One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  ACCLAIM FOR REBECCA ST. JAMES AND NANCY RUE

  Sarah’s Choice

  “A thought-provoking and stirring story of painful choices and their ramifications. For any woman who has had to make a difficult decision, this book, cowritten by Grammy Award–winning St. James and Christy Award–winning Rue, will provide inspiration, hope, and solace to battered souls.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “The realities of being single and pregnant are not sugarcoated in Sarah’s Choice. The protagonist’s struggle to do the right thing reinforces that her decision is not one to be taken lightly. The writing style is conversational, making it easy to engage in the novel. This story provides a bit of encouragement and hope to those facing a difficult decision.”

  —ROMANTIC TIMES, FOUR STARS

  “Written with deep compassion, gentle humor, and incredible insight, this story takes Sarah through a maze of turbulent emotions on a journey that ultimately leads back to a God she had turned her back on when her father died. An excellent book for a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy, this book is also an inspired guide for friends and family to model helpful responses to a young woman’s dilemma.”

  —CBA RETAILERS + RESOURCES

  “Welcome to Sarah’s world! And right now, it’s not an easy place to be. With poignant insight and passion, Rebecca St. James and Nancy Rue have birthed a story that immediately draws you in, and, before letting you go, will touch the deepest levels of your heart.”

  —ROBERT WHITLOW, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE CONFESSION

  “Rebecca St. James and Nancy Rue have crafted a beautiful and moving story about how an unexpected difficulty can truly be a blessing in disguise. Anyone reading will not only be entertained, but also inspired as Sarah’s Choice reveals that no matter the circumstances, God does work everything for our good. Having traveled the country to speak to thousands of young people, I think this book is especially timely for the challenges many of us are facing. I am sure this book will touch many hearts!”

  —LILA ROSE, PRESIDENT OF LIVE ACTION, A MEDIA-BASED NONPROFIT DEDICATED TO BUILDING A CULTURE OF LIFE

  The Merciful Scar

  “Grammy and Dove Award–winning St. James (Wait for Me: Rediscovering the Joy of Purity in Romance) and Christy Award winner Rue (The Reluctant Prophet) tackle a tough topic with sensitivity and forthrightness in an intense novel about self-injury, self-esteem, and the numerous shades of love. Highly recommended, with crossover appeal for New Adult readers.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL, STARRED REVIEW

  “St. James and Rue show their amazing teamwork by focusing on an issue that could be a little unsettling for some readers: cutting. The authors paint a very realistic picture of a bright young woman’s non-suicidal self-injury habits with a smooth and relatable writing style that’s certain to pull the audience in.”

  —ROMANTIC TIMES, 4-STAR REVIEW

  Also by Rebecca St. James and Nancy Rue

  The Merciful Scar

  Sarah’s Choice

  Also by Rebecca St. James

  What Is He Thinking??

  Pure

  Wait for Me

  Sister Freaks

  SHE

  Loved

  40 Days with God

  Also by Nancy Rue

  The Reluctant Prophet series

  The Reluctant Prophet

  Unexpected Dismounts

  Too Far to Say Enough

  The Sullivan Crisp series

  Healing Stones

  Healing Waters

  Healing Sands

  Tristan’s Gap

  Antonia’s Choice

  Pascal’s Wager

  Mean Girl Makeover series

  So Not Okay

  © 2015 by Rebecca St. James and Nancy Rue

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Authors are represented by the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.

  Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

  Scripture quotations are from the KING JAMES VERSION of the Bible and from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson. © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-4016-8926-1 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rue, Nancy N.

  One last thing / Nancy Rue, Rebecca St. James.

  pages ; cm

  Summary: “Tara had always imagined her happily ever after. But her fiancés secrets are changing this story into one she doesn’t even recognize. Tara Faulkner and Seth Grissom grew up next door to each other in Savannah’s historic district. Their parents are best friends. They finish each other’s sentences all the time. Their fairytale wedding is a foregone conclusion…until Tara discovers another side to Seth three weeks before the wedding. Reality has crashed in on Tara’s fairytale--but hope will lead her to a future she couldn’t have planned for herself”-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4016-8927-8 (softcover)

  1. Fiancé--Fiction. 2. Fiancé--Fiction. 3. Life change events--Fiction. I. St. James, Rebecca. II. Title.

  PS3568.U3595O54 2015

  813’.54--dc23

  2014037554

  15 16 17 18 19 20 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Marijean Rue, who moved out of the pain and into herself.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  REFLECTION QUESTIONS AND RESOURCES FOR ONE LAST THING

  AN EXCERPT FROM THE MERCIFUL SCAR

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ONE

  What happened to Seth and me changed everything. Everything. And yet it began with a completely innocuous question: Where are we going to put the couch?

