by Susan Wiggs
Julian tried not to be too obvious about watching Daisy, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She appeared to be having the same problem because their gazes kept meeting, glancing away, meeting again.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said.
“Feels like I’ve been away forever,” he said, “down a rabbit hole somewhere while the world went on without me. I know for sure they didn’t have cherry pie where I was.”
“The pie is from the Sky River Bakery,” Zoe said.
“No wonder it’s so good.”
“Where were you, Julian?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah, where were you?” Zoe echoed.
“Far away in a place called Colombia. I was lost for a long time, but now I’m back.”
The situation felt almost mundane. It seemed both normal and strange to Julian, sitting around the kitchen table, eating pie. He kept feeling Daisy’s attention like a physical touch. It both bothered and excited him. Married, he kept telling himself. The girl is married. Some lines were not to be crossed.
He got up to take the dishes away, and Daisy jumped up to help.
“How about a game of war?” Olivia asked, naming a favorite card game.
“Yeah!” Charlie said, punching the air. “You be on my team, Dad.”
“You betcha,” said Logan.
“I’ll get the cards,” Olivia said.
“Let’s go outside,” Daisy murmured to Julian. “Okay?”
He didn’t say a word but headed out to the back porch. Olivia and Connor had a beautiful place. They had designed the house to fit into the landscape beside the river that rushed down from the hills to the lake. The back porch faced an upward slope with meadows and sugar maples, bisected by a cold spring. Julian used to spend hours imagining his life with Daisy, and it had looked a lot like this. It was fully dark, though the moon was so bright that the trees cast shadows across the lawn.
“I told Logan I would need some time with you. He understands.”
No, he doesn’t, thought Julian, but he didn’t say so aloud. What he wants is for me to still be dead. And I don’t blame the guy. Nobody in his right mind would want his wife’s dead fiancé back in the picture.
Daisy stood with her back to the porch railing. “You’re a miracle,” she said. “A miracle man.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that. Too much of a reputation to live up to. Like, what would I do for an encore, walk on water?”
“Don’t do anything,” she said. “Just be safe.”
“I’m safe now.”
She nodded, inhaled shakily. He could sense she was teetering on the brink of tears again. He still knew her well enough to tell.
“Don’t go crying on me now,” he warned, gripping the porch rail to stop himself from touching her.
“I’m trying not to,” she said. “Lord knows, I’ve cried a river for you, Julian Gastineaux.”
“Until I found my way back to Palanquero Air Base last Thursday, I didn’t know what you’d been told. I had no idea the chopper went down. I feel bad that you had to go through thinking I’d died with the rest of the crew.”
He tried to imagine what it might be like, getting the news that the love of your life, the person you’d planned on marrying, was dead.
“I’m sorry about the crew,” she said. “Were you close?”
“Like brothers.” There was so much more he wished he could tell her, but he held back. He wasn’t at liberty to share his heart with her, not now.
“I’m so sorry, Julian. It’s horrible. Just know…you’ll heal. You’ll never be the same, but you’ll heal.”
“That’s the plan,” he said quietly. “How about yourself? How are you?”
“No one could make it less horrible, but everyone was really kind and thoughtful to me,” she said.
And was Logan kind and thoughtful? Julian wondered. How long did he wait before making his move?
“I loved you so much,” she whispered. “And that didn’t simply stop when they told me you’d been killed. I came to believe that love never dies. I’ll always have you in my heart, no matter what else happens. That’s what finally led me out of the fog. For Charlie’s sake, for my own sanity, I had to quit grieving and start living my life.”
“I know that, Daisy. I do. I respect it. And now I need you to listen, because I’m only going to say this once. You have to understand, all this time, I loved you more every single day. Most days, the thought of seeing you again was the one thing that kept me alive. I survived because you gave me something to come home to.”
She gasped softly, her face showing a terrible mixture of hopelessness and joy. “I understand. But while you were doing that, I was grieving. And it was hell for me. Finally I had to put myself together. I buried you, Julian. There was nothing else I could do.”
