His Surprise Son. Allie Pleiter

initial shock pretty well, and we’re sort of pretending it’s not there. She made like she didn’t know me, and I did the same.”

      Matt gave Josh a dubious look. The man was a master of them. “You know that’s not gonna work, don’t you?”

      “Of course I know that. But I don’t want to mess this up for Violet, either. She’ll get all weird about it, and believe me, she’s high-strung enough already with the wedding. I’ve just got to get Jean alone to hash out how we’re going to handle it.”

      Josh saw Matt pivot to another corner of his desk and begin typing. “Matt, would you mind finishing with me before you look up Jean Matrim online?”

      Matt paused. “Hey, I’m just looking up where you are in case I need to airlift you out of there.” After a second, he said, “Aw, look, there she is standing by the Welcome to Matrimony Valley sign.” Josh heard more tapping and yelled at himself for not paying closer attention to Violet’s plans before now. “She always was pretty,” Matt commented. “Looks like she’s held up better than you have. Little boy’s cute, too, in an aw-shucks kind of way.”

      Josh picked up the brochure on the table beside him. The photo on it was just of Jean. “Little boy, huh? Someone told me she was a single mom, but I haven’t seen a photo of her child.”

      “There’s a photo of her with her son on one of the website pages. Third tab, lower left corner.”

      Josh swiped over from the video chat and pulled up MatrimonyValley.com, clicking through the website’s pages until he landed on the picture of Jean with her hand on the shoulder of a boy.

      He was expecting a toddler, but the boy looked older than that. Five or six, if he had to guess. He stared at the boy.

      A boy about six years old. Josh stared harder.

      A ball of icy lead landed in his stomach and stayed there.

      “Matt, I gotta go.”

      * * *

      Jean swallowed her exasperated sigh later that afternoon as she held the phone away from her ear. Her nerves were strung tight ever since the whopping surprise of Joshua Tyler’s arrival. Josh Tyler, here, in front of her, in front of everybody. Why, Lord? Why him? Now? No matter how many times she prayed with her questions, answers failed to arrive.

      Thankfully, picking up Jonah from school gave her an excuse for a quick exit not too long after Violet was handed off to Hailey at the inn. She counted it as pure grace that she was able to exit before Josh came back across the street from Watson’s Diner.

      Only being saved from Josh hadn’t saved her from Wanda Watson. The woman must have been looking out her diner window waiting for the office light to turn back on, because the phone rang not three minutes after she got herself and Jonah settled back into her office.

      “Wanda, you met him.” Jean continued her attempts to appease the grumpy old woman. “He’s a nice person. Violet is a nice person. Her groom will be just as nice when you meet him. You’ll like the people who will come here to get married.” That felt like an outrageous promise to make—Wanda didn’t like lots of people. How did two sourpusses like Wanda and Wayne Watson ever manage a restaurant full of people all these years?

      “I still don’t see what brides and grooms can do for sandwiches and meat loaf,” groused Wanda. “I don’t care what you say, not every business in town will benefit from your little scheme.”

      It wasn’t a scheme, and it wasn’t little. “The man just bought a sandwich from you, didn’t he? Everybody’s got to eat,” she assured the woman. “The day before the wedding, the day after the wedding, the day they drive into town. Weddings and wedding guests mean business. For you as much as for Kelly’s flower shop or Yvonne’s bakery.”

      “You’re banking an awful lot on this pipe dream, Your Honor.” Wanda’s harrumph practically spilled out of the phone receiver to douse Jean’s resolve.

      Your Honor. Wanda never meant it as a term of respect whenever she said it. Jean put her elbow on her desk and rested her head in her hands while Wanda went on about some other complaint—the woman seemed to have a never-ending list of them.

      Jonah looked up from his coloring sheet across the desk from her, catching his mother’s action and expression. “O-K?” The small fingers of his right hand formed the letters in sign language. His open hand moved toward his mouth, his thumb touching his chin in the sign for “Mom?” One little dark eyebrow furrowed in worried inquiry.

      She smiled at him and made the sign for “fine” and “tired.” Then, with what she hoped was a playful smile, she added the sign for “hungry.”

      “Me, too,” Jonah’s signs replied. His smile was as sweet as the grandfather he was named after. “Home soon?”

      “I hope,” she signed in return, grateful Wanda couldn’t hear any of the conversation. “Our first bride is here for a visit, Wanda,” she said into the phone. “Let’s all welcome her the best we can.” They’d had some version of this conversation nearly every week since last fall, when the town council approved Jean’s proposal to change the town’s name and become a wedding destination.

      Was it extreme to change the name of the town, the streets and half the businesses? It was, but so was the rate at which the tiny town was suffocating under a dying economy. Tobacco was long gone, the mills had slowed and then closed, and nothing had ever replaced them. Something had to be done before there was no town at all. Weddings were what she loved, what she knew, so when the idea came to her she ran with it. Because that’s what Matrims did.

      Jean looked up at the portraits of her father and grandfather as Wanda droned on. I did what I had to do to make everything work out, Grandpa. Grandpa Jake had founded Matrim’s Valley in the early 1900s, opening up the textile mill that transformed the loose collection of mountain tobacco farms into a bustling mill town. He even became Matrim’s Valley’s first mayor. “Built his mill and this town out of sheer grit and an unwillingness to ever admit defeat,” Dad used to say of Grandpa Jake.

      Her father, Jonah Matrim, had taken over the mill, and later the mayor’s office, not long after her mother’s death from an infection when Jean was in her teens. But even Matrim grit couldn’t outrun a failing economy, and eventually the mill had closed the summer Jean graduated and moved to California with Josh. Dad tried mightily to keep the valley together, but it was as if something inside him that had started to die when Mom did continued to die with the mill. As if his own health depended on the town’s. Her new residence clear across the country hadn’t helped, either.

      Josh proposed the day SymphoCync officially opened its offices that July, and for a while they were happy. Still, Silicon Valley’s excess quickly began to taste sour in light of her beloved valley’s demise. Dad had given his all as Matrim’s Valley’s mayor, and here she was, thousands of miles away, doing nothing she could count as important. Her dad loved her, doted on her, needed her, while in San Jose she was fortunate to get fifteen minutes of Josh’s attention.

      At first, Jean thought she was homesick. Or at least missing her dad. Dad and home called to her with a stronger and stronger voice until she finally went “for a good long visit.”

      She never returned to California, even when she discovered she was pregnant. The life inside her seemed to give Dad hope, helping him to improve. Dad loved Jonah in a way Jean had come to doubt Josh ever could. Especially when he was born, and maybe more so when they learned Jonah couldn’t hear three months later. She never told Josh about his son, for reasons he’d now have to learn. Life was full of hard and painful choices. And even though such regrets drew her to finally discover the faith her father had, they still haunted her.

      Failing health, like a failing economy, won out once more over Matrim grit. The pleasure Wanda’s husband, Wayne, took in stepping in as acting mayor when Dad’s health forced him to step down always bothered her. Still, with a toddler and an ailing father, it wasn’t as if she could do anything but thank Wayne for