Disdain had crept into his voice. Bree hadn’t heard that in a while. “What happened after that?” she asked.
“I got the A’s. I got most everything I wanted without making resolutions, so I stopped.” He shot her a look. “I was arrogant as hell.”
“Was,” she echoed, satisfied to hear the past tense at last. She raised his hand and ran her mouth over the scar that had healed to a thin ridge. “So do you believe in them?”
He thought about it. “I do. They imply a willingness to grow.”
“So what are yours?”
He shot her another look. “You first.”
“I asked you.”
“I’m driving. I can’t concentrate. You can. What are your New Year’s resolutions?”
“Just one,” she said. “To live life to the fullest.”
She watched for his reaction. It was a small, pensive smile. “I like that.”
“And yours?”
He turned onto West Elm and cruised over the snow-crusted road to the shingle-sided bungalow. Ice crunched under the truck’s tires on the drive. He pulled up under the carport.
“Tom?”
“I’m thinking.”
Bree felt a touch of unease. It was not that she didn’t want him to think, just that something that was taking so long had to be heavy. She didn’t have to be a genius to know that it was related to the future. New Year’s resolutions always were.
Tom reached for the door handle. Bree reached for his arm.
He stared at the steering wheel, his lower teeth clenching his upper lip, then sighed. “My New Year’s resolution is to figure out my life.”
She caught her breath. He caught her hand.
“That came out wrong,” he said. “I don’t need to figure out you and me. It’s the rest that’s murky. I need to decide what’s fitting in where.”
It had been only a matter of time, Bree knew. Living in the here and now couldn’t last forever. But it had been nice. She had been able to accept diamond earrings from Tom as a simple gift of love, had been able to live day to day without any expectation beyond seeing him after work. She had been perfectly content, more than content, living for the moment. Doing that, she had been free of disappointment.
Now, suddenly, she was afraid. For the first time in weeks, she wondered if Tom would leave town.
He opened the truck’s door, drew her across the seat and out after him, and threw an arm around her shoulders as they walked into the house. They dropped their jackets in the kitchen.
Bree followed him into the family room and watched while he started a fire. When the kindling caught and the flames spread, she turned to the bookshelves lining the walls. Her gaze went straight to the books Tom had written. They were six in a row in an unobtrusive spot, off to the side and higher than eye level, and should have been lost among hundreds of other books. But they weren’t. From the day he had put them there, she had been acutely aware of their presence.
“Do you want to write?” she asked.
He was hunkered down, stoking the flames with his back to her. “I don’t know. I’ve been rereading what I’ve already written. The early ones aren’t bad.”
She folded her arms around her middle. “Do you have new ideas?”
“At first I didn’t. But that’s changed. Right now, ideas are the easy part. If I pick up a newspaper, I get ideas.”
“What’s the hard part? The writing?”
“No. Writing was never a problem for me.”
“So what’s the hard part?”
“What comes after.”
Ahh. His nemesis. “Fame.”
He dusted his palms on his jeans and pushed himself to his feet. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he looked at her. “I’m not sure I can trust myself to handle it well.”
“Kind of like an alcoholic in a room with a bottle?”
“Kind of like that, and anyway, I don’t know if I want to write. I know I can. I just don’t know if I want to.”
“How do you decide?”
He scratched his head. “Beats me.” He left his hand on his head. “You want to live life to the fullest. Well, so do I. There are times when I feel like I’m already doing that. I’d say nine-tenths of my life is that way, that happy. Then there’s the one-tenth that says my father was right. I have skills that I’m wasting.” He crossed to where she stood and hung his arms over her shoulders. “The thing is, I can’t sit around here each day while you go to work. It isn’t right.”
“I don’t mind,” Bree insisted, afraid, so afraid. “I like working at the diner. Besides, I don’t need fancy things. You could have given me beach stones instead of diamonds, and I’d have loved them just as well. If it’s a matter of money—”
“It isn’t. It’s the principle of the thing.”
A man of principle was one to admire, she reasoned, though it did little to ease her fear. What eased her fear was thinking of the being of light, which loved her and wouldn’t let anything bad happen. And then there were her three wishes. If they were real, she would use one of those in a heartbeat to keep Tom.
Two weeks into January, Tom went to New York. He had made a lunch date with his agent and a dinner date with the lawyers with whom he had once practiced. Bree saw the sense in it. She knew that he needed to mend fences before he could decide if he liked what was inside. That didn’t mean she wasn’t jittery from the moment she learned he was going.
Tom insisted that she drive the truck while he was gone. “I don’t trust your old car,” he said, which annoyed her no end.
“Then let me buy a new one. You keep talking me out of it.”
“You don’t need a new one. You have the truck.”
“It’s your truck,” she said. “I want my truck.” She hated thinking that way. But wasn’t he going to his New York, while she stayed behind in her Vermont? Weren’t they from different worlds, after all? And hadn’t she done just fine for herself before he came along? She resented the idea that she had become suddenly dependent, resented the idea that she had given so much of herself to a man who might, just might, throw it back in her face. “I can negotiate a deal on a car. I’ve done it before.”
