The Mistletoe Promise

by Richard Paul Evans

“Think we’ll find a space?” I asked.

  “I’d bet on it,” he said. A few minutes later he pulled into a reserved spot with his name on it, and we took the elevator up to the ground level.

  The shopping center had only opened the previous year and was clearly the place to go. It was an upscale, open-air shopping center that had a simulated creek running through it. It occupied six acres in downtown Salt Lake City with a sky bridge over Main Street connecting the two blocks.

  We were walking out of Godiva Chocolatier, where we had stopped for chocolate-covered strawberries (which was probably the best breakfast I’d had in years), when Nicholas said, “I need to stop at the Coach store to pick up a bag for one of the partners. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not.” I followed him to the shop.

  A professional-looking man, bald with a graying goatee, approached Nicholas. “May I help you, sir?”

  “I’m looking for a leather carry-on bag.”

  “I’ve got just the thing,” said the man. He led us over to a wall display of leather bags. “I’ve got the Thompson foldover tote, that’s been quite popular. And the new Bleecker line. I’ve got the map bag in leather; it comes in two colors, brass and mahogany, and a leather-trimmed webbing strap.”

  “No, it looks too much like a man purse,” Nicholas said. “How much is this bag?” he asked, lifting one to examine it more closely.

  “That’s the Bleecker flight bag. It’s four hundred and ninety-eight dollars.”

  That was almost my entire life savings.

  “What colors does it come in?” Nicholas asked.

  “Just what you see here, black and brass.”

  “I’ll take the brass.”

  “Very good choice,” the man said. “Much more masculine design. Do you need anything else?”

  “No, that’s all.”

  “Give me just a moment and I’ll ring you up.”

  “Here’s my card,” Nicholas said, handing him a black credit card. There was a long line of people making purchases.

  “That’s a nice bag,” I said.

  “It’s for one of my partners,” he said. “He’ll like it. He likes luggage.”

  “It’s expensive.”

  “Not for him,” he said.

  “Or you,” I added. As we waited in line I noticed that there was a Pandora shop across the way. Cathy was a Pandora fanatic, and she always loved getting new charms.

  “Nicholas,” I said, “I’m going to go over to the Pandora shop.”

  “No problem. I’ll come over after.”

  I walked over to the store and browsed the display cases until I found a sterling silver clover with green enamel. It was perfect. Cathy was Irish and proud of it.

  “May I help you?” a woman asked. I looked up. The woman was about my age, heavy with gold, permed hair.

  “I’d like to purchase that charm right there,” I said, pointing to the piece.

  “The clover?” she asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  She lifted it from the display case. “This also comes in gold with diamonds.”

  “The silver charm is fine, thank you.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, that’s it.”

  “This way, please.”

  I followed her over to the cash register.

  “Will that be cash or plastic?”

  “Plastic,” I said, handing her my Visa card. She ran my card, glanced at the name, then back up at me. “Do I know you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She glanced once more at my name on the credit card. “Elise Dutton. No, I think I do. What school did you go to?”

  “I’m not from around here.”

  “Hmm,” she said, handing me back my card. Then a look of recognition came to her eyes. “I know who you are. I read a story about you a few years back. You . . .” She stopped abruptly.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m mistaken.”

  She quickly packaged up my purchase and handed me the bag. “Thank you for shopping. Have a good day.”

  “Happy holidays,” I said dully, then quickly left the store.

  Nicholas met me as I was walking out. “Sorry that took so long,” he said. “That guy was inept with a cash register.” He looked at me closely. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m not feeling well,” I said. “Can we go?”

  “Of course.” He glanced over at the store, then took my hand. “Come on. It’s too crowded here anyway.”

  CHAPTER

  Fifteen

  Dan came to see me today. He’s about as welcome as a January utility bill.

  Elise Dutton’s Diary

  The next Monday was calmer than usual since we didn’t have any tours out that week. The holidays were our slowest time of the year, and most of our efforts then went toward preparing and marketing the next year’s tours.

  A little before noon I looked up to see Dan standing in the doorway of my office. “Flowers,” he said. “Where’d you get those?”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  He stepped into my office. “You weren’t at Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “I told your parents I wouldn’t be there.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “What do you want, Dan?”

  “I came to see what’s up. Why you didn’t come.”

  “I was busy.”

  “On Thanksgiving?”

  “Is that so hard to believe?”

  “What, you had work?”

  “I had another invitation to dinner,” I said, annoyed by his persistence. “I always thought it was weird anyway, going to dinner with you and Kayla.”

  “An invitation from who?”

  “A friend.”

  “A friend,” he said suspiciously. “Male or female?”

  “I don’t need to report to you.”

  “A man, huh?” He walked closer to my desk. “Tell you what—I’ll take you to lunch, and you can tell me about this guy. I’ll pay.” He made the offer sound remarkably magnanimous, and, for him, it was.

