Finding Home

“My goal isn’t a new house.”

“I love this house, Brad. This is my house. Our house. This is where all my memories are.” As Stacey spoke, emotions swept through her, intensifying every word she said. “This is where we started out together. Where Julie and Jim became tiny people instead of just babies. I love this house,” she told him again with feeling.

Stacey searched his face to see if she’d gotten through. But there was no indication that she had.

He shook his head. “Then why change it?”

It wasn’t changing, it was improving, but she had a feeling that comparison would be lost on him, too. “Because like everything else, the house needs a face-lift.”

He glared at her. “You sure that a quarter of a million will cover everything you want done?”

Stacey had no idea what possessed her to glibly answer, “If not, it’ll be a start.” But it felt good to say it.

Marie Ferrarella

Marie Ferrarella wrote her very first story at age eleven on an old manual Remington typewriter her mother bought for her for seventeen dollars at a pawn shop. The keys stuck and she had to pound on them in order to produce anything. The instruments of production have changed, but she’s been pounding on keys ever since. To date, she’s written over 150 novels and there appears to be no end in sight. As long as there are keyboards and readers, she intends to go on writing until the day she meets the Big Editor in the Sky.

Finding Home

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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From the Author

Dear Reader,

Welcome to my life.

All right, Finding Home is a slightly fictionalized version seeing as how I didn’t marry a doctor and my daughter isn’t in medical school and my son isn’t a musician. But I did live through the horror of having several rooms remodeled and I did have a husband who handed me lists every morning to review with a not-so-happy construction person.

Anyone who’s ever had remodeling done and remained married after the contractor and crew have left knows what sort of a triumphant feeling that is. Remodeling is definitely in the same realm as trial by fire. It tests the limits of your patience and your love. When it’s all over, you come out the other end stronger, more confident, with a reorganized sense of priorities. Either that, or in a straitjacket.

So, consider carefully before you make that first call to the local contractor. Can your marriage take it? If you’re afraid to find out, just move. In the long run, it might be safer. But definitely not more interesting.

Affectionately,

Marie Ferrarella

To Katherine Orr, with many thanks.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 1

She couldn’t get the song out of her head.

It haunted her, popping up in the middle of a thought or an activity. Like now, just as she was putting a platter of sugar-dusted French toast in front of her husband.

Stacey Sommers first heard the song, which staunchly refused to untangle itself from her brain cells, years ago. At the time, the lyrics had struck her as unbelievably sad. It was playing on the radio while she was driving home from the supermarket.

The incomparable songstress, Peggy Lee, was asking anyone who would listen, “Is That All There Is?” and Stacey had laughed in response. Back then she was busy up to her eyeballs, juggling the care and feeding of two small kids and a husband who was in his last year of residency at a local hospital, all this while working in order to help pay for said husband’s staggering medical school bills, not to mention put food on the table.

At the time, she’d felt like a hamster with her foot caught in the wheel and was far too exhausted to wonder if life had anything else to offer. Moments together with Brad were just that, moments. Stolen ones. And all the more delicious and precious for their scarcity.

Now, twenty years later, the pace had slowed considerably, although time was still a scarce commodity. Her kids no longer needed her for every single little thing. Half the time, she felt shut out of their lives. And Brad? Brad was an established, well-respected neurosurgeon whose opinion was sought after.

But the moments they had together were even less now than they had been before.

Is that all there is?

At this point in Brad’s career and their lives, she would have thought they could finally have those idyllic vacations she used to dream about in order to sustain herself while going ninety miles an hour through her overwhelming life. But somehow, Brad was busier these days than he had been back when he was in medical school and even during those awful intern days.

Worse than that, he seemed so much more remote now than he had been back then. As if medicine had taken him away from her.

Slipping into the chair opposite his, her life-sustaining cup of coffee in her hand, Stacey looked across the breakfast table at her husband of twenty-five years, the only man she had ever loved, or wanted. He had the Monday Health section of the L.A. Times on one side of his plate of French toast, the latest copy of the Journal of the American Medical Association opened to an article he found engrossing on the other. His attention was unequally divided between the two periodicals. Whatever was left over, and there seemed only to be little more than a scrap, he devoted to his breakfast.

Stacey suppressed a sigh. She didn’t seem to fit into his life anymore. Had she ever? Had she ever been more than a means to an end for him, taking care of his kids, his bills, his eternally wrinkled shirts?

Stacey took a long sip of her black coffee, swallowing and feeling the tarlike liquid ooze through her veins like semifrozen molasses over a stack of pancakes.

