Smoke River Family. Lynna Banning

Sam is going to teach me how to scramble eggs.”

      Zane stared at her. Celeste had never exchanged more than two sentences with Sam, and she’d certainly never asked him to teach her anything about cooking.

      “But before my egg lesson,” Winifred continued, “there is something I’d like to discuss with you.”

      Zane’s nerves went on alert. “Now?”

      “No, not now. Later.”

      “I’ll be at the hospital later.”

      Very deliberately she laid her fork on the plate. “The truth is you don’t want to talk to me, do you? I can understand your not liking me, but—”

      “I do like you.” Oh, God, had he really said that? He drew in a long breath. “I apologize. That came out wrong. What I mean is we have nothing to discuss.”

      “It’s about Celeste.”

      “Especially if it’s about Celeste. She wanted the piano and all her music books shipped back to you at the conservatory, and her clothes—”

      “Her clothes are too small for me, Zane. And she loved the color pink. I detest pink.”

      “I detest pink, too, but...” His voice thickened. “But I loved it on Celeste.”

      Winifred nodded. “I don’t need the piano,” she said quietly. “It brings back painful memories.”

      “Oh? What the hell do you think it does to me?” Instantly he regretted snapping at her. He waited, watching her coffee cup jiggle when she picked it up. Her fingers were trembling.

      “Sorry. Guess I’m strung up a little tight these days.”

      “Well, so am I.”

      They stared at each other across the table for a long minute, and then Winifred dropped her eyes.

      “Zane, when Cissy met you, she and I were about to go on tour. London, Paris, Vienna. Even Rome, which Cissy didn’t want to visit because she feared it would be too hot. Did you know about this?”

      “No, I did not know. She never told me. All I know is that there was a piano recital one night at the medical college and Celeste was playing. She wore some kind of flowing pink gown, chiffon, I guess it’s called. And she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. I fell in love with her during her first piece. Chopin, I remember. An étude.”

      “In A-flat,” Winifred supplied.

      “Is that what you want to discuss—the music tour you and Celeste were planning?”

      “No, it isn’t. It’s, well, something else.”

      Their eyes met and held. Hers were distant. Troubled. He didn’t know what his eyes betrayed, but all at once she blinked and bit her lip.

      “Zane, I am trying to understand about Celeste. She was so smitten she left everything we had planned to run away with you. I...” She swallowed. “I am trying hard to forgive her for leaving it all behind. And for dying,” she added, her voice pinched.

      “I am trying, as well,” he said quietly. “Part of me is hurt and angry that she—that she is gone.” Another part of him, the part he could scarcely acknowledge to himself, much less share with Winifred Von Dannen, was his weariness. He was tired of the constant grinding pain. And he was hungry. Yes, that was the word, hungry for something else. The trouble was, he didn’t have the slightest idea what that might be.

      Winifred sipped her coffee and looked at him over the rim of the cup. “It must be very hard,” she said at last.

      For a moment he couldn’t speak over the ache in his throat. “It is hard,” he said at last. “You have no idea how hard.”

      She looked at him with tears pooling in her eyes and all at once he could take no more. “I’ll be at the hospital.”

      Without another word he shoved back his chair and strode out the door onto the street.

      Winifred watched him through the front dining room window, his long-legged gait decisive, angry, his shoulders hunched forward as if warding off a chill wind. What wouldn’t she give to have met him before Cissy had.

      Her coffee cup clanked onto the saucer. Where on earth had that thought come from?

      “Somethin’ wrong with your breakfast, ma’am?” Rita stood frowning at her elbow. “Never seen Doc bolt outta here like that.”

      “Oh, no, Rita. The eggs were very good, just right in fact. Dr. Dougherty said he had to go to the hospital.”

      “Huh,” the woman said. “That man’s working too hard, if ya ask me. Never takes a day off, up all hours of the day and night. Ever since his wife died it’s like he never stops runnin’.”

      Winifred tried to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t work right. She clenched her lower lip between her teeth to stop its trembling. She was a silly, sentimental fool.

      “I’ll jest put the meal on his account. Yours, too.”

      Outside on the boardwalk she stood surveying the streets of the small town she found herself in, then on impulse started down a pretty maple-lined lane. Five houses from the corner an attractive yellow two-story house caught her eye. The white picket fence surrounding the property was thick with yellow roses, the same roses she’d found on Cissy’s grave yesterday.

      Just as she drew abreast of the gate, the front door opened and a handsome gray-haired gentleman descended the steps. Clutched in his hand was a bouquet of the same yellow roses.

      “Mornin’,” he said as he unlatched the gate. “Another fine day we’re havin’.”

      Winifred stared at the man. “What? Oh, yes. Excuse me, but...forgive my asking, but what will you do with those roses?”

      He dropped his gaze to the bouquet. “These? Why, I’m takin’ these to the graveyard where Miss Celeste—” He broke off and peered at her with startling blue eyes.

      “Say, you must be her sister from the East.”

      “Why, yes, I am. How did you guess that?”

      “Weren’t hard, seein’ as how you look a lot like her. Name’s Rooney Cloudman, ma’am. I was an admirer of yer sister.”

      She held out her hand. “Winifred Von Dannen.”

      Mr. Cloudman shifted the roses to his left hand and grasped hers in a finger-crunching grip. “Miss Celeste, she liked roses, so I take some to her grave every day. Sure do miss her piano-playin’. Used to sneak up on Doc’s porch and set in the swing jest listenin’. Most beautiful music I ever heard.”

      Winifred swallowed hard, unable to speak for a long moment. “Yes, she was quite gifted.”

      “I never let on ’bout me listenin’. Figured Doc wouldn’t mind, but I was afeared she’d stop playin’ if she knew.”

      “I am sure she would have been pleased, Mr. Cloudman.”

      He gave her a wide smile. “Whyn’t you go on into the house and introduce yerself to Sarah Rose. She loved Miss Celeste’s music, too. Me, I’m off to the cemetery.” He tipped his battered wide-brimmed hat and ambled on down the street.

      Winifred didn’t feel like talking to anyone, especially about Cissy, so she decided to return to the doctor’s house on the hill and take her cooking lesson from Sam. She snapped off a single yellow rose from the stems rambling along the fence, spun in place and marched back to the big hill and Dr. Dougherty’s beautiful white house.

      * * *

      In the hospital foyer, Zane was stopped by Samuel Graham, the physician whose name the hospital bore. The older man laid a gentle hand on Zane’s shoulder.

      “How are you managing, son?”

      “Well