He winced and wished he didn’t hear the hurt in her voice. Before he’d left, they had talked about it. They’d had the hard conversation every soldier was required to hold with his loved ones before deployment. He’d told her to live her life, find joy and love. He’d written her that letter, to be delivered in the event of his death, urging her to move on. Yet it had all been so theoretical, abstract, something he couldn’t imagine actually coming to pass.
“I can’t take back a decision I made when I believed you were gone forever,” she said in a voice thick with tears.
“True,” he conceded. “I’d never ask you to.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, the words seeming wrenched from her. “I’m so sorry. From the first time I met you, all I ever wanted was to be with you. And yet I kept screwing things up. I got pregnant and my life did a one-eighty away from you. We went down different paths. And then, when it finally looked as if we were going to get it right, I lost you again.”
“There’s nothing I can say to that. We both did what we did. Nobody’s at fault here.”
“I want to know what happened to you,” she said. “That is, if you can talk about it. I mean, if you want to…”
“It’s a long story. Grim in parts.” He said no more but wished he could.
“I’m a good listener,” she prompted. “You know I am.”
“I do know. But it’s not going to happen.”
“What do you mean? I can handle it, Julian.” Something—irritation?—edged her voice. “If I can survive the news of your death, I can probably deal with the story of your survival.”
“No doubt,” he said, trying to find a way to explain himself. “Listen, when you were going to be my wife, I would have felt okay, burdening you with my shit.”
“I wouldn’t be burdened.”
“Just hear me out, okay? We don’t have each other anymore. Now that you’re…” He didn’t know what she was. His ex? His former widow? “Now that everything’s changed, we can’t be having conversations like that. Or even ones like this.”
She swiped the back of her hand across her cheek. With every cell of his body, he wanted to draw her close, to whisper that everything was going to be okay. He couldn’t. He had no guarantee that anything was going to be okay.
They stood quietly together in the dark. He could see the others through the window. They were gathered around the kitchen table, laughing over their game of cards. Logan and his son looked so alike, grinning at each other.
Daisy had made a family for herself. He didn’t blame her, didn’t begrudge her the happiness she had found. He wished it didn’t hurt so damn much. What hurt most of all was that, when he looked into her eyes, he could see something he probably shouldn’t be seeing—love and longing, every bit as powerful as it had been the day he’d left her.
Thirty
Logan was alone in the house on a Saturday, a rare state of affairs. Daisy had a bat mitzvah to shoot in Phoenicia and would be staying there overnight rather than driving home in the wee hours. Charlie had gone on a campout with his Tiger Cubs troop. For the first time in a long time, Logan was by himself.
He kind of liked it.
&
nbsp; Sure, he had wanted to be a family with Charlie and Daisy, but the one thing he hadn’t quite been prepared for was how…constant it was, having them around. Unrelenting. He was on call 24/7, no breaks allowed. Although he knew it was his destiny to be a family man, he didn’t mind a day of downtime.
It didn’t take long for him to realize downtime had a downside—he started thinking too much. Feeling restless, he did a bit of yard work, mainly to stay busy.
“Hey, neighbor. How’s life treating you?” The guy next door, who had recently moved to the neighborhood, greeted him across the fence.
“Sending me too many weeds. How about yourself, Bart? You settling into your new place?”
“Yeah, it’s great here. The wife ditched me for the weekend, though. She went antique-hunting with her ladies’ club.” He grinned. “Women seem to have a club for everything.”
Logan chuckled, easing into camaraderie with his new neighbor. Bart and Sally Jericho seemed to be a fun, cheerful pair who wanted to make friends with Logan and Daisy.
“Hey, I’ve been ditched, too,” Logan said. “Daisy had a work thing, and my kid is on a campout.”
“And look at us, a couple of chumps doing yard work. We ought to be kicking back on the patio, guzzling cold ones and telling dirty jokes.”