Damn it, where was all this self-pity coming from? she upbraided herself in disgust. She knew Brad loved her. In his own conservative, quiet fashion. Moreover, she knew with a bone-jarring certainty that her husband had never once been unfaithful to her, even though he’d been presented with more than one opportunity to stray.

Thank God she didn’t have to grapple with feelings of betrayal the way Jeannie Roberts did. The woman had been completely devastated, not to mention humiliated, when she’d discovered that her neurologist husband, Ed, had been seeing the daughter of a former patient on the side for more than a year.

The only thing Brad had on the side were more old AMA journals. At times, though, she could swear that those old journals aroused her husband more than she did. At other times, she was fairly certain of it.

This morning the emptiness she sometimes felt gnawed away at her insides to the point that it almost hurt.

Stacey studied Brad over the rim of her mug, the one with the crack on the lip near the handle. The mug she refused to throw away because her son, Jim, had given it to her while he was still Jimmy. Before he’d gotten too old to admit to anyone other than an FBI polygraph technician that he actually loved his mother.

She was still very much in love with her husband, she thought. The man could still set her heart racing. They had just reached the plateau they had strived for and there was no feeling of fulfillment to greet her. No fanfare signaling that now life could be different. It was just more of the same. Life only got more routine.

Is that all there is?

There’s got to be something more, she insisted silently, trying to block the lyric. Squaring her shoulders, she put down the mug.

“Brad, let’s get away this weekend,” she said.

She didn’t tell him why she wanted to get away, or that this weekend, this Friday actually, was their twenty-sixth anniversary. She’d sworn to herself that she was never going to be one of those wives who nagged or felt slighted if an important day slipped by unnoticed.

But, in all honesty, she’d made that vow secure in the knowledge that Brad wouldn’t be like those husbands who forgot.

And he hadn’t been. Until about two years ago, when the hospital had put him on its board of directors and free time went the way of unicorns and leprechauns into the land of myths.

Her eager suggestion faded away, unnoticed. He hadn’t heard her. The sound of her voice, much less her words, apparently hadn’t even registered. Brad was frowning over something he was reading in the journal. Funny how she’d always been able to tune in to seventeen sounds at once—the kids, the TV, the telephone—and he couldn’t even tune in to one.

Inclining her head slightly, she waved her hand as close to his face as she could reach. “Earth to Brad, Earth to Brad.”

Rosie, their seven-year-old Labrador, the dog he hadn’t wanted but who had stolen his heart when she adoringly followed him around as his unofficial shadow, chose that moment to come into the kitchen.

As if to show her up in a play for power, Rosie headed straight for Brad and nuzzled his leg.

Brad looked up from what he was reading. A fond smile slipped over his lips as he ran his hand over Rosie’s back. “How’s my girl?” he murmured.

“A little frazzled, thank you,” Stacey replied. “How are you?”

Brad glanced at her, puzzled. And then he smiled that soft, tolerant smile of his. The one that had recently begun to irritate her because it made her feel like a five-year-old. A mentally slow five-year-old.

“I was talking to the dog, Stace.”

Stacey did her best to remain cheerful. “Yes, I know, and I’m sure Rosie appreciates the attention, but I was first.”

About to resume reading, Brad put the magazine down. “What are you talking about?”

“That’s just it, I was talking. To you. Not to the toaster or to the dog, although God knows that she’s the only one who listens to me at times, but to you. And you didn’t answer.”

The shrug was careless, dismissive, as if her complaint was unimportant. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

A sigh escaped, dragging her hurt feelings out into the open. “You never hear me.”

The frown on his handsome, lean face deepened. Not to the point of making lines, but just enough to register his annoyance.

“You’re exaggerating again.” He glanced at his watch. “And I am running late.”

Between his going in early and coming home late, she hardly ever saw him, much less had conversations with him. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to be growing closer together, not further apart.

Stacey nodded at the large, round, silver-faced clock on the wall. “It’s only seven-thirty.” Which was earlier than he usually left.

“I know.” He folded the paper and carefully closed his magazine. This was the same man who left his shoes, socks and shirts wherever he shed them. But his journals were in perfect order, unmarred by crumbs or coffee stains, and their pages never even marginally bent. “I have surgery at eight-thirty at the surgicenter. What kind of a message would I send to the patient if I got there late? That his surgery doesn’t merit my attention?”

At times she was convinced he made a better doctor than he did husband. She didn’t always feel this way, she thought with a pang.

“The hospital is twenty minutes away,” she pointed out. “Fifteen if you don’t drive like an old man.”