  As a romantic I wish it had started with Seth coming to me and looking into my eyes and saying how he needed to share something with me, something deeply personal and disturbing, so I could help him, walk beside him, stand behind him. You know—be every preposition a woman can be to her man. If I’d found out that way, the whole thing might have unfolded differently. More like a bolt of silk.

  Instead it reeled off slowly and painfully like a spool of barbed wire.

  We wer
e standing in the empty living room of our townhouse, Seth and I. Actually it was still technically Seth’s townhouse for twenty-one more days. As soon as we could get to the bank after we exchanged I dos, then it would be ours.

  Ours was at that point among my favorite words—right up there with scathing and translucent and feckless. You don’t earn a master’s degree in literary criticism without befriending your vocabulary. The simple word ours breathed from me like Jane Austen prose.

  As I said, we were standing there, both of us in our bare feet on the heart-of-pine floor. Seth had the tape measure. I had the dimensions for the couch we’d ordered written on a slip of good stock parchment paper with Tara Grissom printed in burgundy at the top in Lucida typeface. Even though I was still Tara Faulkner, a whole set of matching notepads, sticky notes, note cards, envelopes, and shopping lists had arrived from GrandMary two weeks before, so I could get used to seeing my new name. Little did my grandmother know I’d been writing it on notebooks, textbook covers, and just about any other surface I could put a pen to since I was fifteen years old. But I digress.

  “It’ll fit,” Seth said.

  “I know it’ll fit,” I said. “But will it look right? I mean with the end tables and the coffee table and two chairs? I was going more for casual elegance—not doctor’s office waiting room.”

  Seth put his hands on hips no wider than a snake’s and smiled until the almost-dimples almost appeared just above his dark beard. “You have absolutely no sense of spatial relations whatsoever, do you, Tar?”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Okay . . .” Seth went to the wall we’d just measured seven times and stretched out against it on the floor. On the floor in a starched white Oxford shirt and pressed jeans.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I’m six-two. How long is that couch again?”

  “If I have no spatial relationships—”

  “Relations.”

  “Then you have no memory. It’s eighty-six inches including the arms.”

  Seth stretched his over his head. “I’m the couch.”

  He was nothing like a couch. Six-pack abs. Cut pecs. Ripped everything that was supposed to be ripped. Seth was the exact opposite of a couch.

  “Picture an end table at my head and one at my feet.”

  I dove for him and planted what we in the South call my fanny on his belly and lounged. “Cute,” I said, “but not very comfortable.”

  He rolled out from under me and came up on one elbow, dark eyes twinkling. If I were critiquing a piece that had his eyes twinkled in it, I’d comment about cliché. But his actually did. They were right up there with the proverbial little star we all wonder about in song as toddlers. He gave one of my long curls a signature tug and twirled it around his finger.

  “We’ll figure it out when they deliver it,” he said. “What else are they bringing besides the living room furniture?” Another tug. “Or do I even want to know?”

  My turn to twinkle, although my eyes—blue—tend to ponder rather than sparkle. Or so I was told by a street artist on the Parisian Left Bank when I was thirteen. I’ve hung on to that description ever since.

  “Bookcases and a desk and a big ol’ comfy chair,” I said.

  “For?”

  “The study?”

  Seth eased his fingers into an entire hunk of my mop. “What study?”

  “Mine?”

  “Did we decide on that?”

  I poked at a dimple. “Like I said, you have no memory. Or maybe it’s just selective.”

  “Uh-huh.” Seth gave me a quick kiss and vaulted to his feet. A long-fingered hand reached down for me, but I batted it away and untangled myself.

  He headed for the kitchen. “What did you bring me?”

  “That was a total non sequitur,” I said.

  Feet padding on the still-rugless hardwood, I trailed him between the french doors and through the vacant, large-windowed dining room and tried to get to the Tupperware container on the kitchen island before he did, but he slid it off the granite countertop and put it behind him in one smooth move.

  I took a second to savor that countertop: vanilla cream with flecks of gold and chocolate and cranberry. Seth’s mother said it wasn’t practical. Mine said it was a dream. What mattered was that it picked up the brass in the pot hanger over my head where the All-Clad sauté and saucepans were going to hang.

  “Cookies,” Seth said. He peeled up a corner of the lid and sniffed. “Madeline make these?”

  “I am so insulted right now. No, my mother did not make these. I did. They’re dulce de leche.”

  Seth grinned. “Sounds more like a cocktail.”

  “I can always take them home,” I said. “Kellen’ll eat them.”

  But Seth already had half of one in his mouth. His eyes closed as he chewed and a soft moan furred from his throat. Seth always had the right response. He didn’t even have to mean it and it still worked.

