Rose and Jacob

by Lexi Buchanan

  “Jacob, why did you wait a month to call Degan House to speak to Rose? Why not look for her that night? You knew she was pregnant, I guess it just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “I don’t remember,” he said abruptly.

  Mack was a bit surprised at Jacob’s response.

  Dean came back into the room, looked first at Mack, who was upset, then his grandfather. “Is everyone okay?” he asked as he approached Mack, wiping her tears away.

  “I think so,” Mack replied.

  “Sorry for cutting this short, but Grandmother is waiting in the parlor and was about to head this way as she’s getting rather impatient. I’ve been sent to get you both.” He grinned. “She’s keen to meet you, Mack.”

  He was leading Mack out of the room, followed by his grandfather, when Mack noticed a photograph sitting in a lovely frame on the bookcase. She walked over to have a closer look. “Who’s that?” Mack asked, pointing at the woman in the photograph. She’d seen the photograph before and knew who it was, but Jacob having it on his bookshelf, when he married someone else, just didn’t make any sense.

  Jacob replied, “Eliza, my wife.”

  “Mack, what is it?” Dean asked.

  “The woman in this picture. It’s Rose.”

  “Mack, that’s my grandmother.”

  Mack heard Dean, but she couldn’t think properly because all the blood seemed to be running through her head and ears. Why did they have the picture framed? What did it mean?

  It couldn’t be. Could it?

  “This is the same picture Thomas has that Rose left for him. That’s Rose, not Eliza,” Mack whispered.

  “What? Mack, that’s impossible.” Dean searched her face and realized she was serious.

  He looked toward his grandfather, then his grandmother as she walked in. Mack took one look at her before she lost all color and dropped like a ton of bricks in a dead faint.

  Dean managed to catch her . . . just.

  Chapter 38

  “Mack, come on, babe. Please wake up.” Dean sat on the sofa in his grandfathers study. Mack was cradled in his arms. “Why does Mack think the picture is of Rose?” he asked his grandparents.

  “Dean, what are you talking about?” his grandmother asked.

  “The photograph of the two of you taken just before you got married, when you were pregnant with my father. Why does Mack think it’s Rose?”

  “Because she is Rose. Rose Elizabeth Degan, Eliza,” Mack answered Dean’s question. She’d woken up and heard the end of Dean’s question. “Am I right?”

  “There were only two pictures taken, we have one—” Eliza said quietly. Her voice trailed off.

  “You gave the other one to Thomas, which is how I saw it.”

  Sitting down, Eliza looked at Mack. “How do you know this?”

  “You’re Rose?” He was having a hard time getting his head around the fact that Rose was his grandmother.

  He saw his grandmother slowly nod her head. “She found the diary that you wrote when you met my grandfather. Also, Thomas and Richard helped fill in the blanks.”

  “Thomas?” Eliza whispered.

  “Your brother,” Mack told Eliza.

  “No . . . no, no, you’re wrong. Thomas died in 1953 in Korea . . . didn’t he?” Eliza asked, barely able to finish. Jacob was now sitting next to her, his arms around her.

  Mack asked them the one question that she needed to know the answer to. “Why? Why pretend you were dead? And what do we call you now?”

  “I’ve been Eliza longer than I was Rose. Please use Eliza . . . Can you tell us about Thomas? Then we’ll tell you our story.”

  Mack clung to Dean. “Thomas is the owner of Rose Cottage, which I rented for the summer. It used to be known as the Degan House. I found your diary and started reading it. All this time, Thomas had no idea about the photograph or the message you had written to him. After he thought you died, he couldn’t bring himself to read the comic until I read about it in the diary. It was only then that he found the photograph and message.”

  “But he’s dead. How? I don’t understand,” Eliza said.

  “Why do you think he’s dead?”

  “Mack, I took Eliza back to see Thomas in 1955. She missed him terribly, only to be told by her father he’d been killed six months earlier in Korea,” Jacob answered.

  Mack wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “Your parents knew?”

