My Stubborn Heart

by Becky Wade

  He took a step back, his arms falling to his sides.

  “I thought,” she said, swiping a lock of hair out of her eyes, “you said that we were just friends.”

  “I want to be more than just your friend, Kate.”

  The heater made its familiar clunk and whir as it roused to life. She could smell the subtly masculine scent of his soap.

  “Do you feel the same way about me?” he asked. Doubt clouded his expression.

  She almost laughed. She could hardly deny that she did after the way she’d just kissed him. “Yes. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  But it probably spells disaster for me because I love you. She shrugged helplessly, unable to think of anything suitable to say. Her lips felt swollen from his kisses, and she couldn’t seem to put two coherent thoughts together.

  He reached for her hand. He gazed at it, kissed the inside of her palm, then threaded his fingers through hers and held firmly. His attention returned to her face.

  She simply looked back at him. Silent.

  They stayed that way as the seconds stretched.

  “I have something I have to do,” he finally said.

  She nodded.

  “I’ll be back.”

  “All right.”

  He gave her such a smoldering look of longing that her heart took up its pounding again. Before she could melt into a puddle, he walked away and down the stairs. From below, she heard the kitchen door close behind him, then his car’s engine as he drove away.

  Kate pressed both hands against the bottom half of her face. Oh. Heaven. Above.

  She loved him.

  She couldn’t love him!

  But she did.

  chapter eighteen

  Matt had a ghost to confront. Or, more accurately, a gigantic storage unit full of Beth’s possessions to confront. After leaving Kate he drove straight for the place.

  He’d never visited the storage facility that stored his old life. Not once. He’d arranged for the space over the phone, and he’d had their Manhattan apartment packed and transported by a moving company. Frequently over the years, though, he’d thought about all the things that were sitting in the dark, shut away, and waiting for him. He’d always known that he needed to sort through it all. Until now he’d never had the motivation to face it, so he’d avoided it.

  After kissing Kate—

  He probably shouldn’t have done that. He’d managed to resist kissing her for weeks, and he certainly hadn’t planned to kiss her today. But now that he had . . .

  He couldn’t make himself be sorry.

  A dizzy kind of emotion—happiness?—was still buzzing through him. Man, he was rusty at happiness. It felt light, foreign, addictively good. Even the promise of future pain couldn’t faze him at the moment. Like a junkie shooting cocaine, he knew what he felt for her was bad for him, but he couldn’t make himself stop. If she let him, he’d kiss Kate every chance he got right up until she left.

  He flipped on his blinker and exited the freeway. He’d never in his life felt such power in a kiss.

  In the quiet moments that had followed it, though, the thought of this storage unit had slithered into his head. Of all things, he didn’t want to think about this storage unit when he was with Kate. So here he was.

  He steered his truck through the gates that surrounded the facility. Quickly, he checked the number on the key he’d stopped at home to retrieve. He located his unit and turned off the engine. It looked just like all the others. Brightly painted door. Industrial.

  He exited the truck, wind raking him as he worked his key into the unit’s lock. The clouds hung low, covering the sun and making the day cold and gray. He could hear only the muffled drone of the nearby freeway. As far as he could see, no other person had come out today to check on their belongings, which suited him fine.

  The slotted door rose with a soft whine. Behind it, new-looking cardboard boxes filled the space. Toward the front they’d been stacked on top of one another. Further back, the boxes became larger, and further back still he could make out the shape of furniture, which had been wrapped with some kind of heavy plastic to protect it.

  The moving company had done a tidy job. They’d left a pathway from the front to the rear. Each box had been secured with thick clear packing tape. And everywhere he looked block handwriting in permanent marker told him what the boxes held.

  Resistance struck him with thudding force. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to open any of these boxes and look inside and remember. He only wanted to shut the door, get back in his truck, and drive.

  Tamping down on the instinct, he walked the length of the space and back again, taking it all in. He didn’t know where to begin. There were so many boxes. He stopped near the mouth of the unit and used one of his keys to slit the tape across the top of the nearest box. He lifted the flaps. Inside he saw Beth’s clothes, precisely folded in stacks.

  He remembered these shirts. Could picture her wearing them.

  Grief hit him like a wave crashing. He stood frozen, chin down, memories of her cycling through his brain.

  They don’t smell like her, he thought. He’d have thought they would. But this box and its contents smelled like everything else in the space, like cardboard and dust.

  Without touching so much as a fingertip to even one shirt, he made himself move to the next box. More things from her closet. Scarves, gloves, hats.

  He’d loved her. She’d been a wonderful, wonderful girl.

  He wished for the thousandth time that he’d taken care of her better during the last months of her life. When she’d been diagnosed, he’d sat her down and they’d talked about the possibility of his giving up hockey so that he could be with her full time. He’d known—absolutely known—that stopping was the right thing to do. But when she’d refused to let him quit, when she’d urged him to continue playing, he’d let himself be persuaded. A small part of him had even been secretly relieved, a truth that shamed him to this day.

  He’d brought up quitting a few more times with her over the coming months. Each time she’d grown agitated until she’d finally, earnestly, asked him to stop suggesting it.

