by T. K. Leigh
The smell of sugar and coffee made its way to her senses and she stopped, staring into the large window. A few familiar faces stocked the display cases with freshly made doughnuts, cakes, cookies, and other specialties of the house. She wondered if they still used her recipes, even after she had been ousted from her own bakery. These four walls had been her dream since she could remember, although her parents never supported it. They had a plan for her, too — Brown, law school, then become a partner at her father’s law firm.
When she dropped out after her first semester to follow her dream of becoming a pastry chef, her parents were horrified. Refusing to let anyone stand in her way, she moved out with barely a penny to her name. Her hunger to succeed, to prove her parents wrong, was the driving force she needed to be the best. She studied under the most notable pastry chefs in the world, honing and perfecting her skills over the years. She worked long hours and holidays, trying to save enough money to see her dream come true. Finally, after years and years, she had her very own pastry shop in the financial district of Boston, the perfect location to cater to tourists and the young professional crowd alike.
One day, she was on top of the world, thinking she finally had everything she’d ever wanted.
The next, she’d lost it all.
She could still remember what she was doing when she received the phone call that changed everything.
“Is the cake ready for the Vandekamp retirement party?” Rayne’s bubbly blonde employee, Lillian, asked, bursting through the swinging doors to the kitchen of the bakery. Rayne liked to think it was where the magic happened. Ever since her nanny taught her how to whip up a cake or her famous bread pudding, she knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to be a pastry chef. From sunrise to sunset, she was covered in confectioner’s sugar, flour, chocolate, and whatever other ingredients were necessary for her sweet concoction of the day. It made her feel alive. Every morning, she smiled happily at all the suits heading to their jobs, a scowl on their faces. She truly felt blessed to have a career she enjoyed.
“Just putting the finishing touches on it right now,” Rayne said in an even tone, mirroring the steady hand with which she piped frosting onto the cake. She stepped back, admiring her handiwork. It was a masterpiece.
Once she’d learned Mr. Vandekamp planned to move to South Carolina where he would spend most of his days hitting balls on the golf course he would soon live on, Rayne’s creative juices had begun to flow. Soon, she had constructed a cake to replicate a golf bag, complete with cookie clubs.
When she first opened the bakery, she stuck to what she was comfortable with — cannolis, cupcakes, tarts, eclairs, and the like. But as the bakery’s reputation grew, she stepped out of her comfort zone, designing and constructing spectacular cakes from practically nothing. The joy on her clients’ faces when they came to pick up their orders was priceless.
“They’re going to love it,” Lillian said, admiring her work.
Looking at her, Rayne smiled. “I think so, too. Help me box it up.”
“You got it.”
“Rayne?” a voice bellowed over the commotion of clanging metal and people shouting orders.
“Yes?” she answered, not looking up, keeping her attention entirely devoted to securely boxing up the cake so it arrived at its destination undamaged.
“You’ve got a phone call.”
“Take a message, Alberto,” she instructed, glancing at a short, dark-skinned man.
“I tried. He said it’s urgent.”
“Who?”
He looked down at a napkin he held. There was probably something scrawled illegibly to everyone except Alberto on it. “Alexander Burnham,” he responded in a thick Spanish accent. “He said he’s your fiancé’s boss.”
Rayne inhaled a quick breath, her stomach rolling. She stared at Alberto, unsettled thoughts circling through her head, then snapped out of her daze.
“Alberto, can you help Lillian finish boxing up this cake and get it into the client’s car?”
“You got it, el jefe.”
On unsteady legs, she headed toward her office. Normally, she would laugh at Alberto’s nickname for her, but something about Landon’s boss and friend calling her didn’t sit right. Sure, he had occasionally called to check in with her, as he promised to do while Landon was on assignment in Afghanistan for his security firm, but he never insisted on speaking with her.
She had been with Landon for over fifteen years. He was a SEAL when they began dating, although she simply thought he was a lieutenant in the navy at the time. The first few times he said goodbye before heading overseas, she worried she’d never see him again. But as the years went by, it just became a part of life. When Landon told her he had left active duty as a SEAL to take a special assignment for the private security firm, she was thrilled, knowing he’d no longer be in harm’s way. She had spent their months of separation putting her efforts into the bakery and planning their wedding slated for the following September, not to mention preparing for the arrival of their son, the result of the two weeks he’d spent visiting back in August.
Now, the unease she hadn’t felt since the early days had returned.
Closing her office door, she sat behind the desk, staring at the black phone like it had a contagious disease. Chills ran through her as she reached for it with cold fingers and picked up the receiver.
“Alex?” she answered, trying to mask her nerves.
“Rayne,” he replied in that familiar deep voice, a hurriedness in his tone. “Have you spoken to Landon recently?”
Furrowing her brows, she tried to calm her racing heart, her mind spinning a mile a minute. She thought back to the past week. She had been so preoccupied with the upcoming holiday season, working nearly sixteen hours a day at the bakery, it hadn’t dawned on her that Landon hadn’t called Sunday evening, like he usually did. That was four days ago. It had been eleven days since she’d spoken to him. What had happened in the past eleven days to bring on this phone call?