  “Yes, or rather, my father did,” Eliza whispered with tears in her eyes, “Please tell me about Thomas.”

  “He did serve in Korea, but he didn’t die. In fact, he has become a good friend to Dean and me. He loves to fish and taught my six-year-old nephew. I would say he still gets up to trouble with Levi, who we’ve met briefly.”

  “All this time wasted,” Eliza cried.

  “Will you tell us your story now?”

  Eliza wiped her eyes. “I will. You already know about everything up to that night, yes?”

  “Yes,” Mack replied.

  As Eliza collected her thoughts together, Mack took a good look at her. She still looked beautiful at eighty-seven. She wore her silver hair pulled back into a bun and it emphasized her high cheekbones, small button nose, and her skin that looked to have aged well. She wore a deep purple dress on her slim figure with low-heeled black and purple ballerina pumps. Very stylish, and both Rose and Jacob still looked so much in love, after all these years together.

  Dean pulled Mack closer into his arms and sat back further into the cushions. “We might as well get comfortable. Are you okay, Mack?” he asked, kissing her briefly, but tenderly.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Everything always is with you in my arms.”

  “Good answer,” she whispered, snuggling into him. He always made her feel loved and cherished with his concern for her wellbeing.

  “Okay.” Eliza sighed. “I was on my way to meet Jacob. I’d taken the path along the cliffs when Richard came running up to me. He begged me not to go and kept grabbing me, begging me to stay and marry him. I told him about the baby, thinking he would let me go then, but no such luck. I started getting worried because I didn’t want Jacob to think I’d changed my mind if I wasn’t there by eleven.”

  Eliza couldn’t continue so Jacob carried on from where she left off. “I knew Rose was going to take the cliff path to meet me. I walked along it from town to meet her, and that’s when I heard her arguing with Richard. I went running up and pried his fingers off Rose. I took her into my arms before putting her behind me. Richard made a grab for her again and ended up knocking Rose’s bag over the cliff edge into the ocean.”

  “So that’s how the clothes washed ashore,” Dean stated.

  Eliza nodded her head.

  “Yes. After that, he seemed to calm down and I begged him to tell everyone Rose had gone over the cliffs. He refused at first, but Rose knew something about him so he agreed in return for her silence,” Jacob said.

  Mack was too stunned to speak, but Dean wasn’t. “So, you faked your own death?”

  “It wasn’t planned that way. Rose really was just going to run away with me to be my wife, but pretending she died seemed the safest option. That night, I met her parents for the first time and her father made it more than clear that he didn’t want us anywhere near each other. Her father had many influential friends and was a very hard man. He would have come after us with everything he had, and all we wanted was to be left alone to get on with our lives, together.”

  “But what about the phone call to Degan House a month later. Thomas heard your father telling your mother about Jacob calling and telling him you had married Richard. You said your father knew you were alive?” Mack asked, needing answers.

  “We left that night to go to Boston and stayed with Eleanor, Jacob’s sister. After about a week of living there, Jacob arranged for us to be married. We knew I was really pregnant by then, and he didn’t want me showing without having the paper to prove we were actually married. He also wanted a
ssurance that if my father discovered the truth, it would be harder for him to take me away from him as I would be Jacob’s wife.” Eliza paused. “After a few weeks, Jacob thought perhaps he should ring to ask to speak to me and see what my father or mother had to say. I didn’t like the idea but went along with it. My father was just awful to Jacob and told him that I had married Richard and miscarried his child. I cried for the rest of the day.”

  Jacob wiped the tears from Eliza’s eyes. “Then it was maybe three weeks later that I opened the door and my father was standing there. Jacob was at work and I didn’t know what to do so I stepped outside with him. My father was so angry and said I really was dead to him, and I better not let my mother know I was alive and obviously in good health. I asked my father how he knew, and he told me Richard had told him a week after the accident that I was with child. But it was only the week before that he’d discovered I was actually alive. Apparently, a friend of his who he hadn’t seen for a while saw me in Boston and asked my father about me. My father then went to see Richard again, and he told my father it was true and I was still alive.”