  Beth had preferred to deal with cancer by continuing on with life as if everything were normal. She’d been in denial, and he’d been in denial right along with her. It was only during that final month that it had really sunk in for him that she might not beat it. Dazed, he’d lived each day just going through the motions, and then—before he could grasp her to him tightly enough—she’d died.

  He couldn’t forgive himself for playing through her illness. For the past three years, guilt had dogged him mercilessly, kept him up at night, made him hate himself for the way he’d treated her. Regret was a bitter thing. Horribly bitter, because he couldn’t go back and change a single thing that he’d done.

  He opened a box that contained her jewelry. Then a box of her jeans.

  He’d been a lousy husband to Beth in life, and he was being a lousy husband to her in death, too, because he was falling hard for someone else. His affections were moving on, when hers never would or could.

  “I want you to go on with your life,” Beth had said to him once, late at night in their bed. She’d turned on the lamp and grabbed his hand and looked at him with urgency. “I want you to find someone, after me. Someone to love you.” Her blue eyes had filled with tears. “Someone you can love. I want you to have a family and to be happy. I need for you to promise me that you will. I can’t face this if I’m having to worry about you every minute.” He’d promised her, but only because it was what she’d wanted to hear. He hadn’t had the slightest hope that he’d ever care about another woman.

  “I’m sorry, Beth,” he whispered into the silence, meaning it with his whole heart, standing there alone in the storage unit. “I’m sorry.” The sorrow went deeper than tears. He’d never been able to cry, though he’d often wished he could.

  Beth hadn’t deserved what happened to her. He looked u
pward. She didn’t deserve this!

  His only consolation had always been that Beth wasn’t in any current pain. Despite his hostility toward God, he believed in heaven and he had no doubt at all that Beth was there.

  Right?

  This time a reply did come. He heard a steady voice deep inside himself speak for the first time in a long time. She’s with me now, it assured him. I’ve got her.

  Amazingly, tears did come to him then, blurring his vision. “Good,” he managed to say. “Good, then.”

  He locked his jaw and moved on, opening one box after another after another, cutting through all the items that belonged to his old life, to his dead wife. There was no running away anymore from what had happened to Beth and to him, no matter how fast his car.

  He’d gone about a quarter of the way through the unit when he opened a box that contained some of his hockey memorabilia. Trophies, certificates, framed photos, jerseys. A sense of loss stung him, a fresh sadness layered on top of all the other sadnesses of this place.

  Faced with the proof of his past accomplishments, he realized that he couldn’t go on with this chore. Or maybe it wasn’t that he couldn’t. It was that he realized there was no point. He wasn’t going to bring any of these things home with him. He didn’t want any of them in his new life. Not a single item.

  He dug his smartphone out of his pocket and started to search for local charities. He’d contact one of the agencies Beth had supported. He’d tell them they could have it all.

  But as the first screen of results appeared, he reconsidered. Some of these boxes contained picture albums, childhood keepsakes, wedding china, and all kinds of other things that Beth’s parents, or his own parents, might want. Before he gave it away, he needed to offer it to them.

  He called his mom. He lucked out when she didn’t answer and he was able to simply leave a message. Then he scrolled through his phone’s contact list and found Beth’s parents’ number. He’d seldom spoken to them since Beth’s death, but he got them on the line, explained the situation, and heard himself say that he’d fly down tomorrow and bring whatever they wanted with him. Beth’s mother knew exactly which things she wanted and exactly the things Beth’s siblings wanted, as if she’d made a mental list long ago and had only been waiting for him to ask.

  Once he got off the phone with Beth’s parents, he dialed the airlines and booked a trip to Georgia.

  Lastly, he called Kate. She sounded like light to him. Just the tone of her voice eased him. He tried to tell her what he’d been doing and why he’d be gone tomorrow, but he knew he was screwing it up. “I need to take some of Beth’s stuff . . . the stuff that her parents want to keep, down to them in Atlanta, and then I can get this storage area cleaned out.”

  She didn’t ask him why he’d raced away from her to visit a storage unit and open boxes of his dead wife’s stuff. In a way, Kate already seemed to know why he’d done it. “Okay,” she said, and by the tone of her voice, he could tell it really was.

  “Maybe I should talk to Beverly,” he said, “and ask her for the day off.”

  “No, I’ll talk to her. Listen, it’s fine. Take as much time as you need. The work will still be waiting when you get back.”

  “I’ll just be gone tomorrow. I fly down in the morning and back tomorrow night.” He didn’t say that he couldn’t stand to be away from her for more than a day. “So I’ll see you Thursday.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I’ll miss you.” It slipped out before he could stop it.

  A split second of quiet, then, “I’ll miss you, too.”

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Safe travels.”

  Beth had inherited her mother’s beautiful blond looks and her father’s soft and sentimental personality. Matt could remember the two of them talking about it, Beth chuckling over the way the genetics had filtered down. Looking across the coffee table at her parents now, Matt could easily see the evidence of it again. Looks from Mom. Personality straight from Dad.