  “You having one?” he said. An oatmeal-colored crumb escaped and rested on his lower lip. Lucky crumb.

  “Uh, no,” I said. “My last fitting’s tomorrow and I have to be able to zip that dress. You’re going to want milk with that.”

  “The dress?”

  I opened the refrigerator. “Don’t you have any real milk?” I’m seeing Almond Silk . . . Rice Dream . . . organic soy. “You obviously just made a Brighter Day run.”

  “Cow’s milk is for baby cows,” he said, mouth still stuffed.

  “So . . . isn’t soy milk for baby beans? Sproutlets? How do they get milk out of a bean anyway?”

  I closed the fridge and turned to Seth. He was biting into cookie number two.

  “You’re eating another one?” I pressed my hand to my chest, feigning shock. “Look out, now, darlin’—you won’t fit into that tux.”

  Seth’s mouth stilled in mid-bite. The air in the kitchen went abruptly testy.

  “What does that mean?” he said.

  I laughed. He didn’t. There wasn’t a twinkle within a Savannah city block.

  “I was joking,” I said.

  “Were you?”

  “For the love of the land, Seth, you could probably eat the whole dozen and still not gain an ounce.” I wrinkled my nose at him. “Not that you couldn’t stand to.”

  Seth’s eyes deadened as if someone had pulled the plug on them, and he pushed the container away. It bounced nervously against the umber Southern Pottery jar that held a bouquet of virgin wooden spoons. He spread his hands and looked down at his waspish waist. “Is this a problem?”

  “What? Your body?” I could feel my eyebrows intersecting over my nose. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Are you?”

  “I said I was.”

  It was getting weird. As in, this kind of stupid bickering never happened between us and I had no idea what to do with it. I just stood there staring at him in the sudden silence. The only sound was the rain splatting against the window behind me.

  It wasn’t quiet in my head. My brain started about six questions: Is he . . . did I . . . was it just me . . .?

  I finally came out with, “What just happened?”

  I still expected a soft grin, a shrug of those shoulders, a reach for the hair I was piling on top of my head with one clueless hand. I got none of that.

  “Nothing. Forget it,” he said, and snapped the lid onto the container.

  That was a glimmer of the Seth I knew. It was every guy I ever knew, including my father, my brother, Kellen, and the last thirteen-year-old boy I saw standing sullen-faced with his mother in the checkout line at Publix. Every guy who tells himself, You just said something stupid. Shut up. Shut down. Wait for the Coax.

  I was good at the Coax.

  “Darlin’, have you ever heard me complain about your body?” I put my arms around his neck and looked up the eight inches between us.

  He turned his face away, but I kissed the side of the beard that browned his chin like it had been p
ainted on by Rembrandt. I punctuated each word with another kiss, making my way to his mouth: “You. Are. A. Crazy. Person.”

  His lips hesitated at first, but that was the game, right? I persisted—one, two, three—and he was kissing me back.

  It was the five thousand and third time I wondered how we were keeping our vow not to sleep together until we were married. Three years is a long, long time when the man is tender, unselfish . . . and hot.

  Seth’s arms tightened around me and he lifted me off my feet. I kicked one foot up the way Doris Day always did in the Rock Hudson movies—couldn’t help myself—and nuzzled next to his ear.

  “Tell me again why we’re waiting twenty-one days?”

  He let me go. I staggered against the dishwasher and it swooshed within, and Seth seemed to snap back from wherever he’d gone.

  “You turned it on with your fanny,” he said, sounding too forced for talk of fannies and cookies and waistlines. He also made a far bigger deal than he had to out of pushing buttons, opening the door, closing it again.

  What. On. Earth?

  We were back in unmarked territory, and I didn’t know which way to go. “Okay,” I said finally. “Let’s review: we’ll feel better if we wait.”

  “We’ll be better if we wait,” he said to the control panel.

  I wrapped my arms around myself. “Does that mean we can’t even kiss? I’m feeling like a piranha at the moment. No, pariah. What the heck am I trying to say?”

  I tried to laugh again. He didn’t again.

  “I just don’t want us to start something we shouldn’t finish.” As Seth turned to me, his voice took on a tone even too paternal for my father. “Come on, Tar, we’ve talked this to death.”

  “Are you scolding me?” I said. “What am I, five?”

  My own voice did a thing it never did with Seth—hadn’t done with anyone since middle school when I tried to flirt with an eighth-grader and came off like a mosquito.

  Seth’s face was impatient. “No, I’m not scolding you. I’m just hitting replay.”

  “Really?” I said. “Because I feel like I’m being reprimanded for wanting you.”

  “You’re not,” he said. With a martyred sigh. It was the sigh that wouldn’t let me leave it alone.