Always There: Christian Inspirational Romance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  A Note From The Author

  Other Books By Georgia Grace

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  Always There

  By Georgia Grace

  A Note From The Author

  Note From The Author Thank you so much for picking up Always There! This book came straight from my heart, so I hope you will fall in love with the quirky cast of characters just as I did.

  I love to do special things for my readers, so please be sure to sign up for my VIP list by clicking on the image below. You will get notifications of new releases as well as free giveaways and gift card contests!

  Other Books By Georgia Grace

  Mail Order Brides Series:

  Perfect Harmany

  A Penny Saved

  Stranded in Cheyenne

  Grass Valley Mail Order Brides Series:

  Mock Wedding

  The Unwanted Wife

  The Reluctant Bride

  Western Brides Series:

  As Far As They Eye Can See

  Contemporary Romance:

  Always There

  A Love So Real

  Prologue

  The visitors filed past her, one by one, for over two hours. It was amazing how exhausting it could be to simply greet people, nod your head and accept well-meaning hugs. But it was exhausting.

  She unconsciously twirled her gold wedding band around in a circle, a habit she’d picked up shortly after marriage many years ago. The meaning behind it seemed a bit lost now, though.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” they would say.

  “He was a good man, and he loved you so much,” she heard several times. Did he?

  “It’s hard to believe he’s gone… and so young too…” they would say while simultaneously shaking their heads and making that “tsk tsk” sound with their tongues.

  Every condolence carried with it a sense of words unspoken. Things that people wanted to say, and were definitely thinking, but kept to themselves. Sorrow mixed with sympathy mixed with judgment. Yes, that’s what it was. Judgment.

  She wanted to be genuinely grateful for their words, but all she could think was that she wanted to get out of there, go home and change into comfortable clothes. She wanted to lock her bedroom door, drown her sorrows in a pint of Ben & Jerry’s rocky road ice cream and never leave her house again.

  But she couldn’t, of course. She was someone’s mother.

  Numbness had become her constant companion. A sense of an emptiness oozed from every pore. That person she was just a week ago no longer resembled the person she was now. It was like she had rolled in a pit of life’s ugliest moments.

  She wanted to run over to the urn that held his ashes and scream “Why?” for the hundredth time since she’d found his body three days ago. But the question was never answered, and was there really an answer to that question anyway?

  When someone willingly downs a bottle of pills and leaves you to find their cold body, does the “why” even matter? When a father and husband just gives up, did he ever really love you in the first place? What happens when your whole life, all carefully constructed and pristine, blows right up in front of you?

  Chapter 1

  Three Months Later…

  There isn't much else in the world that hurts more than losing the person you planned to spend the rest of your life with, she thought, as she packed a seemingly endless supply of rarely used teacups into what felt like her millionth box of the weekend. The only thing Elise could imagine being worse was losing a child. The image sent cold chills down her spine as she thought of her baby girl. Of course, Jilly wasn't really a baby anyone. She was eight, as she constantly reminded her mother. Apparently that was a big deal in the elementary school set.

  She reached for the roll of packing tape that was wearing down and sighed when she realized that a third trip to the big box retail store three miles away was on her horizon. She despised going there any more than she had to because it was so big and cold and impersonal. She liked a small town life, but she hadn’t experienced one since she was a kid herself. Maybe she’d find a small town that would welcome her soon.

  Packing up more than ten years of memories wasn't as easy as she had hoped. Losing Ted was bad enough, but putting her hands on literally everything inside of their sprawling four thousand square foot home was exhausting, both physically and emotionally. Part of her held a grudge against her late husband for making her do this all alone. He had a choice. He chose wrong.

  She could have hired professional packers, and no doubt Ted would have, but she just couldn't bring herself to allow strangers to touch his things. She had never gone through them herself after he died, except to donate some of his clothes to Goodwill. And now, here she was three months later going through a private mourning process all over again.

  She had found important papers, old love letters, Valentine's cards and even an unopened Christmas gift that Ted had apparently bought for her early in their marriage before he was making a lot more money in his business. She knew it was early on because he never would have bought her the ugly scarf for any other reason. She laughed as she clutched it closer, a small tear rolling down her cheek. It had now become one of her favorite gifts from him. Her feelings were still so conflicted.

  He was a funny guy, and she could just imagine him in heaven, looking down at her and laughing about the ugly green and blue fake silk scarf. She would wear it when the hot summer weather turned to cool Fall temperatures, she decided. Maybe. If she could find something it would go with… And really, what would that scarf go with anyway?

  One more room loomed on the schedule for the day, and that was the large dusty attic above the garage. As much as she hated it, she would have to clean most of that out before the movers came in two days. Filled with family mementos from generations past and her own junk from her school years, she could feel the memories flooding back. It would take her hours upon hours to sort through the stuff and decide what to toss, what to donate and what to take to the self-storage place.