  “I already have lunch plans,” I said.

  “Since when do you have lunch plans?”

  “Since when do you care?” I said. “Where’s Kayla? Why don’t you take her to lunch?”

  “I need to talk to you about her,” he said. “Who are you lunching with?”

  “A friend,” I said.

  “The Thanksgiving guy?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “What’s Thanksgiving guy’s name?”

  “Nicholas,” Nicholas said, walking into my office.

  Dan turned around. The look on his face was priceless, a mix of surprise and fear.

  “Hi, Elise,” Nicholas said. He leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

  Dan glanced back and forth between us, still not sure how to react.

  “This is Dan,” I said. “My ex-husband.”

  Nicholas looked at him coolly. “Dan.”

  “Whassup,” Dan said. I knew Dan well enough to know that he was intimidated. Subconsciously, he threw his chest out a little.

  Nicholas turned back to me. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.” I took his hand. “I’ll talk to you later,” I said to Dan.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Dan said.

  Nicholas and I walked out of my office, leaving Dan standing there alone. I should have known that he’d never leave my new relationship alone.

  CHAPTER

  Sixteen

  Dan’s the kid in the sandbox who always wants the toy someone else has.

  Elise Dutton’s Diary

  Dan was waiting on the landing outside my apartment when I got home from work.

 
“Whassup?” he said as I approached. “I was just in the area, thought I’d stop by.”

  “What were you doing in the area?” I asked. I unlocked the door and walked in.

  “I came to see you.” He followed me inside, took off his coat, and threw it, then himself, on my couch. “So how was your date?”

  “What date?”

  “The one I caught you on. With what’s-his-name.”

  “You didn’t catch me,” I said. “And don’t act childish. You know his name.”

  “Dick?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Dickolaus.”

  I just glared at him.

  “Whatever. The Nick-man. So where’d you meet him?”

  “In the food court.”

  “Oh, that’s cool.”

  “We met in a Laundromat,” I said. “What does that make us?”

  “Divorced,” Dan said. “So what, he’s like your boyfriend now?”

  “Something like that. What’s it to you?”

  “Kayla’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “She cheated on me. With some old rich guy.”

  “Am I supposed to feel bad for you?”

  “Would it kill you to show a little sympathy?”

  “She’s a cheater, what did you expect?”

  “I expected she would be loyal.”

  “Like you?”

  “I was loyal to her.”

  For a change, I thought. I breathed out in exasperation. “What do you want, Dan?”

  “I want you. I want us to be like we were.”

  “That ship has sailed,” I said.

  “You didn’t give me a chance. I stuck by you when you screwed up, but I slip up and you’re gone.”

  “You didn’t stick by me. You divorced me.”

  “Only because you were going to divorce me.”

  “I never said I was going to divorce you. I should have, but I never did.”

  “But you were going to.”

  “You don’t know that. I don’t even know that, which is pathetic, since you were cheating on me with my best friend while I was in the ICU clinging to life.”

  He looked at me for a moment and his voice softened. “Elise, it’s always been us. We understand each other. We’ve been through the storms together. We should be together. You know it.”

  “I believed that once,” I said. “I don’t anymore.”

  “Why, because some rich lawyer comes knocking at your door? He’s probably married.”

  “No, he’s not married. Not everyone cheats like you, Dan.”

  “A lot more than you think. How long have you known him?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  “You don’t know him well enough to not trust him.”

  “Neither do you.”

  I groaned with exasperation. “I’m not having this conversation. You need to leave.”

  “Come on, ‘Lise. We match. Just admit it. If we didn’t, then why did you marry me?”

  “I was desperate.”

  “No, you believed in us. And you were right. Drop the lawyer and I’ll move in with you.”

  “It’s not going to happen, Dan. Now you need to go. I have to go grocery shopping.”

  He grabbed his coat and smiled. “You’ll come around,” he said. “Like a boomerang. You’ll think about it, then you’ll see the light. Who else knows everything about you? You know how people are when they learn about . . .”

  “About what?”

  “You know. Hannah.”

  “Get out,” I said.

  He remained undaunted. “See you later, ‘Lise.” He stepped across the threshold, then said, “Boomerang.”

  I shut the door after him. As much as I hated hearing it from him, Dan was right. Whenever people made the connection between me and the woman in the newspaper who killed her daughter, they just mysteriously disappeared. I leaned against the door and cried.

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  The annual ICE Christmas affair is about as classy as a truck pull, but without the dress code.

  Elise Dutton’s Diary

  The ICE Christmas party was a perennial redux—a potluck affair that was always held at my boss’s home in Olympus Cove. He lived in a Tudor-style house decorated with plastic reindeer in the front yard and a fake plastic chimney on the roof with Santa’s boots extending straight up as if he were stuck.

