Rainshadow Road (Friday Harbor #2)(4)

Alice burst into tears, standing with the broken glass shards around her.

Alerted by the noise, their mother dashed into the room. “Alice!” She rushed forward and plucked her off the floor, away from the glass. “Baby, are you hurt? What happened?”

“Lucy scared me,” Alice sobbed.

“She broke my glass ornament,” Lucy said furiously. “She came into my room without asking and broke it.”

Her mother was holding Alice, smoothing her hair. “The important thing is that no one was hurt.”

“The important thing is that she broke something that was mine!”

Her mother looked exasperated and distressed. “She was just curious. It was an accident, Lucy.”

Lucy glared at her little sister. “I hate you. Don’t ever come in here again, or I’ll knock your head off.”

The threat elicited a fresh storm of tears from Alice, while their mother’s face darkened. “That’s enough, Lucy. I expect you to be nice to your sister, especially after she’s been so sick.”

“She’s not sick anymore,” Lucy said, but the words were lost in the sound of Alice’s vehement sobbing.

“I’m going to take care of your sister,” her mother said, “and then I’ll come back and clean up that glass. Don’t touch any of it, those pieces are razor-sharp. For heaven’s sake, Lucy, I’ll get you another ornament.”

“It won’t be the same,” Lucy said sullenly, but her mother had already carried Alice out of the room.

Lucy knelt in front of the shattered glass, glinting with the delicate iridescence of soap bubbles on the wood floor. She huddled and sniffled, and stared at the broken ornament until her vision blurred. Emotion filled her until it seemed to rise from her skin and pour into the air … fury, grief, and a craving, nagging, desperate wish for love.

In the dim smear of lamplight, little points of light awakened. Swallowing back tears, Lucy wrapped her arms around herself and took a shivering breath. She blinked as the glimmers rose from the floor and swirled around her. Astonished, she wiped her eyes with her fingers and watched the lights circle and dance. Finally she understood what she was seeing.

Fireflies.

Magic meant just for her.

Every shard of glass had transformed into living sparks. Slowly the dancing procession of fireflies made their way to the open window and slipped into the night.

When her mother returned a few minutes later, Lucy had gone to sit on the edge of her bed, staring at the window.

“What happened to the glass?” her mother asked.

“It’s gone,” Lucy said absently.

It was her secret, this magic. Lucy didn’t know where it had come from. She only knew that it would find the spaces it needed, take life in them, like flowers growing in the cracks of broken pavement.

“I told you not to touch it. You could have cut your fingers.”

“I’m sorry, Mommy.” Lucy reached for a book on her nightstand. She opened the volume to a random page, staring at it blindly.

She heard her mother sigh. “Lucy, you have to be more patient with your little sister.”

“I know.”

“She’s still fragile after what she went through.”

Lucy kept her gaze fixed on the book in her hands, and waited in dogged silence until her mother had left the room.

After a desultory dinner, with only Alice’s chatter to relieve the quietness, Lucy helped to clear the table. Her mind was filled with thoughts. It had seemed as if her emotions had been so strong, they had changed the glass into a new shape. She thought the glass might have been trying to tell her something.

She went to her father’s home office, where he was in the act of dialing the phone. He didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working, but she needed to ask him something. “Daddy,” she said hesitantly.

She could tell the interruption had annoyed him by the way his shoulders tensed. But his voice was mild as he set down the phone and said, “Yes, Lucy?”

“What does it mean when you see a firefly?”

“You won’t see any fireflies in Washington State, I’m afraid. They don’t appear this far north.”

“But what do they mean?”

“Symbolically, you’re asking?” He thought for a moment. “The firefly is an unassuming insect in the daytime. If you didn’t know what it was, you’d think it was nothing special. But at night, the firefly glows with its own light source. The darkness brings out its most beautiful gift.” He smiled at Lucy’s rapt expression. “That’s an extraordinary talent for an ordinary-looking creature, isn’t it?”

From then on, magic had come to Lucy when she most needed it. And sometimes when she least wanted it.

Two

“I have trust issues,” Lucy had once told Kevin, not long after they had met.

He had put his arms around her and whispered, “Not with me, you don’t.”

After two years of living with Kevin Pearson, Lucy still couldn’t believe her luck. He was everything she could have wished for, a man who understood the value of small gestures, such as planting Lucy’s favorite flower in the front yard of the house they shared, or calling her in the middle of the day for no reason at all. He was a sociable man, frequently pulling Lucy out of her studio to go to a party or have dinner with friends.