Logan had an instant visceral reaction to the idea of guzzling a cold one. The craving still took hold like a seductive mistress. With no effort at all, he could hear the click and airy hiss of the bottle opening, could feel the cold bubbles alive and dancing on his tongue, slipping down his throat and spreading sweet oblivion to every cell in his body.
“No rest for the wicked,” he said to Bart with a laugh, and turned on his weed whacker.
Logan’s folks were still amazed that he did things like yard work and household chores. He’d been raised differently, by people who mixed a shaker of martinis and called a contractor just to change a lightbulb.
Logan had made a different life for himself. His family didn’t understand why he’d want to settle in a small town and set himself up in business. Sometimes even he didn’t understand it. After he’d graduated from college and moved to Avalon, he had been focused on being a good dad. He thought that meant marrying Charlie’s mother. Not long after the impulse-driven move he’d made in Vegas, he’d found himself reexamining that decision. Even before the miraculous resurrection of Julian Gastineaux, Logan had realized something was missing for him and Daisy. He hadn’t expected this feeling of ambivalence. As far as he could tell, neither had she.
They both acted as though everything was all right, but the distance between them kept widening. The strain was starting to wear on him.
He heaved a sigh and went to shower off the sweat and grass clippings of yard work. Afterward, he sat down at the computer to check his email. The computer was a Mac, with all the bells and whistles Daisy needed for her photography work. Logan found it to be a pain in the ass. He should have brought his laptop home from the office.
His email queue was short. He dispatched the work stuff, feeling a small tug of satisfaction as he dealt with clients. Business, for him, was a simple matter. Marriage, not so much.
There was a note from his mother—“How was Charlie’s soccer game? When are you going to bring him to see us? Montauk is so beautiful this time of year…”
Montauk. The place where Charlie had been conceived by a pair of reckless teenagers on a weekend of drunken revelry.
He hit Reply and opened a picture file to insert an action shot of Charlie playing soccer. One great thing about Daisy being a world-class photographer was that she documented Charlie’s life superbly. He found a picture of the kid leaping into the air after a soccer ball and sent it to his mother.
Daisy was totally organized with her photos, labeling them with dates, names and events. Logan scrolled through the Charlie file, a pictorial chronicle of his son’s life. The shots of the two of them together made Logan smile. Through the years he’d been a good dad. He was confident of that. He felt sure of himself in this role.
He spotted another file labeled Julian. Still hanging around like a virus on the hard drive. Some propensity for self-torture made Logan look. There was Gastineaux in all his glory, from a dreadlocked punk to the day he’d left on his save-the-world mission. Logan forced himself to look past the obvious—the guy was cut like a bodybuilding ad—and imagine Daisy’s state of mind when she took the photos. A good photographer could speak her heart through the pictures she took. And Daisy was a good photographer. What Logan detected in these pictures was a kind of passion unique to this guy, a passion that didn’t exist for anyone else.
Not even her own husband.
“Yo, neighbor. You in there?” Bart Jericho called through the screen door at the back porch. He’d cleaned himself up, changed into a loud Hawaiian print shirt.
“Come on in,” Logan called, shutting down the computer and pushing back from the desk.
Bart looked around the big, sunny kitchen, with its archway open to the dining room, living room and study. “Nice place,” he said.
“Thanks. We remodeled the shit out of it.”
“It’s a stunner. Nothing like an old house.”
“Thanks.” Logan and Daisy had both thrown themselves into sprucing up the place. Now the house looked exactly like the illusion their new neighbor was seeing—a beautiful home. The kind of place that sheltered a happy family.
“Say, listen, I had a great idea. Since we’re both wifeless for the afternoon, let’s go grab some burgers.”
Logan had planned on hitting the gym and then an AA meeting, but suddenly a burger with his new buddy sounded more appealing. “Cool. Did you have someplace in mind?”