  Nicholas had picked me up along with my pomegranate-and-poppy-seed-dressed salad. I brought the same salad every year, and took it home every year barely eaten, since most of the office avoided salad like a toxin. Still, Mark insisted that I bring it because his wife, Shelley, once remarked that she liked it. I had since concluded that she was only being polite since she hadn’t eaten any of it for the last two years.

  Nicholas parked his BMW across the street from the house, and I carried my bowl up to the door.

  “Shall I ring the bell?” Nicholas asked.

  “No. They won’t answer; just walk in.”

  He opened the door. As I anticipated, there was no one to greet us, and the only sounds came from the television in the family room.

  “I’ll take your coat,” Nicholas said.

  I set my salad on the floor, then took off my coat and handed it to him. “They put them in the living room,” I said.

  Nicholas added our coats to a pile of outerwear already covering the crushed-velvet sofa. Then we walked into the kitchen. No one noticed (or cared) as I lay my salad on the counter.

  My boss, Mark Engeman, was notoriously tightfisted, and the party’s food was grocery store platters of meat and cheese laid out next to plates of Ritz and saltine crackers dressed with cheese from a can. There were also jalapeño poppers, store-bought rolls to make sandwiches, and a large bowl of carrot-raisin salad, which was always Cathy’s contribution.

  The one place Mark splurged was on beer. His refrigerator was stocked with all the Budweiser it could hold. There was also a plastic cooler filled with beer. I think he caught on that his guests rated the party by the level of intoxication they achieved, which was just one of many reasons that I was always the first to leave.

  Everyone else was already there. Mark and his wife, Shelley; Cathy, who brought Maureen, her snarky sister. And Brent and Margaret, our two group escorts, whom we rarely saw because they were on the road more than two hundred days out of the year, with their spouses.

  Closest to the kitchen were Zoey and her date. As usual, Zoey had brought someone none of us had ever seen and would likely never see again, which made introductory conversation pointless. Her boy du jour was tall and muscular, handsome but not especially bright-looking. He wore a sleeveless Utah Jazz jersey, which emphasized his biceps and myriad tattoos but seemed out of place considering the abundance of snow outside.

  With the exception of Shelley and Margaret, everyone was sitting around the living room eating nachos and watching the Jazz play the Portland Trail Blazers. They had all gotten an early start on drinking, and empty beer cans littered the coffee table that three of them had their feet on. Cathy was the first to notice us. “Elise. Nicholas,” she said. “You made it.”

  Everyone looked over.

  “Hi, everyone,” I said.

  Nicholas looked as unsure of himself as he had when he first approached me in the food court.

  “Hey,” Mark said. “Help yourself to a beer. Got Bud in the fridge.”

  “Thank you,” Nicholas said, making no movement to act on the offer.

  “Come watch the game,” Zoey said.

  “Go ahead, sit,” I said to Nicholas. “I’ll get us some food.”

  Nicholas sat down on a chair next to the others. Zoey was holding an open beer. She already looked a little buzzed. She almost
immediately leaned toward Nicholas, drawn like steel to a magnet. I walked to the kitchen table and began making ham and cheese sandwiches.

  “Thanks for all the gifts you’ve been sending,” Zoey said to him. “Especially the cheesecake. It was dreamy.”

  “I’m glad you liked it,” Nicholas said casually, politely glancing at her before looking back at the television. “What quarter are we in?” he asked.

  “Just started the third,” Mark said. “You ever watch the Jazz play?”

  “Sometimes. We’ve got box seats,” he said. “At the firm.”

  “And you’re a partner, right?” Zoey asked rhetorically.

  “Yes.”

  Zoey’s date just stared ahead at the screen, sucking on a beer, completely oblivious to her obvious interest in my date.

  I walked back over with our food. “Here you go,” I said, handing Nicholas a plate with some of my salad and a sandwich. I sat down between Nicholas and Zoey.

  “Thank you,” Nicholas said, turning all his attention to me. For the next hour we just watched the game, which the Jazz ended up losing by four points.

  “They never lose when I wear this shirt,” Zoey’s date said angrily.

  “Are you ready to go?” I asked Nicholas.

  “Whatever you want,” he said.

  “I’m ready.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get the coats.” He walked out of the room.

  Zoey stood and walked out after him. I also stood up and walked out, stopping in the hall just outside the living room. I could hear Zoey talking. “So where did you and Elise meet?”

  “We just bumped into each other. In the building.”

  “I’m in the building,” she said. There was a short pause, then she added, “I’m sorry we never bumped into each other. I mean, before you two.” There was another pause. “Is it serious? You and Elise.”

  “You mean, would I be interested in exploring other romantic possibilities?”

  “You’re so smart,” she said. “Yes. I mean, hypo”—she struggled with the word—”hypo, hypothetically.”

  “That’s a big word,” Nicholas said.