“And that’ll get you a great career for sure,” he said sarcastically.
In the tiny kitchen she’d lived in her entire adult life, Caroline poured a cup of coffee into her favorite mug, careful to miss the chipped part of the rim as she took a gulp.
“I’m planning to enroll in college,” she said quietly, trying to control the fear and the doubts clutching at her heart. There was no one else on earth she’d have dared tell. “The semester doesn’t start for another two weeks.”
“You have to apply, Ma.” Jesse’s voice was equally soft. And loving.
“I did.”
“And?”
“I’ve been accepted, Jess.”
This time the silence was almost unbearable. With a shaking hand, Caroline lifted the mug again, took another sip of coffee that had been kept too hot by the old warming plate she’d been using with the old metal pot since high school. And burned her mouth.
She poured the stuff out. She shouldn’t be drinking it, anyway. Not for the next eight months, at least. Although she’d drunk coffee when she’d been pregnant with Jesse.
“Congratulations, Ma.” The pride in Jesse’s voice was her undoing.
“AH, MERI, HERE I AM AGAIN…”
With an embarrassed look, John Strickland slid into the bubbling spa in his professionally landscaped private and walled yard. He leaned back and closed his eyes. It wasn’t late, just dark. He’d had a long day. But his inner vision wasn’t restful. Meri was there, her memory filling his mind. She was dressed in his favorite red gown, diamonds glittering at her throat and wrist, laughing.
And then not.
Now the glittering came from the lights of the fire truck, police cars, the ambulance. Meri was lying inside the ambulance, wearing the red gown. But she wasn’t laughing.
“Breathe,” he said aloud. “Breathe.” He could almost feel her struggle for air.
And then he opened his eyes. As long as he opened his eyes, she’d still be breathing.
“I know I promised we’d quit meeting like this.” His words fell into the not-quite-freezing Shelter Valley January night, becoming part of the air around him, floating aimlessly in space. Just as he was.
“I’m supposed to be at dinner at Will’s,” he told his wife, as he imagined her sitting across from him. “Instead, here I am again, forgoing life to sit and talk to a dead woman.”
A cold breeze wafted over the water. And his face.
“I need a drink.”
He hoped to God his neighbors couldn’t hear him over the bubbling water. Not that there was much chance anyone would be lounging around a backyard in what, for Shelter Valley, was considered a major cold front. Any time you could see your breath, it made the news.
“I’m still traveling more than you liked.” He squinted at the empty space across from him, an idiot who was weak and disappointing himself even as he gave in to the overwhelming need to connect with the woman who’d left his life more than six years before.
He wiped at a trickle of sweat making its way from his forehead down between his eyes.
“Business is good. Finished another signature Strickland design last week.”
The water was hot, but it didn’t warm the blood in his veins. Nothing was going to do that. He’d resigned himself to the truth.
He hadn’t told Meri about the capitol building dedication he’d attended in Kentucky the first week of December. Hadn’t talked to her at all over the holidays, keeping his promise to her—and to himself.
“I’m still working on my own,” he reported aloud. “I have to commission some of the menial stuff, but I’ve been able to hang tough and not give in to the pressure to commercialize the Strickland trademark.”
She’d cautioned him about that often. Said the world would be better off with fewer Strickland buildings if the ones it had were pure Strickland and not some watered-down version.
He currently had a small office in Shelter Valley with draftspeople and clerical staff, and another in Chicago. Most of his work he did out of his home.
“I have two state capitol buildings coming up in the next year. One on the East Coast, one on the West.”
She’d want the details. So, as his butt turned numb, buffeted by jets while he sat on a cement bench, John gave them to her.
His backyard was really quite something. On one side was an arboretum shaded by a couple of olive trees that he’d paid a bundle to have brought in mature. From there, desert landscaping stones led down to a brick divider and then grass lush and green enough to have been on a tournament golf course. The grass led around to the wall in the back, where flowering bougainvillea climbed randomly, covering every available inch. In front of the grass was a negative-edge pool that appeared to be fed by a waterfall from the big boulder that flanked it. Off to the right was a gazebo with wet bar and stools and a gas barbecue. He’d had them put in when he bought the house.
He’d never used them.
“I broke off my engagement.” He’d meant to tell her that right off. But he’d needed some time alone with Meri before he brought another woman between them. Even if it was only to tell her there was no other woman between them.
John took a deep breath, ducked under the water, blew out the breath and came up for air. Pushing the hair off his forehead, he blinked and sat on the other side of the spa. There was still time to get inside, take a quick shower and get over to Will’s before Becca served dinner. He could make some excuse for having missed the appetizer and drinks portion of the evening.
“I’ve tried, Meri.” The pain and hopelessness in his voice scared him. Glancing at the star-filled blackness above him, he searched, as he had countless times, for some sign that he was being heard. That there was meaning to his existence, guidance from something stronger than his weak and pathetic self. “I just don’t know how to live without you.”
Oh, he had his moments. Times when his mind was preoccupied with other things and he actually behaved like a fully functioning, relatively normal human being. But they were only moments.
“I hurt Lauren.”
But not as much as he would’ve hurt her if he’d married her and then remained committed to Meredith.
“You’d have liked her.” John had liked her.
Pressure built in his head. He was getting too hot. He’d move inside. Soon. Get himself a drink. And maybe throw a frozen dinner in the microwave. Though he was relatively skilled in the kitchen, he didn’t feel like cooking. Too much trouble for too little benefit.
“Martha Moore got married.”
She was the first woman John had dated after Meri’s death. He’d had a lot of talks with his wife about that. The day he’d met Martha. Whenever he’d passed her on the street. After the time—the only time—he’d been intimate with her.
And on the night last year, when he’d heard that the young woman who’d been raped in Shelter Valley was Martha’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Ellen.
“Shot a thirty on the back nine today. Not my best, but still under par.”
The spa, operating on an automatic timer, shut off. John got out, cooling off while he walked over to push the button again, then slid back into the dark depths, watching as his body slowly disappeared from sight. He needed a little more time before he rejoined the living.
Even if it was in name only.
He fought the urge to close his eyes and rest. He couldn’t risk picking up the inner vision