“No…,” she said timidly, swallowing back the ache in her throat, her air passage tightening. “We usually speak every Sunday evening at seven. The bakery’s been slammed with holiday orders. It didn’t even phase me when I didn’t hear from him.”
Alexander let out a barely audible sigh. Rayne could picture his normally intimidating physique sinking. She bit her lip, her pulse quickening.
“There’s been an attack,” he said in a soft voice.
“An attack?” she squeaked out, feeling dizzy, hot, and cold at the same time. “When?”
“I’m still trying to find out the details and narrow down a timeline. When I didn’t hear from him during our normal check-in time, I started asking around. I called a friend who’s deployed over in Kabul. He said he had heard rumblings about a bombing of a school or something fifty miles out of town.”
“I don’t understand,” she interrupted, holding on to all the hope she could. “How is this relevant to Landon? Where was he stationed?”
“Rayne,” Alexander continued, his voice sincere. “Landon wasn’t on the front lines of anything. It was more of a humanitarian mission, but even so, it was still dangerous. Many locals don’t like the presence of westerners, especially when they believe we’re interfering with certain customs.”
She shook her head, her stomach churning with each word Alexander muttered. “Where’s Landon, Alex?”
“I don’t know. My friend owed me a favor, so he agreed to take his unit to where Landon was stationed and check it out for me. When he got there…” There was a heavy pause.
“When he got there what?” she pushed, her voice growing louder and more unsteady.
“There was nothing left. The building had been reduced to rubble.”
Gasping for air, she felt the room spin as her world fell apart. This couldn’t be happening. They were supposed to get married. She was carrying his child. They were supposed to live happily ever after in their beautiful house and raise their son together.
Rayne’s mind raced. Did Landon escape with his life? Surely, even in an explosion, there would have been some sort of evidence of a body, wouldn’t there? She prayed that was the case. That he had gotten out and was just laying low, trying to determine his next move. He was a former SEAL, after all. He had served over a decade in some of the most dangerous places in the world before taking this job.
“They’re trying to determine a precise timeline and who’s responsible,” Alexander continued. “The initial guess is a suicide bomber, but they usually target large groups of people out in public. This was a building in the middle of nowhere. Even if everyone perished, it would have only killed a dozen or so people.”
“What was Landon doing for your company?”
“Rayne…” He paused. “As much as I want to tell you, Landon’s life may be in jeopardy because of his assignment. I can’t do the same to you.”
“You think Landon was targeted specifically?”
“I do.”
“By whom?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know. I’m afraid I won’t have any answers until I can get feet on the ground over there and push people to start talking.”
She nodded, closing her eyes as tears trickled down her cheeks. He’s not dead, she reminded herself. It was the only hope she had.
“Rayne?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s okay. I know it. He’s one of the bravest, smartest men I’ve had the good fortune of knowing. I promise I’ll bring him home to you.”
Placing her hand on her protruding stomach, she put all her faith into Alexander’s words. It was all she could do.
“Here ya go, Miss,” a man dressed in a long trench coat and expensive-looking shoes said, summoning Rayne back from her memories. She snapped her head up, her gaze lingering on his debonair smile, blond hair, clear blue eyes, and sexy five o’clock shadow. Her expression flat, she stared at him for a brief moment. When he gestured toward his outstretched hand, she glanced down, unsure how to react to the five dollar bill he held out to her. She returned her eyes to his.
“’Tis the season, isn’t it? Just promise you won’t buy drugs or booze, okay?” He shoved the bill into her hand, then disappeared around the corner.
She gazed at the green bill, Abraham Lincoln looking back at her, a smug expression on his face. She raised her head and stared into the bakery’s window, able to make out her reflection. Her red hair was disheveled and appeared as if it hadn’t been washed in weeks. In truth, she wasn’t sure when she had last showered. She wore a torn jacket and old scarf that had seen better days, but were gifts from Landon during their time together. She simply couldn’t get rid of them or stop wearing them, no matter how decrepit they were.
She was still stuck in that time of her life, wishing she could rewind the clock to the weeks before her world turned upside down and ask Landon to come home for the holidays. After receiving that dreaded phone call from Alexander, she had remained a nervous wreck most of that night. Every buzz from her cell phone made her leap to check whether Alexander was calling with more information. Instead, she heard nothing from him or Landon. Hours turned into days as she waited, trying to distract herself from thinking the worst by pouring all her energy into her work. She spent days in the worst kind of limbo imaginable. She prayed Landon was okay.
Her prayers were never answered.
Instead, a week before Christmas, she had found out Landon’s fate with the rest of the nation on the six o’clock news. She thought it was just a cruel nightmare, that something so horrific couldn’t be real. Most of the following week was a blur as she remained curled up in her bed, barely sleeping, eating, or moving. She couldn’t remember how, but she somehow made it to Landon’s funeral, where they lowered an empty casket into the ground.
