Home to Her Read online

  Home to Her

  C.L. Ryder

  Contents

  SUMMARY

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Thank you for reading!

  Preview: Heart’s Tempo

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Untitled

  SUMMARY

  “Maybe my expectations for love were completely off?”

  At 30, Rachel Winterfield could never have anticipated moving back in with her parents again, but after being left by her fiancée and losing her job, options were limited. Her heart and her trust wounded, Rachel struggles to redefine her views on life and love, believing she’ll never love again. Everything changes when, at a local farmer’s market, a vendor selling fresh vegetables turns out to be someone from a chapter in Rachel’s life that she’d long put behind her—the only girl she’d ever loved.

  “It was like every plant that grew was healing me, giving me life again.”

  Dixie Waters has dealt with hardship her entire life. She lost her mother as a child, and after her father passed away, she decided to put all of her energy into one project: The Waters Lifespring Gardens, a permaculture food forest spanning the entire half-acre of her suburban backyard. She always viewed the gardens as her source of healing and love, but she never thought that her fruits and vegetables would bring her back face to face with her high school sweetheart—the one who got away.

  “This whole thing has just gotten me all turned around.”

  The two former lovers find passions quickly rekindling, but Rachel needs healing, and Dixie doesn’t know if she can let herself fall in love with her again. It may be up to Rosie, Dixie’s clever border collie and sole emotional companion, to quietly keep the two women together. But can one dog, the healing power of nature, and the warm memories of a past love keep fragile hearts from pulling apart?

  Copyright © 2017 by C.L. Ryder/Cody Ryder

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This story has been adapted with permission from a book previously published as Bounty of the Heart by Cody Ryder

  One

  Powlton, California.

  Settled in 1885 as a small farming community, Powlton stayed an unincorporated community within San Diego County until the late 1970’s. Even when it became its own city, Powlton was still tiny, with just one main road going through the entire thing. And today? It definitely lives up to its nickname: “the city in the country.” Although, considering it’s located just forty minutes north of downtown San Diego—a real city with actual tall buildings and city things—it probably would be more apt to just call it “the town in armpit of San Diego”.

  Powlton was where I grew up. I went to high school at Powlton High, middle school at Powlton Middle, elementary at Powlton elementary—you get the idea. As a kid, it was probably the best place to be. Plenty of places to ride your bike off-road, a nice public swimming pool, the bowling alley to hang out with your friends; it was safe, friendly, and close enough to things like Sea World and the San Diego Zoo. As I got older, though, this sleepy one road town only made me restless. I had big dreams—dreams of the city, San Francisco, of working on the cutting edge of my field, getting to ride up to my top floor office in a skyscraper every day and knowing that I was making something with my life. Powlton, with its public pool, its one bowling alley, and its sleepy air of drowsy placidity only stifled me.

  And so, as soon as I graduated high school, I left. I was off to college at UC Berkley to study business, and I was living my dreams. Life then went exactly how I had hoped—in fact, better than how I had hoped. During school, I’d met Alan, the boy who would become my fiancée. His father was the vice president of a major technology, and after I graduated, he’d used his connections to help me get a job that most new graduates could only dream of. I worked in my skyscraper office, shared a nice apartment with Alan, and was well on my way to living the perfect normal city life that I had always seen for myself. We’d have a couple of kids, maybe a dog, move out of our apartment into a condo and eventually get ourselves a house, maybe in San Carlos or something.

  Things were perfect for eight years. Eight years, can you believe that? Alan proposed to me in our seventh year together, and I said yes. We had everything planned out, and everything was going to be perfect. I thought that what I wanted was what he wanted, but I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I was too wrapped up in making sure everything fell neatly into place in my own perfect little idyllic fantasy life, but I sure as hell can tell you that I did not see it coming in the slightest. Hindsight is twenty-twenty as they say, and I looking back at things now I can just make out the signs in my memories. I can see the hesitation, Alan’s little hints that he wasn’t happy and that things had changed for him.

  He ended it nine months ago. We’d just been in the middle of making our wedding plans.

  “I care about you, Rachel,” he told me that day. I was on the ground in front of him, squeezing his hand in mine, tears streaming down my face as I begged him not to go. “But I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. A really long time. And it’s hard for me too, but I need to do this for myself. We’ve been together since college, and I just feel like… I never got to live my life. I never got to explore, or discover me. Hell, you’re the only girl I’ve ever been with…”

  I couldn’t say anything to that. All I felt was hurt that he couldn’t feel free to discover herself with me. That I wasn’t enough. And no, he didn’t cheat on me or anything like that, though from the recent Facebook posts I’d seen of him on some South American beach with smiling with his arm wrapped around the stick-thin waist of some ten-years-younger Tinder hoe, it really didn’t matter. It hurt all the same, and I understood exactly what he meant by “explore”.

