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“How’d Valerie take it?”

“I don’t know. She’s so hard to read sometimes. It was as if she already knew, which is impossible.” Norah frowned. “I wish you’d talk to her again. She’s in her room now and, Steffie, I’m really worried about her. She’s in love with Colby—she admitted it—but she seems resigned to losing him.”

Steffie thought she understood her older sister’s feelings.

“To complicate matters,” Norah went on, “Valerie and I started talking and…arguing, and Dad heard us. He asked what we were fighting about.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I didn’t get a chance to say anything. Dad did all the talking. At least he and I agree. Dad believes Valerie should go talk this out with Colby, too. But I don’t think she will.”

“Where’s Valerie now?” Steffie asked.

Norah looked away. “She’s upstairs.”

“Doing what?” Her sister had been spending a lot of time alone in her room lately.

“I don’t know, but I think you should go to her. Someone’s got to. Valerie needs us, only she’s so independent she doesn’t know how to ask.”

Steffie disagreed. Her sister was getting—and apparently ignoring—advice from just about everyone, when what she needed to do was listen to her own heart.

“What’s all this about you and Charles?” Norah asked with open curiosity. “I didn’t know you even liked him.”

In light of their recent confrontation over the newspaper article, it was natural for her sister to assume that.

“We’re just friends.”

“Which is definitely an improvement,” Norah muttered.

Eager to leave before Norah asked more questions, Steffie went upstairs to her room. She toyed with the idea of talking to her sister, of telling her that seeking a long-distance cure for a broken heart didn’t work.

But Valerie was intelligent enough to make her own decisions, and Steffie didn’t feel qualified to say or do any more than she already had.

She dressed in a bright blue suit for her trip to Portland, one Valerie would have approved of had she been home. Her sister had mysteriously disappeared without saying where she was headed.

Steffie was on her way out the door when her father stopped her. “Sit on the porch with me awhile, will you, Princess?”

“Of course.” The wicker chair beside her father had belonged to her mother. Steffie sat next to him and gazed out over the sun-bright orchard she loved so much.

“Are you serious about this—getting a teaching position and all?”

“Yes. I can’t stay home and do nothing. It’d be a waste of my education.”

“Wait, Princess.”

All his talk of marriage was beginning to annoy her. “But, Dad—”

“Just for a couple of weeks. You’ve been home such a short while— I don’t want you to move away just yet. All I ask is that you delay a bit longer.”

“I won’t be moving out right away…” She hesitated. She couldn’t deny her father anything, and he knew it. “Two weeks,” she promised reluctantly. “We’ll visit, catch up, make some plans. Then I’ll start looking for an apartment.”

“Is Charles coming for dinner tonight?”

“No.” She’d invited him, but he had a late-afternoon meeting and doubted he’d be back in time.

“He’s going to miss out on your Italian dinner.”

“There’ll be others.”