His eyes narrowed. “I drive safely.”

“You drive slowly.” And sitting next to him drove her crazy at times. He never went through a yellow light. The moment a hint of anything amber arose, he came to a dead stop. Driving since he was sixteen, he hadn’t so much as a warning to look back on.

Not like her, she thought ruefully.

“Not all of us were born with a lead foot,” he told her matter-of-factly.

He’d have a lead foot, too, if he had to be in a dozen places at once, she thought. But she bit back the retort. Voicing it would only lead to a meaningless argument.

She watched her husband rise to his feet. At forty-eight, Brad Sommers looked young for his age. He had the same build from when she’d fallen in love with him more than thirty years ago. Though his career was demanding, his hours at times grueling, there were no undue lines or wrinkles on his face. The Southern California sun he’d once worshipped had had no chance to do any damage to his skin in the past two decades. The last time they’d been to the beach, she recalled, Julie was five and Jim was three. Other that a few gray strands weaving through Brad’s thick, deep-chestnut-brown hair, there were no indications that time was advancing on him, or that it even knew where he lived.

She was the one who’d changed, Stacey thought, not for the first time. She was the one who’d had twenty unwanted pounds stealthily sneak up on her over the past fifteen years. The one who no longer looked as if an agent from Playboy magazine might be interested in making her an offer.

It wasn’t so much that she’d let herself go. God knew she still tried to look and dress attractively, mostly for a man who no longer noticed. It was more that a silent attacker had set siege to her body. When she was driving home from work, she sometimes thought about going to one of those expensive spas where someone could reknead her body back to its former self again.

As if that was possible, she thought, silently laughing at herself. She hadn’t the time. And the spa probably couldn’t work miracles, anyway.

“So what do you say?” she asked as she followed Brad to the front door—directly behind Rosie.

Brad glanced at her over his shoulder, perplexed. “To what?”

“To my idea. About getting away this weekend,” she added when his expression still remained blank.

For a moment, Brad had her going, had her hopeful that he might actually remember it was their anniversary.

“Sounds good.” But then he halted at the door. “But I can’t,” he recalled. Was that disappointment in his voice, or was she just wishing it into existence? “I’ve got a conference to attend. A local one,” he added. They both knew how much she hated having him go away for a conference.

“Can’t you—?”

Stacey never got a chance to finish her question. His cell phone rang, interrupting her. Brad held up his hand to stop her in midsentence as he listened to whoever was on the other end.

He mouthed “Goodbye” to her as he walked out.

And left without kissing her.

Again.

CHAPTER 2

That was happening more and more frequently these days, Stacey thought as she turned away from the closed door. She made her way back to the kitchen, trying to remember the last time Brad had kissed her goodbye without her first having to throw herself directly in the path of his outgoing lips.

That long ago, huh?

Once in the kitchen, which was sunnier than she felt at the moment, Stacey began to clear away Brad’s plate with its only half-eaten piece of French toast. She supposed, in her husband’s defense, for the most part she’d stopped waiting for him to make the first move, to lean forward and kiss her. Because, in her own defense, she didn’t want to take the chance on winding up staring at the back of a closed door, feeling as if she’d just been kicked by a mule.

Feeling hollow. Just like this.

Is that all there is?

Damn it, why couldn’t she get that stupid song out of her head?

Stacey felt a sudden, overwhelming urge just to cry.

Hormones.

They always picked the worst time to attack, she thought, fighting to reach equilibrium and some semblance of calm. Stacey looked down at the dog, who, with Brad gone, had shifted her allegiance as she did every morning and followed her back to the kitchen.

Rosie was now wagging her tail, a hopeful look in her eyes.

“You just want another treat, you furry hussy.” She stroked Rosie’s head and went to the cupboard where she kept the dog’s wide assortment of treats. After taking out something that resembled plastic bacon, she tossed it to the animal. With a semileap, Rosie caught the treat and devoured it in the time it took to close the cupboard doors. “At least he talks to you,” Stacey said wistfully. “Someday, you have to tell me your secret.”

“Talking to the dog again, Mom?”

Stacey turned, surprised to see Jim enter the kitchen. Now that college was over, unless something out of the ordinary happened or the house was on fire, Jim did not acknowledge that any hours before eleven-thirty even existed. As he stumbled barefoot into the kitchen, wearing the ancient torn gym shorts he slept in, his deep blue eyes were half closed.

Six foot, one inch and still filling out his gangly torso, at twenty-two Jim looked exactly the way Brad had at that age. But carbon-copy looks were where the similarities between her two men ended.