A month later, she began having contractions at only twenty-five weeks and was rushed to the hospital, scared and confused. Even then, she held on to hope that the memory of Landon would survive through their son.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor had said when he returned after whisking the baby away to the operating room. “The duct between the two major blood vessels near his heart didn’t close properly. We did everything we could, but his heart wasn’t pumping enough blood.”
She still remembered holding the small, lifeless body that barely weighed two pounds, tubes and wires, the remnants of the hospital’s efforts to save his life, still taped to him. In an instant, all hope she would be able to move on from Landon’s tragic death vanished. Her grief consumed her. Air filled her lungs and her heart continued to beat, but she wasn’t living. Most days, she could hardly muster up the strength to get out of bed. Sleep eluded her. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the grainy video broadcasting Landon’s final moments on this earth, coupled with the blueish newborn baby she never even heard cry.
As the weeks passed and she was unable to bring herself out of her deep depression, her bakery was on the verge of going under. She had no option but to sell the business to an interested buyer. In the span of less than three months, she had lost her entire world — her fiancé, her bakery, and her son. She had nothing left to live for. She became an empty shell of a woman. There were many nights she considered raising a blade to her flesh, stopping when she saw Landon’s sad eyes flash in her mind. It was at times like these, when she felt most vulnerable and ready to end it all, that his presence surrounded her, urging her to continue.
As she walked down the aisle of the local liquor store on a sunny afternoon in May, a flier stuck between a shelving unit and the dirty linoleum floor had caught her attention. She picked it up and read the advertisement for a grief counseling meeting held at a local church every Thursday night. It listed the five stages of grief, and Rayne wondered where in the spectrum she fell, doubting whether talking to a group of complete strangers about what she was going through was even worth her time.
Then Franki Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” came through the overhead speakers. For the first time in months, Rayne smiled. She closed her eyes, basking in the memory of Landon bellowing those lyrics to her on his last night of liberty all those years ago when they first began dating. Despite his horrendous singing voice, which made it perfectly clear to everyone listening in the bar that he was tone deaf, she fell for him even more. Hearing that song again had made Rayne think Landon was there, urging her to try to move on from her pain and grief. Landon had his life cruelly extinguished. He would have wanted her to look at every day as if it were a gift, and she had hoped assimilating herself with others who were going through the same thing would help her get on the path to living again.
But as the weeks turned into months, she had trouble doing that, plummeting lower and lower into the abyss of her anger. The woman staring back at her now, holding a crumpled five dollar bill, her red hair ratty, her eyes sunken, her skin pale, was a complete stranger to her.
“He did this,” she muttered somberly, fighting a thousand conflicting emotions. Yes, she wanted nothing more than for Alexander, or someone, to suffer for what had happened to Landon, but would she really feel any better if she were the one wielding the blade, so to speak? Would she finally have closure?
She shook her head, pocketing the five dollar bill and shuffling down the street. Mark was stronger than she was. He wanted revenge and went after it. What would Landon have wanted her to do? She knew the answer to that. Despite his hard exterior, Landon spent his life making the world a better place for everyone else. He was a trained killer, yet each life he took hit him hard. “It’s for the greater good,” he had said time and time again. There was no greater good here. No matter how much anger and pain she still felt, she simply couldn’t hurt anyone, especially Landon’s best friend. After all, he didn’t kill him.
Her head hung low and she hugge
d herself to stay warm in the frigid early morning temperatures as she trudged along the city streets. A wetness splashed the left side of her body and she stopped, lifting her head slightly to see a yellow cab speeding down the street.
Glancing at her surroundings, she laughed at the irony of it all. She wondered if she subconsciously found her way here, or if Landon’s spirit was trying to tell her something. She had walked this path on many occasions and could blindly navigate the few city blocks between her bakery and the building that housed the security firm for which Landon had worked. She considered turning around and going back the way she had come, but something pushed her forward.
She continued down the street, lowering her head once more to fight off the bitter wind whipping around her. She didn’t even need to look up to know she was walking past the large glass doors of that familiar skyscraper. There was an inviting warmth about it.
Her heart thumped in her chest as she faced the revolving doors, staring into the lightness and bustle of the lobby. People rushed through, scanning a keycard at a security turnstile before heading toward a massive bank of elevators that serviced all twenty-nine floors of the building Alexander Burnham owned. The top few floors housed the security company, the rest of the floors being rented by various businesses. Knowing how pricey the lease was on her small bakery, her head spun just thinking about the amount of money Alexander received every month in rent alone, while she struggled to rub two pennies together.
She considered walking through those large revolving doors and going up to see Alexander. At least once a week following the funeral, he had shown up on her doorstep to check on her, but she was never able to muster enough strength to let him in the house she once shared with Landon. She was surrounded by memories everywhere she turned. She couldn’t face a living, breathing reminder of everything she had lost.
Maybe she was now standing in front of this building for a reason. Maybe being around someone who knew Landon as well as, if not better than, she did was precisely what she needed to move on.
