by Cara Colter
She turned it over.
In her aunt’s spidery, oh, so familiar handwriting, were the words Krissy’s perfect match.
Her house. And her husband. Aunt Jane looking after her. Except the husband part had gone so terribly wrong.
But there was the baby. Someone to care about. Someone to lavish love on... She heard another vehicle stop in front of her house. That was more traffic in the last hour than she’d had since she arrived home from the Boyden family reunion.
Krissy went and peeked out the curtain again.
Finally he had come. Her relief was instant and acute. It was real, after all. They could figure this thing out.
But as she watched, it wasn’t Jonas who got out of the car. First it was Chance, racing toward the door, and then it was Theresa.
She might have been able to keep that door closed to Theresa, but the dog? She cried harder as she saw how fast he was running to the door. He was scratching on it, now, whining, giving hysterical little barks.
Krissy went and opened the door. She collapsed in a puddle of feeling, threw her arms around the dog, who lavished her with kisses and whined his admonishment for being abandoned.
Theresa’s feet moved into her range of vision.
“Oh, my,” Theresa said sadly.
And Krissy realized the sight she must make, in her crumpled, stained wedding dress, hair uncombed and eyes puffy from crying.
“Let’s go in,” Theresa said gently. “I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.” Once they were in the door, Theresa took her in solemnly, and said, “Where’s your bathroom? I’m going to run you a nice bath and make you tea while you have a soak.”
Stop this, Krissy ordered herself, but the truth was, she was so relieved to have someone take charge that she just pointed the way to the bathroom. While the bath ran, she shucked the wedding dress and put on her robe.
Minutes later, she was soaking, the dog was hanging his head woefully over the side of the tub, looking at her accusingly, and she could hear Theresa humming away in her kitchen.
It was the first time Krissy had felt sane since she had left Boy’s Den. Feeling restored and stronger, she finally pulled herself from the tub, wrapped herself in her robe and padded down the hall.
“How do you like our new car?” Theresa asked her, setting a cup of tea down in front of her and taking the seat across from her.
“He told you about the bet.”
“Bet?” Theresa said, cocking her head at Krissy. “No, he told us he hated that car. He didn’t want it anymore.”
“Oh,” Krissy said.
“Just for the record, he looks as bad as you. Maybe worse.”
She couldn’t even be offended that Theresa thought she looked bad. Her heart twisted at the thought of Jonas in pain. Somehow, she had pictured him shrugging the whole thing off, getting back to normal quite quickly, leaving the whole debacle behind with a certain ease.
“Maybe you’d better tell me about the bet,” Theresa suggested.
“The bet. The one where Mike would get the car if Jonas turned thirty and wasn’t in a committed relationship.”
“That wasn’t really a bet,” Theresa said. “It was a joke between the three of us.”
“Well, he didn’t see it that way. And neither did Mike. They were laughing about it the morning after the wedding. I heard them.”
“You better tell me how our silly bet relates to you,” Theresa said quietly.
And suddenly Krissy needed to tell someone, as if in the telling of the entire story, she would herself be able to figure out the truth. She started at that night they had set off the alarm at Match Made in Heaven and told Theresa the entire story.
“And then today,” she finally finished, nearly half an hour later, “I found this.”
She went and got the receipt her aunt had written and flipped it over so Theresa could see the back of it.
Her almost sister-in-law looked at it, then sighed. “Do you think I would have pushed you two to get married if I didn’t think this very same thing, Krissy? You two, together, were something to see. You know, Mike and I have the best relationship. It’s as solid and as comfy as an old T-shirt you love to wear around the house.
“But you and Jonas have something else. It’s the same thing I saw in my parents. It’s like a light goes on in both of you when you’re together, and it makes the very air around you shimmer with radiance.”
“But we barely know each other!” Krissy wailed. “It started over a bet!”
“Maybe that is how it started,” Theresa said, “but you can’t possibly believe he married you because of that! I saw the look in his eyes. And our bets go back and forth all the time. They’re games, that’s all. He might have lost the car. Mike would have enjoyed tormenting him for a week or two and then made sure he won it back on a bet about a hockey game or something. So what’s really going on with you?”
Krissy faced what was really going on with her. It felt like a relief to say it. “I don’t want to be like my parents.”
“Your parents?”
And so she ended up telling Theresa about that, too.
“And now you’re going to have a baby,” Theresa said.
Krissy went very still. “How do you know?”
“I’d like to tell you I can see it in you, and I can, now that I know. But I saw the test strip in the bathroom. Did you suspect it at the reunion?”
“Yes.”
“So that explains the fast exit.”
“Are you going to tell him?” Krissy whispered.
“No, Krissy, I’m not. You’re going to have to make that decision.”
“What if I tell him, and he feels obligated to make our marriage real because of a baby?”
“Just like your parents?”
“Yes.”