At that age, Brad had been driven to make something of himself and to provide not just for himself and the family they’d hope to have, but for his ailing mother as well. Back then, she’d thought of him as being almost a saint.

Except for the sex.

Her mouth curved as she remembered even despite her efforts not to at the moment. The sex had truly been without equal.

And she missed it like hell.

Their son, as Brad was wont to point out over and over again whenever they did have a conversation, was not driven. After much pleading, Jim had attended UCLA, emerging after four rather lackluster years with a degree in fine arts. He’d gotten the degree, they both knew, purely to drive his father crazy.

“Damn it, he’s a smart kid, Stace,” Brad had complained loudly enough for her to close a window. “We all know that. His SAT scores were almost perfect. Why is he throwing his life away like this?”

Arguments over Jim and the course of their second-born’s life were as regular as clockwork. And there was never a resolution. Her only answer to Brad’s question was that their son was striving to be the complete antithesis of everything that his father was. She kept it to herself.

“I’m talking to Rosie because she doesn’t talk back or give me an argument,” Stacey told her son cheerfully. “That’s kind of refreshing.”

Dragging a hand through his yet-to-be-combed, unruly hair, Jim shrugged off the answer. Taking the half-eaten French toast from her, he straddled the chair his father had vacated and put the plate down in front of him. He didn’t bother with a fork.

Somewhere between the first and second bite, his lips dusted with a fine layer of powdered sugar, Jim nodded in the general direction from which he’d just come. “Upstairs sink is clogged again.”

Stacey sighed as she placed a fresh piece of French toast on what was now her son’s plate. So what else was new? It seemed that something was always going wrong with the sinks and toilets in the house. There were four of the first and three of the second. And that didn’t take into account the house’s two showers and tub.

And lately, the wiring was giving her trouble. The power would go out on certain lines. A month ago, half the house was down until the electrician came to the rescue. Brad had been furious over the bill. Rescues did not come cheaply.

Stacey dearly loved the house they lived in. She’d fallen in love with it the very first time she saw it, over twenty years ago. But she was the first one to admit that it was at a point in its life where it needed loving care and renovating. A great deal of renovating.

Her problem was, she couldn’t seem to convince Brad of that. Practical to a maddening fault, her husband would only nod in response to her entreaties, then, when pressed for a verbal answer, would point out that they could make do by calling in a plumber.

“Which is a hell of a lot cheaper than getting renovations.” He’d give her that look that said he knew so much better than she did what was needed. And then he’d laugh, the sound calling an official halt to the discussion. “If I let you, you’d wind up spending your way into the poorhouse.”

She knew as well as he did what they had in the bank. What they had in all the different IRA and Keogh funds Brad kept opening or feeding. There was no way renovating the house would send them packing and residing in debtors’ prison. Or even strolling by it. But telling him that she had no intentions of using solid-gold fixtures or going overboard made no impression on Brad. Neither did saying that most of their friends had already updated their homes and added on years ago. Some had done it twice.

That kind of an argument held no meaning for Brad. He had no interest in keeping up with anything except for the latest advances in his field.

The only other thing that meant anything to him was making sure his children had the best. He wanted them to have every opportunity to make something of themselves—he being the one who defined what “something” was.

Julie had been canny enough to hit the target square on the head. Ever since she’d first opened her eyes to this world twenty-four years ago, Julie had been the apple of her father’s eye. Julie could do no wrong—and she didn’t. Their daughter was presently in medical school. Her goal was to become a pediatrician.

Jim, who had taught himself how to read at four because he’d been too impatient to wait for anyone to read to him, had been Brad’s genius. He’d begun making plans for their son the second he’d detected that spark in his eyes, been privy to the innate intelligence their son possessed. But rebellion had taken root early in their son, as well. Once he got into college, Jim deliberately slacked off. There’d been a few times he’d been in jeopardy of being “asked” to leave the university. Whenever that happened, he’d study enough to get his grades back up. And then backed off again.

Somehow, he had managed to graduate this June. But he still seemed destined to infuriate his father at every turn and raise his blood pressure by ten points with no effort at all.

The problem was, his inherent aptitude for science notwithstanding, Jim had the soul of a poet. A poet who wanted nothing more—and nothing less—than to make music. Brilliant to a fault, with an IQ that was almost off the charts, he had no use for the academic world. As a matter of fact, he had gotten his degree not to please his father but as a grudging tribute to her. Because she’d begged him to give working in a different field a try, “on the slim chance” that he changed his mind later on in life.