Davina frowned briefly at Celia, then turned back to Miranda.
“I hope you move on from this and forget him, Miranda. I hate to say that since Prent’s my own flesh and blood, but I can’t abide what he’s done to you. And don’t let it eat you up inside. That’s how my husband handled things. Internalized his problems, dwelled on every last little imperfection, didn’t share the burden,” she said, shaking her head. “Burned him up, just like toasting a barrel too long. Prent’s like me though. Flies off the handle. Says and does impulsive things. And when the anger or fun or thrill is over, you’ve got to deal with the fallout. With the reality that’s left.”
Miranda perfectly agreed with Davina’s assessment of Prent’s crazy personality. He was a bright and shining star, but he burned brightly like a meteor falling to earth. The intensity of his character was what had drawn Miranda to him, but she should’ve recognized that heat it for the danger it was.
Hot, indiscriminate, and crazy enough to burn and singe and leave a permanent emotional scar.
She briefly thought about that time he’d shown her the production line at the cooperage and how they charred the inside of the barrels with a blast of intense heat to the oak staves. Although Miranda knew that the char was instrumental to making a fine bourbon, it was frightening to see the barrel’s innards blacken in an instant. Great for the bourbon, not so great for the barrel.
Davina left in a flurry of apologies and within a few more minutes the three women were ready to leave. Reluctantly, Miranda took the garment bag containing her wedding gown from the coat rack and draped it over her arm, a bitter reminder of failed love.
At least the ring was valuable and she could sell the thing. Hell, she could probably buy herself a new car for the price she could demand for the unused marital trinket.
Maisie and her mother offered to come to Bourbon Springs and spend the night with her, but Miranda declined. They all pulled out of the church parking lot at the same time. Miranda waved to them as they turned for homes and she headed northwest out of town on Mackville Road.
But she had a stop to make first.
Less than five minutes out of town, Miranda turned left into the grounds of Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site. Upon pulling off the main road, she saw that the park was overrun with picnickers to the immediate right, where tables were plentiful and there was a large playground. Many a day Miranda had played there with her sister under her parents’ watchful eyes. Only later had she learned that the place was the site of a bloodbath.
On the ground now underneath swings and jungle gyms, Confederate troops had climbed, swarmed, and died as they pushed the Union back until the battle ended in a tactical defeat for the Rebels as the sun set on that blisteringly hot and horrific October day. When she discovered she’d whiled away many happy hours upon the ground of such horrors, Miranda had felt guilty for disgracing the place with frivolity.
But with the passage of time came perspective.
She could think of no better honor for the terrible sacrifice made on these gently rolling hills that people now lived in peace and gathered in this place to celebrate the simplicity of love and life, the ultimate gifts of freedom.
Miranda bypassed the picnic area and the frenetic activity of a swarm of children at the playground and kept her car on the road toward the museum. There were only a handful of cars in this less-crowded part of the grounds, and she easily parked in front of the cemetery across from the museum. The solitude of the small graveyard felt appropriate that day, and she was drawn to the morbid isolation of the lonely area and comforted by its familiarity and stillness.
She scaled the small incline to the square space, which was a Confederate memorial with a few markers and surrounded by a low stone wall. Miranda approached slowly and reverently, gazing up at the statue of the lone Confederate soldier staring out onto the now-tranquil battlefield. She walked around the monument and toward the rear of the square, knowing that a small gate in the wall afforded access to a lovely view beyond the cemetery area.
As she rounded the memorial, she was surprised to see a figure hunched and sitting in the shade of a cedar tree on the wall next to the gate.
It was Prent.
With his back to the cemetery, he was bent at the waist, head in his hands, still wearing the shirt and trousers from his tux. His jacket was draped on the wall beside him, and his bow tie was on the ground inside the wall.
Huddled and shaking, Prent was crying. The thing she couldn’t bring herself to do.
Feeling a little dizzy from the heat and craving shade, she silently approached and took him unawares.
“Strange that we had the same idea,” she said at his back in a whisper, causing him to start and actually fall off the wall.
He cursed as he hit the ground on the other side.
Miranda leaned against the rough rock wall with her hands on top and looked over to see Prent pushing himself up from his tumble.
“Are you all right?”
Nodding, he stood and brushed bits of grass from his trousers. After recovering from his spill, Prent looked at her with wide, almost crazed eyes. Sweat shone on his broad forehead, and his hair was a complete mess. She wondered how long he’d been sitting in the heat.
“How’d you know to find me here?” he asked. “I didn’t tell a soul where I was.”
“I wasn’t looking for you. I was on my way home and decided to take a little detour. Wanted a place to think.”
Prent nodded and looked around.
“Same for me,” he said sadly. “I loved coming here for picnics with you and thought it would be a good place to just—you know—”
“To what? Escape?” Miranda snapped. “Run away from what you’d done?”
“No. To remember.”
“Remember?”
“Of course. To remember the times we were here together.”
She snorted. “Why would you want to reminisce about the fiancée you dumped?”
“Because I love you, that’s why,” he shot back as if the answer were obvious.