  So there I was, my fiancée walking out the door of the apartment we had shared for eight years, an entire saga—a whole decade—of my life crashing down around me, and I was let go from my job a month later. Downsizing, they said. When it rains, it pours. It really fucking pours.

  In the months that followed, I did what I could to get back on my feet again, though my world was completely torn apart. It felt like I had gone crazy, like everything I had known just didn’t make any sense. I was seeing things differently then, you see, and I suppose it’s bound to happen when the reality you’ve lived in for so long suddenly gets obliterated. I was alone in that apartment, where every corner shared some memory of our time together, and where every morning, I’d wake up in our bed and wonder what the hell was happening, what I had done to deserve this, where had it all gone wrong. I felt like my entire existence was completely shattered.

  I was hitting up all my contacts from school, trying to find a new job that could support my life in San Francisco, but I was coming up empty. Eventually, with all the elements beating at me and my savings account dwindling to its bones, I decided to join the masses of my peers who also couldn’t afford to live independently in this modern world, and swallow my pride. It was back home for me.

  Back home to Powlton. Back with the folks.

  Back to square one.

  Two

  The worst mornings were the ones after I had those v
ivid dreams.

  In them, I’d be back in my old apartment in San Francisco, waking up to the smell of breakfast cooking and the sound of Alan singing from the kitchen. I’d get up and out of bed to the kitchen where he was, his back facing me as he worked his magic. He was an amazing cook. I’d walk up to him and wrap my arms around his waist, and he’d look up to me and tell me good morning. I’d kiss him right next to his ear, the smell of his hair so vividly filling my senses. Then I’d wake up. For the first few moments after coming back to consciousness, I’d be confused about where I was. Same bed, different room. This was one of those mornings.

  The smell of Alan’s hair still seemed to linger around me as I looked over to my right where the doorway to the kitchen should be, and caught an eyeful of blank wall. What the hell? I looked up and saw the faint left over residue of the glow-in-the-dark star stickers I used to have all across the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, and I remembered where I was. The sound of CNN on the television and the call of birds outside my bedroom window. Alan and I never had cable TV, and we hardly heard the sound of birds from our city loft apartment.

  I let out a breath of air. “Right,” I muttered, rubbing my eyes.

  My chest felt tight. It’d been six months since I’d moved home, nine months since he’d left. I hated that feeling of want, of missing him, of memory—because when I was awake I definitely wasn’t feeling that way about him. Of course, I still thought about him from time to time (okay, maybe a little more than that), but I’d at least come to grips with the fact that wallowing in the pain of missing him was meaningless. I didn’t think I was still in love with him, but did the dreams represent what I felt deep down inside?

  If he came waltzing back into my life, would I crumble and beg him to take me back?

  I didn’t know.

  He was an asshole who left me, but the void was great, and it wasn’t easy to just forget about someone you’d loved, no matter how badly they’d hurt you.

  I threw back the covers and without even thinking about it, quickly glanced over at the side of the bed that Alan used to sleep on. Dugh. Dammit. I’d brought the bed back from San Francisco with me because it was nice, I’d spent a lot of money on it, and I wasn’t about to go back to sleeping in my tiny childhood twin bed. Now I was starting to wish I’d just sold the damn thing.

  Sitting on the edge of the mattress, I took a few deep breaths and tried to clear my mind. The tightness in my chest was slowly letting up, but his presence was still choking my mind. I looked over at the small electronic clock sitting on my bedside table. Eleven. Another late morning, as usual. I’d always been the kind of person who liked to wake up early so I could sneak in a workout before going to the office, but ever since moving back home I’d found myself waking up later and later. It wasn’t just because I was out of the job. I just was having difficulty finding the motivation.

  I opened my blinds, went to the bathroom and took a quick shower. After that, I changed out of my pajamas, slipping into a comfortable merino wool t-shirt and some jean shorts. On the dresser in a neat line lay my hair tie, iPhone, wallet and Ray Ban sunglasses, and I went from left to right, taking the first two but leaving the wallet and glasses. I tied my hair up into my usual ponytail, quickly checked my phone for messages (though I knew no one would be contacting me), and then slipped it into my pocket. I detailed what I was going to do that day in my mind–my typical morning routine, though my daily checklist had become pretty thin:

  _ Look for job.

  _ Don’t think about Alan.