“Wait,” he begged. “We’ll go together when I get back.”
Thinking of his return began to make her feel better.
Seeing him dressed in a suit, ready to leave, didn’t. She stared at him for so long that he looked down at himself. He touched his tie, brushed his lapels, checked his fly.
Then he looked back at her and read her thoughts. “Weird, huh? I’m a stranger to me, too.”
From the neck up he was fine. His hair was neatly combed, though longer, she wagered, than it had ever been when he had worn this suit. Add that to the slim line of the scar on his cheekbone, and he was the man she knew and loved. From the collar down was the problem.
“You look stuffy,” she said, when what she was really thinking was that between that longer-than-lawyerly hair, the prominent scar, the suit and the stunning body beneath it and everything about his face, from his eyes to his straight nose to his squared chin, he would stop traffic, which meant that God only knew what possibilities lay open to him in New York, but in any case he would never come back.
“Two days, Bree. That’s all.”
She wanted to believe it, but there were so many possible glitches. “What if something’s too good to resist?”
“Nothing will be. I just need to talk through some things. I need to see what’s there and what isn’t.”
“There’ll be women.”
“I won’t be looking at women.”
“They’ll be looking at you.”
Suit and all, he gave her a bear hug. “I love you. I’m immune.”
She grunted against his designer lapel. “That’s what they all say. I’m going to wish for you to return.”
“Bree.” He held her back. “Don’t. That’d be a total waste. I’ll be back day after tomorrow. My tickets say it. I say it.”
Bree
took a deep breath and pictured the being of light. It was real. The mole on the back of Simon Meade’s neck proved it. The being of light wouldn’t let her lose Tom. Would it?
Worst case, there were still those wishes.
Afterward she would blame it on loneliness, frustration, and simply thinking about the wishes once too often. At the time, all she knew was that she had woken in her own ancient house without Tom, and she was cold.
Scrambling out from under the quilt, she pushed icy feet into slippers and trembling arms into her robe. Pulling the belt tight, she glanced at the clock on her way to the door. It was six in the morning. She hadn’t slept well. She missed Tom, missed his bed, missed his warmth.
The house was dark, but her feet knew it well. They plodded with due speed and much annoyance down the stairs to the first floor, then through the kitchen and down a narrower flight to the basement, which was framed in stubbly cement and colder than cold. The furnace was at the far end. She pulled the fight chain there, shivered, and scowled.
She jiggled one knob, then another. She made sure the pilot light was on. She checked to see that the dampers were open. She turned a dial and gave the furnace a shove. When nothing happened, she shoved it again. Her breath came out white when she swore.
Tom had warned her. Flash had warned her. She hadn’t listened. She didn’t want to listen even now, because the last thing she wanted to do was to pour money into this house. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be with Tom. But Tom was living it up in New York, having all kinds of fun with his friends, maybe even making plans to return there and wondering how to break the news to her.
She needed a miracle, was what she needed. Right here. Right now.
Feeling desperate and cross enough to be brash, she squeezed her eyes shut, laced her fingers together with her knuckles by her chin, and dared the being of light to put up or shut up. “I . . . wish . . . for . . . heat.” Picturing that being, she said it again, louder this time, to make sure it heard. “I . . . wish . . . for . . . heat.”
Opening her eyes, she tucked her hands under her arms, glared at the furnace, and waited for it to turn on.
It didn’t
She rocked back on her heels, tucked her hands in tighter, and waited longer.
Nothing.
Turning on her cold-enough-to-be-nearly-numb heel, she stomped back upstairs and lit the woodstove in the kitchen. By the time it was radiating warmth, she was wrapped in a quilt in a chair inches away, brooding over a mug of hot tea, telling herself that maybe, just maybe, wishes took time.
She arrived at the diner at ten, two hours before she was due to start work. If three layers of sweaters and two of socks hadn’t given her away, her scowl would have.
“Aha,” Flash gloated. “What did I tell you? If you’d listened to me, you’d still be lying in bed, nice and warm. How cold is the house?”
“Cold,” Bree grumbled, though she suspected disappointment was as much behind her mood as the chill in her bones. She had waited at the house for nearly four hours, four hours, and her wish hadn’t come true. Okay, she had money to fix the furnace. A new car could wait. But the thought of having three wishes had been kind of nice.
Flash wrapped her hands around an apricot bran muffin that was fresh from the oven and warm. “Sit and eat. The Wrights will handle the heating, and they won’t charge you an arm and a leg. They’ll be in for lunch. We’ll give them the news then.”
When the Wrights came in at noon, they were the ones with the news. “Can’t eat now,” Ned said. “Just got word on the scanner.” As he spoke, the whine of the town’s fire alarm began to sound from the top of the hill to alert the volunteer force. “There’s a fire over on South Forest.”
Bree had the worst thought. “South Forest?”
“Don’t know whose house.”
She saw Eliot turn into the diner’s lot with his lights flashing and ran to the door. When he climbed from the cruiser looking straight at her, she knew. Grabbing her jacket, she joined him. Horror was shaking her so badly that she didn’t trust herself to drive.