  When she and Ted, just newlyweds at the time, had bought this house ten years before, she had brought so much stuff from her mother's house. Her Mom was sick at the time and being moved into hospice after her second bout with cancer. Elise was charged with taking the family heirlooms, which were many, and all of her own boxes of keepsakes from middle and high school. Her mom was quite the packrat, and she just couldn't bring herself to throw anything away from Elise's childhood. She had finger paintings from preschool, handmade ashtrays from kindergarten, love notes from Tommy Simpson in second grade and even the certificate she'd won in the third grade spelling bee.

  While Elise was a little curious about what was in the boxes, she knew it would bring up the painful memories of losing her mother, her grandmother - whom she affectionately referred to as Mamaw - and her grandfather Ed. And other people. But, much like her idol Scarlett O'Hara, she would think about that another day.

  Only today was THE day. She had no other days to think. She'd put this off longer than she should have, and there was no procrastination time left. She simply had to go throu
gh the attic, and it had to be tonight. And, in order to do that, she would have to enlist the help of her good friend and neighbor, Sandy Evans.

  Sandy and Elise had become friends when Sandy and her husband, Phil, had moved into their swanky north Atlanta neighborhood four years ago. Sandy was a CPA and Phil owned some kind of golf merchandise business. Phil and Ted had been golfing buddies, but Sandy and Elise spent most of their time together gossiping about the other neighbors. Most of the gossip was pretty mild, but they soon realized they were surrounded by people who got themselves into a lot of unnecessary drama and trouble. Like when Willard Devary got arrested for busting Chester Stonefield's windshield out over a poker debt. Or the time the Hilliard boy set the woods on fire by accident. There was the occasional affair too, but Elise hated talking about stuff like that. She just couldn’t relate to it. Ted had been the epitome of honorable and dedicated to their marriage, and she felt bad for couples that didn’t have the same kind of relationship she did. DID. Past tense. Sometimes those little words could hurt worse than anything else.

  She DID have a marriage. She DID have a husband. Now, she was single. Widowed. Pitiful. And a little angry even today.

  And then there was the whole Bunco cheating scandal followed by the chili cook-off cheating rumors... and on it went. In reality, she had been living in her bubble of an upper class suburban world for quite some time, where her biggest problem was getting the perfect shoes for a night of dancing with Ted or locating just the right interior designer to redo her master bathroom for the sixth time in as many years.

  When had she become so high maintenance?

  Of course, the two women also helped each other by keeping each other's kids from time to time, and that's what Elise needed today. She just wanted to be alone while she went through the attic, and Jilly was one talkative little girl. No way was she going to get any peace and quiet while she was home.

  As if on cue, Jilly came bounding into the kitchen singing some song from one of her TV shows at the top of her lungs. Ted had once offered to hire a nanny to help with the raising of Jilly, but Elise hadn’t seen the need for it. How would she explain to all of her friends why Jilly needed two women taking care of her when Elise didn’t have a job?

  "Mommy?" she yelled about two decibels louder than necessary.

  "Jilly, sweetie, use your inside voice please. Mommy has a headache," Elise said patting Jilly’s head full of blond hair. She had thick blond hair like Ted did. He always looked like a cover model for a J. Crew catalog. "What do you need?"

  "Can we go bowling?"

  "Honey, you know I have to finish packing up so we can move out on Saturday. The new owners want to get moved in and settled before school starts back in a couple of months." Elise continued wrapping mugs, trying not to look into Jilly's crystal clear blue eyes. She knew where this conversation was heading.

  "But, Mommy, I don't want to move out of our house. My friends all live here, and I like my pink walls and..."

  "Jilly, enough. We've talked about this for weeks. This move is final. That isn't going to change," she said kneeling down and looking into Jilly's eyes. She wished she could allow her daughter to stay in their home - the only home she’d ever known - but it just wasn’t possible. “I know you’ve had a lot of changes in the last few months, but things will get better, sweetie. I promise.” Even as she said the words, she wondered if they were true. Would things ever be better? Manageable, maybe. But better?

  "But, Daddy lives here." The air was suddenly sucked out of her lungs. Jilly had never said that to her before.

  "Honey, you know Daddy lives up in heaven now. Remember when we let the balloons go? We told Daddy goodbye and that we would see him soon..." Elise tried not to well up with tears, and instead pulled her daughter into a tight embrace.

  "I know we can't see him, Mommy, but he lives here. If we leave, he'll be all alone with strangers! He won't know where we went!" Jilly was sobbing now, and Elise felt terrible. What kind of job had she done explaining heaven and death? What did she really understand herself?