“That’s the other part of my great idea,” said Bart. “Our membership at the country club was just approved, and new members are entitled to a special discount. So it’s my treat.”
Logan grinned, thinking about a juicy burger. “Even better.”
The Avalon Meadows Country Club was old-school, with a gated entry and a broad avenue sweeping up to the grand Edwardian-style clubhouse. Lush lawns and tennis courts, a swimming pool and golf course surrounded the place. The moment they drove onto the premises, Logan felt a warm pulse of familiarity. This was a world he knew. The Bellamys were longtime members here, but Daisy never wanted to come. She claimed she shot so many weddings here, it felt like a place of work rather than relaxation.
Not Logan. He appreciated the quiet elegance of the clubhouse, with its view of golfers and their caddies hiking in and out of the afternoon shadows. Even the sounds were familiar and soothing—the thwock of tennis ball volleys and the laughter of children splashing in the pool, the smooth, discreet waiters with trays of drinks, the murmur of conversation and occasional bursts of laughter, the clink of ice cubes against fine crystal. The whole scene on the sunny deck took him back to simpler times when he was a kid, and everything in the world was a possibility.
“This is the life, eh?” said Bart, settling back in a deck chair and surveying the scene.
Logan nodded. A burst of little-girl squeals came from the pool area below. One of them appeared to be having a birthday party down there.
Bart studied the tent card on the table. “Hey, there’s a drink called the Bellamy Hammer, didja know that? Isn’t your wife a Bellamy?”
“Yep, that’s right.”
“Any relation to the Bellamy Hammer?” asked Bart with a chuckle.
“Some days I think she is the Bellamy Hammer.” It just slipped out.
“Oh. Trouble in paradise?”
Logan shrugged. “The drink was named after some old uncle of hers, a geezer named George Bellamy who passed away. Having a drink named after him was one of those do-before-you-die things.” He pushed the tent card away.
The waiter came for their drink order. He presented each of them with a printed card. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Today’s drink special is a rare single barrel bourbon. Highly recommended.”
&n
bsp; “I can’t say I know exactly what that is,” said Bart, “but count me in.”
“I know exactly what it is,” Logan began, “however—”
“Then count my buddy in, too,” Bart said expansively. “Make them doubles, too. It’ll save you a trip.”
Logan took a breath. Opened his mouth to retract the order, but the waiter was quicker, heading off to the bar. Within moments, he’d returned with the drinks. The amber liquid looked beautiful in the sparkling crystal highball glasses. A silver bucket of ice and a carafe of water were set in the middle of the table.
Logan was flooded with longing. The daily battle that was his recovery was forgotten, entirely. Nothing existed except that perfect, beautiful glass of whiskey. Vaguely, he became aware of the guy across the table—his new friend, who didn’t know Logan was damaged, one drink away from spinning out of control.
Bullshit, he thought, picking up the heavy cut-crystal glass. It was all bullshit. He wasn’t a stupid kid anymore. He could have this one drink with Bart, and that would be the end of it.
“Cheers, neighbor,” said Bart, clinking glasses with him. “Down the hatch.”
The gorgeous, piney scent of the fine bourbon wafted on the country-club breeze, nearly bringing tears to Logan’s eyes. On the pool deck, childish shrieks of excitement filled the air, mingling with grown-up laughter and conversation. He touched the glass to his bottom lip. Then, with a casual tip of his wrist, he took his first, glorious sip.
As the fire raced through him, he felt a dark, defiant glee.
Julian wasn’t quite sure what to get his four-year-old niece for her birthday, and he was running late for her party at the country club, so he got her one of everything. Okay, that was overstating it. A local toy store, Queen Guinevere’s Castle, was crammed floor to ceiling with stuff. He found a corner where everything was pink and filled his arms with everything a little girl would like—a stuffed poodle, a magic wand, a talking mirror, a pop-up book of princesses…
“Whoa, slow down there,” said an amused voice. “You’re not much for browsing, are you?”