Read Tart for Free Online Page B

busy. Full of friends and work. It was a good thing to make herself slow down. Even if it was just a few minutes at the end of each day.
    She took a shower and changed into her pajamas before settling in with her pillows. Her house was a rental, but it was perfect for her. Her brother had offered to sell their childhood home to her at a really great price. But she’d turned it down. She’d been given Tart and that was enough. And she didn’t want to live in the place where her mother’s heart had been so well and truly broken.
    She could have lived in the apartment upstairs from Tart, but it was important to leave every day. To walk away and have her work life over. She liked that division. Of course she baked at home, but that was different. That was for pleasure.
    She’d kept that apartment open just in case her mother wanted to come back and visit. She wanted her mom to always know she was welcome and had a place to hang her coat. Her mother had used it less and less as the years went by and lately Jules had been thinking of using it as an office space for Tart. Now that Mary and Daisy were there too, it would be good to have some desks with computers and phones.
    But doing that would be an affirmative step. She’d be admitting her mother probably wasn’t coming back for more than a brief visit once every year or two. And Jules wasn’t sure she was ready to do that yet.
    Growing up, Jules and her mother had been close, but something had shifted in their relationship when her father had made his declaration. When he’d stood up at the dinner table and announced he’d filed for divorce and would be marrying the girlfriend no one had known he’d had. Oh and that he’d knocked her up.
    Her mother, who had always deferred to her father, who had taken her commitment to be his partner and helpmate seriously, had been filled with so much anger it had been astonishing.
    It wasn’t that Jules didn’t understand why her mother would be so angry. She did. She’d been totally and utterly betrayed by her husband.
    But it was impossible not to feel like she’d lost her mother in a lot of ways. Her mother had divested herself of so much of her old life, sometimes even her children, who, as Jules reminded her brother, were adults anyway. She was proud that her mother had reinvented herself after a terrible thing. But Jules missed her.
    And in reaching out to try to bring her back into Jules’s life, their roles sometimes flipped and she found herself mothering her mother. Making sure she had enough money and was all right.
    She didn’t tell anyone that part. Jules knew Gillian would frown. Gillian, the fiercest mother Jules knew, would be angry that Jules’s mother had—what Gillian would perceive as—walked away from her responsibilities as a mother.
    Her brother had a relationship with their father that was even more strained than Jules’s own. Ethan had done the right thing, had given their mother half the money from the house sale and had used the rest for his own house in Oregon with his wife and their children. He’d retreated into his own family life. It wasn’t that he’d walled her out, but the distance did that anyway.
    He was angry. Angry at their father, even seven years later. Angry at their mother, who’d extended a few weeks’ trip to a lifestyle of sorts. And he had children, children their mother rarely saw, though she did send them presents. It wasn’t the same, and Jules understood his anger. Felt it on his behalf.
    So she’d taken that on too. Made sure she was part of her nephew’s lives. She called and Skyped, and at least every month or so headed down to Portland to spend time with them. In fact she’d be going down soon to celebrate her oldest nephew Connor’s birthday. Her mother was flying in to Sea-Tac and would be driving down with Jules.
    Jules was looking forward to that time with her mom and also to spending the weekend with those two boys she loved so much.
    It was good for her