Within minutes, they were at the scene. There wasn’t much she could do but stand and watch. There were no flames shooting through the roof, only thick black smoke, but the flames were on their way. The second floor was fully engulfed, the first floor long gone. She imagined that the basement was nothing but a charred concrete shell.
Feeling helpless, discouraged, and quite personally at fault, she watched while the men she knew—plumbers, carpenters, and electricians transformed into firefighters—directed thick streams of water through the upper windows. Glass shattered. Water was re-aimed. The air was filled with the acrid scent of a burning past.
She didn’t want to think about the damage, about the loss of a history, about memories that would never be the same, but she thought about all those things. She was the last of the Millers. This house was all she had.
“This wasn’t what I meant by heat!” she wailed to no one in particular. “It wasn’t what I meant at all!” Her voice held both upset and accusation. She wanted to blame someone else, something else. But her cry was lost to the awful sound of fire and the thunder of water from yards and yards of canvas hose.
As word spread through Panama, friends arrived to stand with her, but they were small solace for the ravage she witnessed. By the time the flames were out, nearly half the town was there, and she was feeling completely alone.
“You’ll rebuild, Bree.”
“The house will be better than ever.”
“You can stay with us. Our attic room is perfect.”
“Take the room over our garage. It’s yours.”
Her eyes remained on the ruin of her house. She couldn’t seem to drag them away, not even when they filled with tears.
Jane slipped an arm around her. Quietly, she said, “You’ll stay with Tom?”
Bree nodded. She was practically living at his house anyway. That’s where she would have been last night, if he hadn’t been in New York. She wouldn’t have slept at her own house, wouldn’t have woken up lonely and cranky and cold, wouldn’t have dared the being of light to make good on its promise, wouldn’t have forfeited a wish out of spite. There was plenty of heat at Tom’s house. So had her wish come true in some perverted sense?
Many hours later, warm as toast under the down comforter on Tom’s bed, she was no closer to an answer. Her stomach turned each time she pictured the blackened remains of her house. It had taken two showers before the stench of the smoke left her hair, and a bath filled with scented oils before her skin let her forget.
By that time, she was worried again. Tom hadn’t called. He had said that he would, had promised it—his word, not hers. If he hadn’t been able to get through at her house, he would have tried here, unless he was so wrapped up in being back in New York that he forgot. She was scared, so scared.
Sitting up, she hugged her knees to still the shaking inside. Fine. If he gave her up and went back to his life in New York, she would take the insurance money from the house on South Forest and buy this house from him. She had always wanted it. She could live here without him and go back to her own life, which had been just fine before him. Just fine. Yes, it had been. Just fine before Tom.
The digital clock turned. It was midnight He should have long since called.
Grabbing for the phone at the side of the bed, she called information, got the number of his hotel, and, on the second try, pressed all the right buttons. A hotel operator answered. Bree asked for Tom. After a pause came word that he had checked out that afternoon.
She didn’t know what to think or do. In a bid for calm, she tried to recapture the comfort of the being of light. For the first time, she couldn’t. She could picture a great ball of light, but the picture was an intellectual one. She couldn’t feel it. Emotionally, she was detached. And suddenly she was back in the world she had known before that October night, only it didn’t seem as wonderful to her now as it had seemed then. Now it seemed
programmed and parochial. It seemed lonely. It seemed boring. Ironic, but it even seemed barren.
Unable to sit still with those thoughts, wanting to recapture the present, she left the bed and began walking from room to room. That was how she found herself upstairs, looking out over the front yard from the spare bedroom, when a pair of headlights lit the street Her pulse skittered when she saw that the headlights belonged to a taxi, which pulled up in front of the bungalow.
It was Tom, back home a day early. Because New York had been so good that his mind was made up?
Heart pounding, she watched him turn away from the cab and lope up the walk. She ran down the stairs, opened the door just as he reached it, and held back in fear for only as long as it took him to drop his bag. When he reached for her, she was there, holding tight to his neck, clinging in a way she would never have done in her other life but which was the only thing that made sense in this one. It was a long minute before she realized that the shaking wasn’t all coming from her. He was holding her that tightly.
“I went by the house,” he said, in a voice so raw she barely recognized it. “What happened?”
“Fire,” was all she had a chance to say, because anything else would have been lost in his kiss. It was a kiss that tasted of fear and a desperate need for reassurance, as much of it his as hers.
When it ended, he took her face in his hands. “When?” His thumbs brushed at her tears.
“Lunchtime today.” She wormed her arms inside his and touched his face right back, needing to know more, feel more, to prove he was there. “I called your hotel. They said you checked out.”
“I had to get back here. Were you at work when it happened?”
She nodded and burst into tears. “Why didn’t you call?”
“I tried, but your phone just rang.” He pulled her close. “When I tried the diner, the line was busy, and then I was sitting in the airplane on the goddamned runway for three hours while the fuckin’ air traffic control computers were down. Aw, honey, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”
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