  I went downstairs. My mom and dad were sitting around the dining table eating breakfast, my mom involved in whatever was happening on the screen of her iPad, and my dad staring absently at the TV where some talking head was droning on about the upcoming presidential election. My parents were retired now, both former accountants for IBM way back in the day. I remembered how when I was young, my parents would work all day, and then when they came home there would be a big emphasis on family time at the dinner table. There would be no TV on, and the same deal for breakfast on the weekends. Mom would cook up a big breakfast while dad talked or played with me, and then we’d all sit down to eat and talk and laugh together.

  In high school, I was preoccupied with my school life and my friends, and didn’t put much thought into the at-home dynamic, but now that I was back home again, I had become acutely aware that things had definitely changed.

  “There’s cereal on the counter, if you want any.” My mom gestured over towards the boxes on the kitchen counter.

  “I’m sure she knows by now, Carol,” my dad said. “It's Saturday, the cereal is always out on the counter on Saturdays.”

  She tilted her nose down, looking over her glasses at him with more than a hint of irritation. “I’m just reminding her, Joe.”

  I went over and poured myself out a bowl of cereal. “You know,” I said, going over to the fridge to get the milk out, “do you remember back when I was a kid? We used to have those big family breakfasts. I remember, mom, you’d cook up all sorts of good stuff. These fat, juicy sausages, perfect bacon, grilled tomatoes. I think that those were the only times I liked eating tomatoes as a kid. And that salad too. The salad was great.”

  “I asked your mother the same question,” my dad said. “You know what she said?”

  “Cook it yourself,” she filled in.

  “That’s right, she told me to go cook it myself.”

  I would’ve laughed, if not for the thick passive aggressiveness behind their words. Ever since moving home, I’d noticed my parents going through little spats like this. Micro-fights. Had they always happened, even when I was younger? I couldn’t remember. Back then I’d always seen my parents as a perfectly happy couple. I’d had friends whose parents divorced, or separated, or just were otherwise not in good relations, and I’d always kind of assumed that nothing like that was going on between my folks. Living at home with them as an adult these past six months made me re-examine things.

  It’s a jarring thing to have your truths rearranged. It’s even more jarring when it happens multiple times in succession. One moment, I’d been engaged, a career woman on the cusp of what I saw as “the rest of my life”, the next, I was an unemployed thirty-year-old living back at home with her parents. I’d been existing with this idea of my folks being the perfect happily married couple that I aspired to be like one day, and now I was reassessing all my memories to try and figure out if I really was just that unobservant about things.

  I mean, wasn’t that the cause of all this? My inability to notice that Alan was unhappy?

  Don’t think about Alan, I scolded myself.

  Had Mom and Dad been this way when I was in high school? I really couldn’t remember, no matter how hard I tried. They were busy with work, I was going out with friends and paying attention to other things. When was the last time I even saw them kiss?

  Had I ever seen them kiss?

  Huh.

  I sat down at the dining table with my cereal and tucked into it.

  “Why do you ask, Rachel?” my mom asked.

  “Oh, just… I just was thinking about it. Good memories.”

  “How’s your job hunt coming?” asked my dad, still looking at the TV.

  “About the same,” I said. “Lots of applications, no responses.”

  “Have you tried going in and applying in person? Handing in your resume. Companies like that, you know?”

  “Most places would rather have the application sent in online now, Dad,” I said.

  “Is that right?”

  My mom shook her head incredulously. “We’ve discussed this before, Joe. Don’t you remember?”

  “Hm. Is that right?”

  “Good Lord,” she sighed under her breath. “He is so forgetful these days; it drives me crazy.”

  My dad smiled guiltily and shrugged. “Old age.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I finished my cereal and went to go wash the bowl out in the sink.

&nbsp
; “Rachel?”

  “Hm? Yeah, mom?”

  She took her glasses off, something she always did when she was about to say something serious. Dad turned down the television. Uh oh.

  “How are you doing these days?” she asked.

  I blinked dumbly. “I’m okay,” I said, “I’m doing better.” It was only partially the truth.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about everything. I mean, it's pretty much all I think about besides getting a new job—getting back on my feet. But I think I’ve worked through the worst of it.”

  “It’s great that you’re working so hard on getting a new job,” dad said. “It’s good to get back up in the saddle. But what about, um, your dating? Are you seeing anyone?”

  I knew he knew the answer to that question. Asides from going to work out, I’d hardly left the house during the past six months. I just sat at home browsing job listings, watching TV and doing my best not to look at Alan’s Facebook. So cool, I know.