  Dean and Mack were sitting on the sofa in silence. You could have heard a pin drop. Mack felt overwhelmed with the turn of events. Rose was alive. She had known there was something wrong with the information they’d uncovered. Although she’d hoped for a happy ending for Rose, she certainly hadn’t expected one. “So, you eventually went back to see Thomas?” Mack asked, finding her voice.

  “Yes. It was 1955. Rose had missed Thomas so much. Her mother had died in 1951 so there was no fear of her finding out about Rose. We had a car by then so I drove up to Cape Elizabeth. Her father was home. I asked him about Thomas, and he told us he had died in Korea. It broke Rose’s heart and she cried for weeks. I can’t believe that bastard lied to us. I guess we should have expected it, but we didn’t, not about something like that,” Jacob replied.

  “We have to see Thomas.” Eliza wiped her eyes.

  “Grandmother, I think this is going to be one hell of a shock for him. Let Mack and me break it to him and then we’ll arrange a get together or something. But we need to go easy. Up until Mack read your diary, he actually thought you died hating him!”

  Eliza brought her hand up to her mouth. “I loved him, and he has always been in my heart.”

  “He has always loved you, Eliza. He told me that himself. What did you know about Richard?” Mack asked as she tried to mop her face up a bit.

  Eliza and Jacob exchanged a look. “He loved Rose a lot, we really believed that, but Rose had discovered that he preferred . . . men,” Jacob said.

  “Oh.” Mack hadn’t been expecting that at all, but all of a sudden, she remembered about Rose’s friend, Jayne. “What about Jayne? Did she know you were still alive?”

  Eliza smiled. “I got in touch with Jayne about two weeks after we left Cape Elizabeth, and I knew for once, she would keep my secret because she has, all these years. Jayne was, and still is, my dearest friend. She’s gone away with her husband now. It was her house we went to the day of your mother’s garden party. Would you believe that she actually married Jacob’s best friend from the engineering company he started to work for all those years ago.”

  “Thank you for telling us your story. I can’t tell you how much it means to me, knowing you’re alive and lived all these years, happily married to Jacob. It broke my heart when I thought you’d died, and that Jacob had been told you’d left him for another man,” Mack said, close to tears again.

  Dean stood up and moved over to the desk to retrieve a box of tissues, offering some to Mack and his grandmother. He knelt in front of Mack and pulled her close so he could wipe her tears away, then kissed her. “Babe, come here.” He took her into his arms for a much-needed hug.

  “Dean, may I have a word with you, please?” his grandmother asked. She started to leave via a door on the opposite side from where everyone had entered.

  “Will you be okay?”

  “Dean, go. I’ll be fine.”

  He still looked apprehensive. “I won’t be long.”

  She smiled back. “Don’t worry about me.”

  Mack sat quietly with Jacob as Dean and his grandmother disappeared through the other door. Jacob looked at Mack and smiled slightly.

  “So what did Eliza write?” He roared with laughter when he saw the look on Mack’s face. “That good, huh! Might give me a heart attack now.”

  Mack started to giggle. “It’s pretty hot stuff, I can assure you.”

  “Mmm, hot stuff. That’s what she was back then, she still is. She’s the only woman I’ve ever loved. I can still remember the first day I saw her. I thought I was dreaming. It was a rescue at sea, and I was helping out on land. Heading back to get a warm drink, I just happened to look up and glance into the crowd, and there she was.” He was lost in his thoughts. “She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, and I felt my heart somersault in my chest. It was love at first sight for me, and before I knew it, my legs were carrying me over to where she was standing."

  Jacob wiped his eyes, setting Mack off again with the waterworks. “We introduced ourselves and I just didn’t want to ever leave her. I wanted to carry her away with me and keep her forever.”

  “Which you did, but a month later.” Mack smiled.

  “Yes, I did. The only thing I regret about what happened back then is that we didn’t just go and get married before going to see her father. We should have just done that and told him instead of pretending that she died. He probably would have acted the same, but at least there might have been a chance of Thomas being in our lives as he got older.”