  "Oh, sweetie," she said, pulling back and looking at Jilly again. “Daddy is always with you. He doesn't live in this house. He lives in here," she said touching Jilly's tiny chest and then her own. "We carry Daddy with us wherever we go. Just like we carry Jesus. Remember how we carry Jesus in our hearts?"

  "Yes, m'am...."

  "Well, that's where we carry Daddy. And he can see you and hear you and he knows we are doing this to live out his dream. And I bet he's smiling really big right now, Jilly." Ted had always wanted to travel in an RV, and given the state of their finances when he died, it was all Elise really had to fall back on.

  "Tell me again about Daddy's big dream, Mommy," Jilly said as Elise sat down on the kitchen floor and Jilly slid into her lap.

  "Well, your Daddy was a hard worker, but he always wanted to travel more with just our family. Daddy was adopted as a child, and his family wasn't very close so he always wanted one like ours. So, Daddy bought a motorhome for us to start traveling in. He wanted us to drive all the way up the East coast first, so that's what we're going to do. We are going to see all the things that Daddy didn't get to see, Jilly. We're going to use our eyes to let Daddy see everything. Does that make sense?" Elise asked, turning Jilly's cheek with her index finger.

  "Yes, m'am. I'm going to show Daddy everything!" she said with a big smile. Amazing how resilient kids can be.

  "Good. But for right now, I need you to go upstairs and brush your teeth. Miss Sandy is going to let you stay at her house for tonight so I can finish packing up boxes and you can play with Megan, okay?"

  "Yay!" she said as she ran straight upstairs. Megan was her best friend and Sandy's only daughter. Sandy had three sons, all older than seven year old Megan. She had the family that Elise always wanted. She had grown up an only child herself, and Ted's family was estranged when she met him, so her family consisted of one blond haired little girl. The thought made her pine for all of the children she would never have with Ted. All the plans that never got fulfilled simply because her husband hadn’t seen a way out of the mess he was in.

  The pain of losing Ted had just about done her in. She had loved him and respected him, and they had a big life in front of them. He was just thirty-five when he swallowed a bottle of pain pills left over from a knee surgery he’d had the year prior. Elise had no idea that their finances were in ruins. Truth be told, she’d let Ted handle the money during their entire marriage, remaining blissfully ignorant about electric bills or mortgage payments.

  After Ted was gone, she learned the true state of affairs. The mortgage was four months past due and coming up for foreclosure. How could she not have known? Ted’s business, that she thought was thriving and growing, was instead floundering but he didn’t see fit to tell her. His wife. His supposed best friend. Not only was he in deep debt, but he had been accused of some improper business dealings, and the noose was tightening around him. The only way he saw out of his mess was suicide, and she would never understand it. He didn’t even leave a note. He just left unanswered questions and financial surprises that had shattered her life even further. She questioned everything they’d ever had together. Except Jilly. She knew that they had at least gotten that right.

  The fact that he left her, his soul mate, to find him made her seethe with anger, and yet she knew that wasn’t right. Ted, her staunchly Christian husband and funny best friend, had left her high and dry without money, without a stable home and with more questions than answers. And now she questioned whether she would ever really know anyone again because she surely thought she knew her husband.

  Their friends had really held her and Jilly up during that time. Elise remembered missing her mother more than anything that day and for many days following Ted’s death. Her mother had exuded a warm, Christian spirit that always soothed Elise during times of crisis, just like when she had lost her own father at thirteen.

  "Sometimes," her mother would alway
s say, "people lose their faith when times get tough, but that's just when we need to cling to God. When the sun's always shining, it's hard to see. Often, the light needs to dim just a little bit so we can see without squinting our eyes. God's like that. He's always there, Elise, but we can see him best when the light gets a little dimmer." Her mother always had her own way of explaining things, and Elise tried to hold those pieces of wisdom close so she had them when she needed them.

  "Knock knock!" she heard Sandy calling through the screen door leading to the back porch.

  "Come in!" Elise said from the floor. "I'm down here."

  Sandy ran around the breakfast island. "Are you okay?"

  Elise chuckled as she ambled up to her knees and then her feet. "Yes. Jilly just had a little breakdown, so I was sitting on the floor trying to soothe her."

  "Is she okay?"

  "Yeah. Just worried that when we move, her Daddy won't know where we went."

  "Aw, poor baby. This has been so hard on her. And you. How are you holding up?" Sandy asked sitting down on one of the bar stools. Sandy had one of those short, kicky hairdos that looked good on rocker chicks, but Elise could never pull it off. Her thick, auburn hair wasn’t meant to be short, and Ted never wanted her to cut it anyway. Funny how those little thoughts would pop into her head all the time.