Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
With that, he shuffled out of the diner, leaving his father fuming.
He didn’t fume in our presence for long.
He took off after his son.
So that was that.
And no case was pending.
On the Monday after all our troubles were over, Angelica signed over custody of Ledger and Viggo to Riggs and Storm.
She then carried through with her every-other-weekend visits with them for precisely a month before she moved to Spokane.
This might have to do with the fact she’d become a pariah in Misted Pines. But call me cynical, I thought it had more to do with her being outed, so there wasn’t a man in the entire county who would touch her.
She called Ledger on occasion and came to MP a few times to see him and his brother, but mostly, she was as she had been when she was around.
Absent.
Ledger honestly didn’t seem to mind. He seemed relieved. And since Riggs and Storm made sure the brothers had time together (and Viggo was a doll, a total Storm-mini-me, like Ledger was with his dad, including his stormy-colored eyes), it seemed all good for Ledger.
But we were keeping an eye.
My theory about Angelica proved true when, not four months in Spokane, she phoned Ledger and gave him the “happy” news he was going to have a little baby brother or sister.
Not only that, she was getting married to a real estate agent future daddy who was apparently a big deal in that city.
So, I guessed, the third time was a charm for Angelica.
Having broken the seal, I spent a lot of time with my journals, either on the front or back porches of the cabin, on the pier, in the hammock, in the cabin, or out in the workshop with Riggs.
There was a lot to put down about him and Ledger, Angelica, Storm and Viggo, the Whitaker tragedy, my life in Misted Pines.
But eventually, I got around to pouring into it my thoughts and emotions about what happened to Mom, as well as how I felt about her.
And the man who sired me.
This wasn’t easy.
Sometimes, I’d have to put my journal aside and race down the trail to find Riggs, throw myself in his arms, and burst into tears, whereupon he’d hold me and murmur to me and be there until I was all right.
Sometimes, I’d just have to put it aside and cross the workshop to him.
So, yes.
Misted Pines, in the end, gave me the space to face all of that, and even though I’d never come to terms with it, it also gave me Riggs, Ledger, Gail and a big, wide family.
So I could live with it.
If not peacefully, the life I was living that it was a part of was happy.
Riggs got his commission done just under the wire, working at it sometimes until dinner, then going back to it after.
My heart melted when he told me why he was going to install the first arbor on his property.
He did that at the trailhead to the cabin from the house.
He then called Harry and asked him to contact Truman and Kennedy in order to ascertain what their mom’s favorite color rose was.
They told him it was peach.
So he planted two rose bushes of that color at the base of each side of the arbor, where they would grow and intertwine with the beauty Riggs had crafted out of iron.
It was perfect to denote the beginning of the path Sarah would take to lead her to Roosevelt, and the end of it when she went to Lincoln.
And the route Riggs had taken to guide him to me.
It was not lost on me that much (though not all) of Riggs’s genius was tied up in his art.
Simply put, what he crafted in that workshop was extraordinary.
He was far from stupid, obviously, so he knew that too.
He probably also knew that it could be shown in galleries and might earn him something more than money.
But he was like Roosevelt. He loved creating it, but beyond that, he had little interest.
Though, he was also like Lincoln, because he made sure, with everything he made, he got paid.
As for Riggs, Ledger, Gia and me, I put my foot down about things steadying, so now we had the time to take, in order to ease Ledger into his dad’s new relationship.
Throughout the summer, and into early autumn, Gia and I spent three to four nights a week at the cabin, giving Riggs and his boy father-and-son time.
This ended the night we threw a big party to celebrate his crew getting back from a job (Riggs held true to his word, promoted Easton, and during the first job, drove the two hours to oversee things four times, but the ones after, how often he would check in could be as little as once), as well as Riggs finishing the massive deck he’d built on the lakeside of the house.