  Eliza came back into the room. “Jacob, what have you been saying to upset Dean’s girl again?”

  Mack smiled. “He was telling me how it was love at first sight when he saw you. A bit like Dean and me, really.”

  Eliza sat down next to her husband. Dean moved to sit back down next to Mack and took her hand in his, lacing their fingers together. “Just like us, Mack.”

  “If you want the truth, Mack, neither his grandmother nor I thought we would see the day when he would fall in love so not only have you made our day telling us about Thomas, but you have made our day by loving our grandson. So, thank you.”

  She smiled at both of Dean’s grandparents. “I want you to know I love Dean so much. He has become part of me in such a short time.” She turned to Dean and placed a tender kiss on his lips.

  “Now you’ve made me cry,” Eliza said, wiping at her eyes again.

  Dean stood, pulling Mack up from the sofa. “We’re going to go and rest for a while before heading out. We’ll see you before we leave.”

  “Make sure you do,” Eliza said.

  Mack hugged Eliza and Jacob.

  “You take good care of her, you hear?”

  Dean looked at Mack. “Yes, sir,” he replied, looking at his grandfather.

  Chapter 39

  They walked out of the study. Dean escorted Mack through to the back stairs to his room so that Martha wouldn’t see them and engage them in conversation. All he wanted was to be alone with Mack, who looked exhausted.

  Mack was still really pale after discovering Rose was still alive, having been living all these years as Eliza. God, Dean hadn’t seen that one coming, although he should have realized something wasn’t right with the marriage license and the name of his father and aunt.

  “Mack, come and lie down. You look drained.”

  She moved over to Dean and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Don’t let go.”

  He picked her up in his arms and carried her to his bed. “I don’t intend to.”

  He lay down on the bed with Mack cradled in his arms. “You’re the first woman, apart from my grandmother and mother, to come into my room, Mack.” He hadn’t realized until then, with Mack in his arms, in his room, how sacrosanct his room, and possibly his heart, had become. He hadn’t realized that his grandmother was so worried about his heart. He was glad that he had Mack, thou
gh. She was his Rose, the only woman he’d given his heart to.

  “I love you, Dean,” Mack whispered before she fell asleep.

  As Mack started to wake up, she’d forgotten where she was and why, but she certainly recognized the body holding her.

  She smiled, feeling so full of joy, knowing that Rose hadn’t died and had lived a long life. Sixty-eight years with the love of her life, Jacob. She didn’t know how to break the news to Thomas, but hopefully, he wouldn’t be too upset, now that he had the family he’d always wanted.

  She wrapped her arms around a sleeping Dean and kissed his chest. “I’m so thankful that you took the trip to meet me in Cape Elizabeth the day that I spoke with Martha, rather than ignoring the call,” she whispered.

  “So am I.”

  She lifted her head and met Dean’s eyes. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

  “Been lying here awhile, thinking about everything that’s happened today, and since I met you. I wouldn’t change any of it.” He gently squeezed her.

  He slid slightly down so his face was level with Mack’s, then smoothed her hair back from her eyes. He used his finger to trace her eyebrows, down her lightly freckled nose, and to her lips before he caressed them. She opened her mouth slightly.

  “Marry me, Mack.”

  She froze.

  “God, I didn’t mean to just blurt that out. I love you. Right from the first time, Mack. That’s never happened to me before. I don’t want to lose you.” He saw the tears in her eyes. “I know we haven’t known each other long. Hell, we can even have a long engagement. I just want to know you’re mine.”

  Mack gave a tear-filled laugh. “Yes.”

  He smiled at her as his nerves from a few minutes ago started to dwindle. He reached into his pocket and produced a ring, then took hold of her left hand and slid the ring slowly on her finger, as he looked into her eyes. “My grandmother took me out of the room to give me this ring. She said it was the ring my grandfather gave her sixty-eight years ago. It had belonged to my great-grandmother.”