Theresa sighed. “This isn’t about the baby, not really. It’s about whether or not you love him. Because that would involve a level of trust in him. And you can’t decide that based on what your aunt thought, or what I think, either. Your heart is telling you the truth, and I think you are brave enough to listen to it. But I can’t make that decision for you.”
As Theresa spoke, as her words washed over Krissy, it felt as if a dark curtain was being lifted and the sun was dancing back into her life.
That thing that would not be killed and would not be quelled, no matter how hard she tried. It winked back to life, an ember that had been blown on.
Hope.
A sudden illuminating realization came to her. The level of trust she needed, she realized, was not in Jonas. She needed to trust herself.
“I need to see him,” Krissy said. And then she laughed. “I don’t even know where my husband lives.”
“Luckily for you,” Theresa said, grinning, “I do.”
* * *
Jonas’s face itched from not shaving. His hair was too long. He could smell himself, for God’s sake. His breath could make a train take a dirt road. Added to that, Jonas had the headache of all headaches. He wished he could blame it on alcohol, but no, it was heartache pure and simple. He wasn’t eating right. He was barely sleeping.
How well he remembered this kind of pain from the loss of his parents.
He counted back to the day he had first met Krissy. Barely a month. If she could do this to him after one month, wasn’t it for the best that she was gone? What if they’d been together a year, and she decided to pull the plug? Or two years. Or ten.
Or maybe she wouldn’t make a decision to pull the plug. Maybe she would die in a terrible accident, just like his parents had.
This was what he’d forgotten when he was falling for her and falling so hard. The pain, not so much of loving, but of losing that love.
It was why he had wrestled down the desire to phone her. A thousand times he had looked up her number, thought of call
ing it just to hear her voice. But then, no.
He’d get through this period of grief.
He’d white-knuckle his way through it. Go cold turkey, like an addict leaving behind their drug, their source of pleasure, their one thing that made them want to live, that gave them the impetus to get up in the morning.
But he wasn’t strong enough to go completely cold turkey. Well-meaning relatives—who had no idea his marriage was over before it had really begun—kept sending him pictures from the reunion.
The tug-of-war, her face caught in the reflected light of the fireworks, her expression as she ate her first s’more and of course, her coming toward him with those flowers in her hair and that look on her face.
That was the problem, really.
The look on her face. Nobody could make up a look like that, could they?
He groaned, back on the merry-go-round, revisiting all those things he needed to stop revisiting.
He glanced at the clock: 10:00 a.m. Today, he’d go to the office. Today, he’d make those phone calls, today he’d answer emails.
He took his phone out.
He ordered himself to look at his emails, to return a call, to look for a new resort to buy.
But instead, he opened the pictures of Krissy, felt his heart fall all over again and realized he would not be getting back to normal today.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JONAS WOKE UP, feeling groggy and out of sorts. His teeth felt as if they were wearing socks. He glanced at the clock. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.
What kind of self-respecting person was napping at two in the afternoon?
He realized someone was at the door. You practically had to have secret service clearance to get in his building so he knew it must be Theresa.
“Go away,” he called.
She knocked at the door again. He knew his sister. She wasn’t going away. He got up and went to the door, flung it open.
It wasn’t his sister.
Krissy stood there, with Chance.
The dog apparently had forgotten all the good things they had taught him, because he leaped at Jonas, put his paws on his shoulders and cleaned his face.
“Get off me,” he bellowed.
“If I were you,” Krissy said, slipping in the door completely uninvited and shutting it behind her, “I’d take kisses where you can get them. You look terrible.” She wrinkled her nose. “And you smell.”
He managed to get the dog off of him. “Sit down!”
The dog did so reluctantly. Jonas stared at Krissy. His wife. Unlike him, she looked at the top of her game. Not the least heartbroken, apparently. Radiant.
Beautiful in a pair of jeans and open-toed shoes and a clinging T-shirt. Her hair was flowing free around her shoulders, and he had to shove his hands in his pockets to keep from touching it.
He looked away from her so that he didn’t have to see her lips. How could he look at them without remembering? Wanting? Longing?
“Sorry,” Krissy said. “I had to bring Chance. He won’t leave me since I left him at Boy’s Den. He has anxiety now, every time I go out the door.”
Perfectly understandable, Jonas thought.
“What do you want?” he asked hoarsely.
“This came in the mail,” she said.
She handed him a piece of paper, and he unfolded it, frowned at it. So much easier to study it than to look at her.
It was their certificate of marriage.
“Yeah,” he said gruffly, handing her back the piece of paper without looking at her, “about that. What do you want to do? Annul it?”
“Hmm, I think you can only annul an unconsummated marriage,” she said mildly.
She was going to bring that up? He dared a look at her. Memories of being with her in that way stormed him.
“Well, what do you want to do, then?” he managed to ask her.
“I want to give it a try,” she said.
He stared at her.
“If you want to.”
Want to? He wanted to throw himself at her feet and scream yes. He wanted to pick her up and swing her in circles until they were both dizzy from it.