“How the hell can you say that to me? You left me at the altar not more than two hours ago!”
“Because it’s true!” His voice ripped through the grounds, shattering the tranquility like a canon blast.
“Strange way of showing it…”
At last the tears came, and she regretted approaching him. She should’ve left him in his misery and headed back to Bourbon Springs to wallow in her own. Yet there they were, arguing about love in a serene landscape graced by inexpressible beauty and tainted by terror and loss. And they were desecrating the place with their petty drama.
“You haven’t asked me why I didn’t show.”
“Pretty obvious that you didn’t want to marry me. I got the message.”
“No, I do want to marry you, Miranda. It’s the thought of you leaving me that I couldn’t stand.”
First Davina, now Prent. How had he intuited her doubt?
“L-leaving you?”
“Miranda, I’m still completely amazed that I ever got you to go out with me, much less agree to marry me. I’m a decent-looking guy with a bunch of money, but I’m also a royal fuckup. Got kicked out of boarding schools and barely made it through college. Been arrested, been sued, and been through too many women. Only my name and money have gotten me out of more than one unhappy scrape, and it’s only because my father was smart enough to put my money in a trust that I haven’t blown through my inheritance.”
She swallowed hard and couldn’t bring herself to say that none of that mattered.
Because it did.
It was his stupid history that had been nagging at the edge of her common sense for the past week, seeding a nasty vein of doubt that had ruptured that morning when she reached the church. Long before Prent had called her to say he would be a no-show.
He gestured to her, palms up, as though she were a treasure, a hallucination.
“And then I met you. Perfect, sweet, profe
ssional. Totally not my type—or so I thought. I fell hard for you and—miracle of miracles—you fell in love with me. But you know what I never had the guts to ask you, Miranda? What the hell you ever saw in me. I always knew what the attraction was for most women: the money. Guy pulls up at a bar or the racetrack or wherever in a fancy car and nice clothes tends to get noticed. But I learned that getting noticed by some people wasn’t the best thing. And I knew from the moment I met you that you weren’t into money. Hell, you wouldn’t even let me buy you dinner until our third date.”
“I knew your history when we started dating. You told me all that. I didn’t walk into a relationship with you with blinders on.”
He’d pestered her for a date for the better part of a month after they first met at a wedding reception in Lexington. When she started asking around Bourbon Springs about him in light of his continuing interest, she had repeatedly been warned away from him. Yet Prent kept after her and she was finally honest with him: his reputation bothered her. He then completely and painfully confessed his past, including his less-than-stellar educational efforts, his arrests, and his string of girlfriends.
He’d even told her about one particular girlfriend, Ainsley; he’d thought she’d been The One. Instead, she’d broken his heart by dumping him and moving across the country and had threatened to get a restraining order against him if he tried to contact her, even though Prent claimed his efforts to reconcile were not over the top. A few months after their breakup, Ainsley had the audacity to call her and warn her away from Prent. But the ex had told her nothing Miranda hadn’t already heard from Prent himself.
So while other women might have been put off by Prent’s past to the point of fleeing into the streets in terror, Miranda had been impressed by his honesty.
“And yet you love me—or loved me,” he said, dropping his head. “Why?”
Miranda looked at him with new eyes. She saw a terrified Prent—a version of him she had never seen. It broke her heart to see him like this because the truth was that she still loved him. But because his insecurity had been stronger, he would never know the depth of her doubt about his character, the shallowness of her own, and the pain she had been prepared to cause him.
“I just… do.”
He leaned against the wall, placing both hands on the rough surface. In doing so, his jacket slid from the wall and onto the ground on Miranda’s side. She draped it over the wall again, but a piece of paper fluttered from the jacket’s interior and landed at her feet. She bent to pick up the sheet and recognized it as their marriage license.
She handed the document to him, but Prent wouldn’t take it.
“Let’s use it,” he said, suddenly excited.
She blinked at him, enraged and wondering whether she’d heard him correctly.
“You still expect me to marry you?”
Prent jumped over the wall.
“I just heard you say you still loved me,” he said, expectant like a child eager for a treat. “You said I do, ironically enough. Not did love. Not past tense.”
“I didn’t say I’d marry you though.” She thrust the marriage license at him.
He fell to his knees and grabbed her hand.
“Then I’ll ask again. Marry me, Miranda Chaplin. Today. Now. We can go into Danville and find a Boyle Circuit Judge and—”
“You’re insane!” she cried but didn’t pull away from him.
“That’s me all over, and I’m pretty sure that’s the reason you fell in love with me. And I happen to be in love with you,” he countered, then looked down at the hand he held, which was her left. “Wait—where’s your ring?”
“You didn’t really expect it to still be there did you?” she said, trying to hide her right hand behind her back.
Prent saw her subterfuge and grabbed her right hand, causing the marriage license to fall to the ground again. He held up her hand and examined it. The large diamond gleamed like fire in the June sun as Prent rotated her hand and admired the ring. He smiled at her in relief.
“You’re still wearing it.”
“Not on my left hand if you noticed. And I had to put the thing somewhere, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but you put in somewhere you can still see it. You didn’t stuff it into your wallet, did you?”
