelings about the candy store. That her mother had settled here when it was far too late for Mary to benefit from it.

That it was the place her girls had gotten along best.

Mary hated to admit it, but she’d felt betrayed by that sometimes. That Addie had been able to find ways to bring the girls together. That she’d done it with arts and crafts, which had felt beyond Mary’s reach.

With chats and sewing, feminine things. The sorts of things Mary had spent a lifetime feeling incompetent at and certain people around her knew it.

But now the building had brought Lark home.

“I did,” her daughter said, coming in from the back.

She was so glad Lark was home. She worried about Lark because while her daughter had done what Mary considered to be an incredible feat—become a self-supporting artist—she was so isolated. So hard to reach when at one time she’d been so...

She’d been different. And Mary had never been able to figure out what had changed. Lark would have never admitted anything had.

And Mary didn’t know how to...talk to her girls. She’d never learned that. Talking about feelings. She was always more comfortable doing something. Putting a Band-Aid on a scrape. Fixing peanut butter and jelly to ease their hurts.

And as they’d gotten older Band-Aids and peanut butter hadn’t been enough.

More and more she’d felt like an outsider to their lives. And as they’d grown older they’d gotten closer to Addie.

Addie knew how to talk to them, she supposed.

Mary hadn’t known how.

Lark smiled, easily, the way that Lark always did. Lark was her sunny child. She’d always had so much energy, and her moods were aggressively cheerful, until they weren’t. Lark’s meltdowns were rare, but they had always been epic. She had never been halfway on anything.

When Lark had gotten an idea she’d been halfway finished with it before she’d ever thought to ask. One time she’d cut up half of their family photos making a scrapbook when she’d been ten. Mostly that had just meant all of Mary’s nice photos that had been waiting for a home in a photo album had been cut into shapes deemed artistic by a child, and destroyed in Mary’s opinion.

Lark had once started a dog washing business without asking. Mary had discovered it when she’d come home to find a terrier in the bathtub and Lark making bandannas out of an old swimsuit.

Lark never meant to be bad. She never meant to cause problems. And any opposition to her schemes had been met with meltdowns.

Mary found herself missing Lark’s tantrums.

She couldn’t figure out why Lark being less moody made her feel more concerned. Had never been able to pin that worry down.

“It looks... It looks wonderful,” Mary said.

The door opened behind her, and Hannah came through, along with Avery.

Hannah was a statement, as always, her bottle red hair never faded. She suspected her daughter touched it up at least once a week. She was dressed head to toe in black, and somehow managed to command attention, even wearing dark colors. But that was Hannah. Quietly intense and dramatic, but rarely showing it.

She was outspoken and quick to voice an opinion but when it came to deeper emotion she kept everything bottled up, and sometimes Mary could see that she was silently drowning, but also knew that asking her about it would only push her into deeper water. Further away.

It frustrated her that in many ways she and Hannah were probably the most alike, and somehow that made her the hardest to know.

It was one reason she’d been so thankful for Hannah’s boyfriend, Josh Anderson. She’d had to pretend she didn’t know Hannah was sneaking out to be with him some nights. But she hadn’t wanted to push Hannah further away, and she’d so hoped that Josh reached her in ways she couldn’t.

For a while, it had seemed he had.

Until Hannah had dumped him. Broken his heart.

Mary had gotten an earful from Cathy Anderson after that.

It had been the last time she’d spoken to the other woman.

Mary had told her that while she liked Josh well enough she didn’t meddle in the affairs of her kids. And that Hannah had to do what she thought was right.

It didn’t matter if Mary couldn’t understand what Hannah’s heart wanted.

Avery was both intimidating and a triumph for Mary. Evidence that having Addie back in their lives had done some good, but also...a feminine, pretty supermom type that Mary herself had always been intimidated by when she’d been raising her kids.

She’d never meshed well with groups of women. But she’d been raised in a house of men.

Her father had been a quiet man. A good man. But a man who had expected that when life was hard you picked up and carried on.

It was Addie who hadn’t been able to do that.

Mary’s mother had been so...volatile toward the end. Crying, laughing or shouting and nothing in between. In response, Mary’s father had gotten more and more even-keeled till he was like a river that barely moved.

She knew he’d been hurt when Addie had left, but he’d stayed steady.

Mary had wanted to do the same.

“I have all the fabric laid out in the sitting room,” Lark said.

Lark was fluttering. And she led them all from the entryway into a little room that had chairs set up in a circle.

“And look what I made!” Lark produced a large box, and inside were blossoms and vines, twined into...

Lark pulled one out and put it on her head, pale white and pink blossoms like cheery punctuation