Sleigh Bell Dreams (Mistletoe Meadows Sweet Christmas #1)

Chapter 4

She checked the address that Amy had given her again.

Yep, this dark, brooding house, with only one front door, was the duplex Amy told her about.

When Terry thought about duplexes, she thought about two separate front doors and a house that was entirely split down the middle, with one family on one side and one family on the other.

How was that possible with only one front door?

She couldn’t resist sending a text to her sister. Are you sure this is the right address?

The reply came back quickly. Yep. I know it doesn’t look like a duplex, but it is.

Okay, thanks. She sighed as she texted back.

She wasn’t nervous exactly. She’d been through a lot worse in med school. She chuckled to herself, thinking not for the first time that that might have been one of the purposes of med school, to give her something to compare every terrible thing that ever happened in her life to. Like, if she could survive med school, she could survive anything.

Taking a breath, she yanked the latch of her car, gave it an extra hard shove, because it stuck sometimes, and got out.

She hadn’t even thought to ask her sister if Judd would be home.

Or what he did for a living.

Maybe he was working.

Does Judd have a job?

She needed to stop texting her sister.

He’s a landscaper in the summer, does odd jobs in the winter, and snow removal of course. He also does maintenance work for different places, including the church, and he probably even has helped Dr. Vivik at times. You may want to talk to him about that while you’re there.

It took a while for Amy to write that text out, and her phone buzzed as she was standing in front of the one front door.

She rapped, not seeing a doorbell, and hoping once more that she wasn’t making a huge mistake. Maybe she should have moved in with her mother.

After shuffling from one foot to the other and feeling like several minutes had gone by, she rapped on the door again. Maybe he was in the bathroom. Maybe he didn’t answer the door for strangers. Maybe he was working.

Okay, Lord, if he doesn’t answer on the third knock, I’m going to go to Mom’s. Maybe that’s where You want me anyway. Maybe I’m supposed to be helping with Sally, like Amy suggested.

Although, she might have “doctor” in front of her name, that didn’t mean that she was going to be any better at taking care of someone who was dying of cancer than anyone else could. Typically a person’s loved ones took care of them better than anyone else. Unless they had been doing it for a long time and were weary. Weariness had a tendency to cause a person to make mistakes.

Lifting her hand, deciding that maybe she hadn’t been knocking loud enough, she decided she would really smack on the door, and that was how she ended up punching Judd Landis in the face the first time she met him.