“I forgot,” she said. “I just wanted to get the hell out of that church and—”
Prent took her hand and thrust it upward into her face.
“You forgot about this ring? A rock so big that you wet your pants when you saw it?”
“I did not!”
“That’s what you told me. And when I peeled your clothes off when we made love under the Old Oak after you said yes, that thong was pretty damned wet! Or did I get you that hot and bothered instead of the diamond?” he asked with a leer.
She snatched her hands from him, equal parts embarrassed and amazed he remembered the details of his proposal.
“If this is really another proposal, it just crossed the line into the worst one ever!” She backed away from him and slipped the ring from her finger. “Here,” she said, thrusting it into Prent’s face, “take the damn thing.”
“No,” he said determinedly, all the silliness gone from his demeanor. “I meant what I said. Keep it. Besides, I’m still hoping we’ll put it to good use today.”
“Why the hell would you think that I’d marry you after what happened today? And why would you ask me again? Aren’t you still afraid I’ll leave you?”
“Because just a few moments ago you said you still loved me, Miranda Chaplin.” He was still on his knees and crept toward her like a supplicant to a sovereign. “You were able to say that even after my no-show today. And when I heard you say that, I knew I’d been wrong to think I’d lose you.”
She slipped the ring back onto her right hand. “Fine. You got me. I still love you. But that sure as hell doesn’t mean I’m going to marry you, Prentice Oakes. Because the one way you figured out you were wrong about me was the surefire way to lose me forever!”
“Miranda, please…,” he said, still on his knees as she continued to back away.
“Fine, I love you, and you love me. Big fucking deal! It wasn’t enough to get us to the altar, was it? And you know what falling in love with you got me? A broken heart, a bunch of wedding presents to return, an unused wedding dress, and not one but three towns full of people—Perryville, Littleham, and Bourbon Springs—to face in miserable embarrassment!”
Prent stood, his face impassive.
“Then tell me to go to hell.”
“What?”
“Tell me to go to hell. Tell me to get out of your life. Tell me that you never want to see me again. Tell me any one of those things, and I’ll leave you alone forever.”
He stood over her, and she sensed he was about to kiss her. It took every bit of her willpower not to move toward him, to accept that invitation she saw in his eyes. Miranda took a deep breath and several steps away from him until she nearly stumbled on one of the graves in the cemetery. She caught herself, looked at Prent, and saw hope fading on his face.
“Good-bye, Prent,” she said and turned to walk away.
“You didn’t say it!” she heard him shouting as she scurried past the monument. “You couldn’t say it!”
She ran to her car, Prent stalking her.
“You couldn’t say it! You couldn’t tell me to leave you alone!”
She had just started the car when he appeared at her window, a goofy grin on his face. Knowing that she couldn’t move with his face plastered against the car, she put the window down.
“Say it,” he taunted. She gripped the steering wheel and looked straight ahead. “You can’t! You can’t tell me to go to hell!”
“Get away from my car, Prent,” Miranda said between gritted teeth and still looking straight ahead.
“What’s that?” he asked, his hand to his ear.
Seeing that he was no longer touching the car, she resolved their little standoff by moving fo
rward out of the parallel parking space since there wasn’t a car parked in front of her. She made a U-turn since the driveway came to a dead end and saw that Prent was still standing in the same place she’d left him.
“You can’t say it!” he again cried as she passed him and put her window up. “So that means I’ll see you later!”
For the life of her, she actually thought she saw the man making that silly gesture with his thumb and pinky finger which indicated he’d give her a call soon.
As she drove away, Miranda glanced in her rearview mirror and saw Prent waving to her as casually as though she’d just left his house after having a nice Sunday dinner.
As he well knew, she still loved him, despite what he’d done today. Hell, maybe she loved him even more for the fact that he hadn’t shown up, regardless of what she’d said to him. At least Prent had the guts to admit he was scared, to risk ruination and the further shredding of his reputation by acknowledging his fear in a very public way. While most people likely saw him as a coward, she saw him as a realist and perhaps even courageous to subject himself to such public scorn.
Miranda turned left out of the battlefield grounds and took the winding road home. She knew the way well and took the curves and corners at a fast clip, barely paying attention as her mind raced and her stomach churned but not from car sickness. Her first words to him in the cemetery haunted her, and as every mile passed, the weight of her own cowardice felt heavier and heavier.
She hadn’t been strong enough to tell him that she shared his basic fear.
That their marriage was destined to fail, that they were a disaster waiting to happen, that they were making a monumental mistake.
She just hadn’t been strong enough to act on it.
Because the fact was that by not going through with the wedding, Prent had saved her the trouble and embarrassment of being the one to make that decision in public.
Miranda was the only one who knew that right after her sister had adjusted the veil on her head and long before Prent had made his fateful call, she’d made her decision not to marry him. She had decided that shortly before the ceremony began, she would call Prent, have him come to her in the parlor and drop the news on him. They would announce it to the waiting guests as a mutual decision so as to spare either party the shame of a very public dumping.
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