But what if it didn’t work out? What if all those scenarios he had played out in his mind over the last few days came to fruition? He would be a destroyed man.
Though, truth to tell, he was nearly a destroyed man now.
“Why?” he asked her.
Her words were so simple.
“Because I love you. Madly. Unreasonably. It feels like the air is gone from my world. The color. The reason.”
But that was how he was feeling.
“I know you’re scared, Jonas.”
He wanted to deny he was scared, but when he looked at her, she was the one who would always know all of him.
And who would accept it. Maybe even cherish that which he tried to hide from the rest of the world.
“I am, too,” she said. “Terrified. Both of us have been so wounded by love. In very different ways, but it still makes it hard to say yes to it. I think that’s why I was so quick to reach the wrong conclusion when I overheard you talking to Mike on Sunday morning.”
“What?”
“He was congratulating you on the lengths you’d gone to to get your car back.”
“It stopped being about the car a long, long time ago.”
“I know that,” she said softly. “I needed it to be about the car. Because I had to run. I was so afraid, Jonas.”
“Of me?” he asked, appalled.
“No, Jonas. Of repeating history. I’m going to have a baby. Our baby.”
He could feel something rising within him, phoenixlike, out of the ashes of his destruction.
He stepped toward her, and then closer.
“A baby?” he said. “Our baby?”
She nodded, and it was all there. Her terror. Her uncertainty.
He put his hands on her shoulders and rested his forehead against hers. The moment he touched her, his strength began to flow back into him. She was Samson’s hair and Arthur’s sword.
“I was born for this,” he told her softly.
“To be a daddy?” she asked.
“Maybe that, too, but no. I was born to take that fear from you, and that uncertainty. I was born to show you a world that can be trusted. I was born to show you what love can do, and what it can make and how incredible the world can be because of it.”
She was crying now. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight.
“Jonas?”
“Yes, my love?”
“You really stink.”
And just like that, they were laughing. And the dog was barking, and the world and the future stretched out in front of them, illuminated.
Illuminated by the one light that had illuminated the world forever. Sometimes it flickered, sometimes it was hard to see. Sometimes tumult and the unexpected and uncertainty threatened it.
And yet it always fluttered back to life, it always gained strength, it always proved itself more powerful than any darkness.
There it was, shining.
A beacon for all to follow.
Love.
EPILOGUE
“ARE YOU SURE?” Jonas asked Krissy.
“About?”
“Leaving her with the boys.”
“Jonas! We are not leaving Jane with the boys. We’re leaving her with your sister. I think she can be trusted with a baby.”
Jane-Paulette was named after Krissy’s aunt Jane, of course, and after Jonas’s mother. She was nearly four months old.
And so tiny. And so perfect. Jonas had never felt anything like what he felt the first time he had held that baby. Protective. Besotted. Enchanted. And you would think that feeling would go away—the newness would rub off the awe—but no, it
deepened.
“You told me you were going to take away my fear and uncertainty,” Krissy reminded him. “You told me you were going to teach me the world can be trusted.”
“And haven’t I?” he demanded.
“Oh, yeah, you have. But honestly, Jonas, when it comes to the baby, I have to teach you all those things.”
“She’s little! Simon and Gar are rambunctious. You can’t be too careful.”
“You can, actually, be too careful. If she’s survived Chance, the probability of her surviving our nephews is pretty good.”
The reunion was starting tomorrow. But Jonas and Krissy and Jane and the dog had all arrived early. Because Krissy had announced to him, her eyes shining, that she finally had figured out where to spread her aunt’s ashes.
When she had told him, he’d had his doubts.
“But you said she wanted them spread in the place she loved most. She’s never even been to Boy’s Den.”
Krissy smiled at him tenderly, that smile that could still melt his heart, even as they approached their one-year anniversary.
“What she loved most was love,” she told him. “That’s where she would want to be.”
So Jonas reluctantly surrendered the baby to his sister and followed Krissy down to the rowboat. She had the urn of ashes on her lap.
“Where to?” he asked, gathering up the oars.
“You know,” she said.
And then he did.
They had honeymooned here, last year, after all the vacationers had gone home. And they had taken out the rowboat and found the most beautiful private cove overlooking the lake. It had its own beach and was only visible from the water.
And it had a For Sale sign on it.
They had wandered that piece of property most of the day, deciding where to put the road and where their cabin would go, where they would put the tire swing over the water, where a good place for a sandbox would be.
Now he turned the boat in that direction and rowed through quiet waters.
They came to the cove. Their new house was rising out of the ground, the framing nearly done.
Already, Jonas could feel the long summer days that would unfold here. He could hear children laughing and dogs barking. He could smell campfires burning and marshmallows cooking. He could see Krissy reading on the deck and a little girl with blueberry stains around her mouth. He could see himself and another child carrying a string of fish up from the dock. For one brief, incredible moment, he could see the future.
