The Lawman's Runaway Bride. Patricia Johns

for a mother to simply walk away from her little girl. She’d eventually found her living in a dumpy apartment, and she looked decades older than she really was.

      “The last I saw her, she asked for money. And I—” Sadie put down her teacup “—I said no.”

      “You had no choice, dear,” Nana said. “She’s an addict. She’ll always ask for money, and when you give it to her, she’ll buy more drugs.”

      “She pleaded.” Sadie met her grandmother’s gaze. “She begged for it, Nana. I went back home and cried.”

      Nana came around the table and wrapped her strong arms around Sadie, pinning her arms at her sides. These hugs—she’d come home for moments like this, where she wasn’t alone and someone else hurt as badly as she did when it came to her mom. Sadie’s mother had always been flighty. That was Nana’s term for it. She’d bounced from boyfriend to boyfriend, from job to job. When she’d gotten pregnant with Sadie, she wasn’t even sure who the father was—at least that was her claim. It was possible that she didn’t like who the father was... She’d never really put down any roots, and the most security Sadie had ever known was right here in her grandmother’s house. But Sadie was her mother’s daughter, too, and she’d inherited that tendency to bounce from job to job, from goal to goal...

      “Sadie.” Nana pulled back and looked her in the face. “There was nothing you could do. If there were, I’d have done it already, I promise you that. Lori might be your mother, but she’s my baby girl.”

      Sadie knew that, and she wasn’t a child, either. She understood the way drugs wreaked havoc on a person’s mind and body, but when she thought about all those years of waiting—hoping her mom would drive back into town as quietly as she’d left—it was both heartbreaking and infuriating to realize that her mom had been so close by all that time, and had never checked on her.

      “Nana, I missed you.” Sadie meant that with every atom in her being. She’d missed her nana, the stability, the security, the love. For Nana, Sadie had been enough. She just hadn’t been enough for her own mom.

      “I’m glad you’re home.” Nana patted her cheek. “Now, let me feed you. What would you like?”

      That was always Nana’s solution for every problem—pie, bacon and eggs, perhaps a nice thick sandwich. Nana was a phenomenal cook, and she used food like therapy. Unfortunately, when Sadie was upset about something, her stomach closed down.

      “I’m not hungry, Nana,” Sadie said with a small smile.

      “Well...” Nana sighed, then shot Sadie a hopeful look. “I’ve made a few additions to the dollhouse...”

      Sadie couldn’t help the smile that came to her face. “Are you still working on it?”

      “Dearest, I’ve been working on that dollhouse for ages. I wouldn’t just stop. Come on, then. I’ll show you the newest renovations.”

      Nana’s dollhouse was located in “the craft room,” which was a room too small for a bed, and since it had a window, it was also not suitable for closet space. Nana had turned this room into her crafting space, and it was therefore where the dollhouse sat on display. This dollhouse had been a formative part of Sadie’s childhood. She’d spent hours just staring into the tiny rooms, soaking in every perfect detail. Nana’s dollhouse was four stories of sky blue, Victorian elegance on the outside, but inside, the rooms were carefully decorated in a 1950s style. The house opened on hinges, so that even more rooms were available once the two back wings had swung out on either side. The center of the house had a staircase that led up to the very top floor—a tiny attic room with a cot and a rickety little dresser.

      “What have you changed?” Sadie asked as she followed Nana into the study. It was a few degrees colder in that room, and the window had frost on the inside, too.

      “Oh, this and that,” Nana said. “You know how it is. I decided to put real linens on the beds last year. Do you know how difficult it is to make a fitted sheet for a doll bed? I also made some tiny block quilts—all authentic, of course.”

      “Of course.” Sadie bent down in front of the display of tiny rooms. She reached out to finger a tiny quilt on the bed in the attic. “Nana, this quilt is lined—” She stared at the minute craftsmanship.

      “I told you—authentic.” Nana was pleased that she’d noticed—she could tell.

      The funny thing was that seeing this dollhouse again felt like home in a deeper way than anything else in Comfort Creek. She’d spent so many solitary hours staring into these rooms, imagining the family that lived there, their dramas and quarrels, their victories and quiet Sunday evenings spent all together in the tiny sitting room in front of the fireplace...

      The mother in this house never left. She doted over her offspring and cooked lavish meals in the kitchen. The father came home every day at the exact same time, and he picked up a tiny newspaper from the sideboard in the hallway. Any mess left about—like the toys on the children’s bedroom floor—was carefully orchestrated to be attractive. This house was perfection, frozen in an imaginary time where nothing could go so wrong that it couldn’t be set right again.

      “I added a telephone in the kitchen.” Nana pointed to a pale pink rotary phone on the wall. “I found that one at the bottom of a bin in the craft shop. Liz could see how excited I was, and she charged me double, I’m sure. Oh! And I’ve been working on making sure that every single book in the library is real. I’ve found a tutorial online for making books that open. I tried making them with four or five pages each, but they just fanned open. It was very annoying. So I used thick cardstock on both sides, so that each book opens to the center.” Nana paused. “I was hoping you’d help me choose which books to include in the library. Maybe a few of your favorites, Sadie.”

      Sadie rose and shot her grandmother a look of surprise. “Did you say you found a tutorial online?”

      When Sadie left, Nana hadn’t exactly been tech savvy. She could email, but she was a strict telephone chatter. There was no video chatting with Nana, and for the most part, she tended to stay pretty old-school.

      “It’s how it’s done these days, dear.” But her cheeks pinked in pleasure. “Okay, truth be told, last month, Ginny Carson’s grandson showed me how the tutorials worked. So I’m still new at it.”

      “Ah.” Sadie shot her grandmother a smile. “I’m still impressed.”

      “Welcome home, dear girl. Now you sit yourself down and get reacquainted with the old place, and I’ll go sort out some supper.”

      Sadie was thirty-two, and this old dollhouse still soothed a part of her heart that nothing else could touch. This was the part of her that had softened to Noah—the part of her that longed for a perfect life with a picket fence. Noah had offered a picture-perfect existence here in Comfort Creek—a handsome man to come home to at the same time every day and pick up the paper off a sideboard table...

      But it hadn’t been enough, because she didn’t love him enough, and she wasn’t sure that she was the kind of woman who could stay content with so much monotony, anyway. In the real world, with real emotions, real hardships, the life Noah offered wasn’t enough to fill her heart, after all. But he should have been, and if she’d been a little less like her flighty mother, he would have been. That knowledge had been nagging at her for the last five years. No man was perfect, and relationships didn’t stay in the honeymoon phase. Noah, his house, his family, this town—it all should have been enough.

      Nothing had ever been enough for Mom. No boyfriend. No job. No town. They’d bounced from place to place, from romance to romance for her mom. And no matter how nice the guy, her mother always found a reason to cut him loose and they’d leave again... No one had been enough to fill that hole in her mother’s heart, and she feared that she might be the same. At least looking back on it all. She had been when it came to jobs around town.

      If she could be faced with a sweet guy like Noah and the perfect life and still walk away from it all because she felt