  The three of them sat in Beth’s parents’ classy living room, in their big classy house with the white columns, in their classy Atlanta neighborhood. Beth’s mother, Anne, had a slim frame, stylishly cut short hair, and almond-shaped blue eyes. Her father looked exactly like what he was—a southern gentleman and a successful businessman half retired now so that he could play golf three times a week.

  When Matt had spared a thought for them in the past few years, he’d always pictured them the way he’d last seen them the week of Beth’s funeral—pale and devastated.

  But they weren’t that way anymore. They looked tan and healthy. They showed him pictures of the five grandchildren Beth’s brother and sister had now given them. They talked about their vacation home in Costa Rica and their upcoming trip to Switzerland in the spring.

  They brought up memories of Beth easily, as if they were used to talking about her. They went back over childhood stories about her he’d heard before. They talked about the pageants, Matt and Beth’s wedding, and holidays he’d spent with their family. They reminisced about all her best qualities. And they reminisced about her weaknesses, too. How she’d burst into tears sometimes when she got too stressed. Her outright terror of flying on airplanes. Her anxiety over her weight even though her weight had always been perfect. It made Matt feel uncomfortable, but her parents smiled over those traits just as fondly as all the others.

  Matt had never known Beth’s father not to choke up with emotion at a family gathering, and their visit turned out to be no exception. Talking about Beth caused his eyes to fill with tears a few times, and he got emotional all over again when Matt stood up to leave. He embraced Matt in a bear hug. “We visit New York about once a year. Would it be all right if we made a side trip to Pennsylvania to see you next time?”

  “Sure,” Matt said. The two men shook hands and then Anne walked him out to his rental car.

  “Thank you,” she said, “for making the effort to bring Beth’s things to us.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  They stopped on the lawn next to the car. She wrapped her long light-blue sweater tight around herself and studied him.

  “She was a great person,” Matt said. He’d been wanting all day to say that to her, at least.

  “And you were a great husband to her.”

  He winced a little. Right away, he could tell that she’d noticed his reaction. Unlike her husband, Anne had a very practical, steely, commonsense kind of personality and could be as observant as a hawk.

  “You were,” she insisted, her gaze unflinching. “You made her extremely happy. No one else could have made her as happy as you did, and we’ll always be grateful to you for it.”

  “No, I—”

  “Never doubt that you were a wonderful, wonderful husband to her, Matt.”

  He regarded her painfully.

  “It’s certainly none of my business,” Anne said, “but have you by any chance . . . found someone?”

  “There is,” he said slowly, “someone.”

  “Good.” She reached out and briefly squeezed his shoulder. “Good. I’ve been concerned about you. Beth told me more than once that she wanted you to move on someday. I’m sure she told you, too.”

  “She did.”

  “Well. Maybe it’s up to you now to accept that she meant what she said, to give her that much credit, and to respect her wishes.” She watched his face. “She didn’t want you to go through life lonely, Matt. She was much too softhearted, and she loved you too much to ever want that. Let go of the guilt. You understand me?”

  He didn’t know what to say, so he nodded.

  She hugged him, then gestured toward the rental car. “Go on now. It’s chilly out here.”

  He got in the car and reversed down their driveway. The visit had been rough on him, but not as rough as he’d thought it would be. He’d done the right thing, and found satisfaction in that.

  His last image of Beth’s childhood house was of her mother, who looked
so much like her, standing in front of it and waving good-bye as he drove out of sight.

  “Cream or sugar?” Gran asked Kate and Theresa, motioning to the little china bowl and pitcher she used whenever she served high tea.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Theresa answered, helping herself to both and to two snickerdoodles.

  Ah, Kate thought, looking at the fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies and the steaming cup of tea. When they left Chapel Bluff, she was really, seriously going to miss the food. She’d actually put on a little bit of weight here, which she almost never did, and it might be her imagination but her boobs seemed incrementally bigger because of it. How depressing it was going to be to return to Dallas, frozen food, a life without Matt, and smaller boobs.

  “I’ve been waiting to get you both sitting down,” Theresa said. “Now that you are, I think the moment’s suitably dramatic.”

  “Especially since we’re all wearing hats as big as punch bowls,” Kate said.

  Theresa laughed and pulled a folder from her bag. “Ta da!” She presented it to them as if on a silver platter. “The official appraisal report for the contents of Chapel Bluff.”

  “Theresa!” Gran exclaimed. “Oh, how wonderful.” She took the folder and began eagerly thumbing through it with hands so weighted down by two enormous turquoise rings it was a wonder she had any dexterity in them at all.

  “So you really did finish it.” Kate grinned at her friend.

  “It’s a miracle. Between PTA meetings, indoor soccer practices, The Plaid Attic, and trying to take care of my two wayward children, I actually, finally, did it. I’m surprised at myself.”

  “I’m not a bit surprised,” Gran answered. “I knew you were the right person for the job.”

  “Me too,” Kate said.

  “Well,” Theresa replied, her corkscrew yellow hair puffing out wildly from under the brim of her hat, “I guess I was the only doubter, then.”