“Chase?” she whispered, just before everything went black.
***
Jake lunged for her, but the boy grabbed her first, barely catching her before she hit the floor.
Reaching to take her from him, an inexplicable feeling of dread suddenly overcame Jake, much like he had the day he found the socks.
“Who are you and how do you know Nikki?” he demanded as he carried her into the living room and gently laid her on the couch.
“I was fixing to ask you the same thing, Mister,” he said, his young face stricken. “My name’s Chase Parker and I don’t know any ‘Nikki’. That’s my sister, Selena, and I want to know what’s going on.”
Nikki moaned, startling them both. Chase knelt beside her and took her hand.
“Hey, Selena. What’s happening here?”
Selena.
Jake stared at him uncomprehendingly, watching as she threw her arms around him.
“Chase!” she cried and buried her face in his neck.
“What’s going on? What’s happened to her?” the boy demanded, but Jake was too stunned to speak.
The wheels in his mind were spinning furiously and coming up with lemons. Dazed, he sank into the sofa and stared at Chase. This all felt like a strange dream.
“Look, mister. You need to say something—” Chase sounded very young and very frightened. “Okay, how about this…I’ll tell you what I know, then you can fill in the rest.” He took a deep breath before continuing, still holding Nikki protectively.
“My sister Selena left Alabama back in November to search for her sister. She and I are both adopted. She has a friend who’s a computer whiz, and he did a little hacking. She’s always wanted to find her birth parents and find out whether or not she had any other brothers or sisters. This guy told her she had a sister and somehow he came up with this address. We let her have her time, but Mom started getting worried when she hadn’t heard from Selena. That’s not like her, not to call or anything. So I decided to drive up here, to see if she was okay…” He paused, and said tersely, “Your turn.”
She stared at him over Chase’s shoulder, and Jake’s heart pounded in his ears as realization struck.
She wasn’t Nicole Hawthorne.
***
She felt dizzy, drunk, and the only thing she could ask him was, “Why did you call me MP?”
Chase actually grinned. “That’s my nickname for you, Miss Perfect, MP for short. You’re always running around, cleaning up after me, throwing away my stuff.” His smile faded a little as he said, “Are you saying you don’t remember, Selena?”
“I remember,” she whispered.
She glanced at Jake, who stared back at her in mute horror. The look on his face was more telling than a scream.
Nikki.
Nikki had died in that wreck.
With a strangled cry, Jake propelled himself from the room. She froze, wanting to chase after him, but…
What was there to say?
In a halting voice she barely recognized, she told Chase about the accident, about her amnesia, and all the craziness that had taken place since then. Soon, Chase’s face mirrored the horrified look on Jake’s.
“Oh, God…” he breathed, staring at the doorway Jake had fled through.
“I kept hearing this little voice in my head that said ‘my name is MP’, and I could almost hear your voice.”
“All this time, you both thought you were his wife,” Chase said and Selena nodded tearfully.
She wasn’t Jake’s wife.
All her dreams for the future were gone.
She had no claim on him whatsoever.
***
Jake’s world reeled around him.
Nikki was dead.
The woman that he’d been in there with, the woman he’d planned to marry, was a stranger named Selena. He thought of Sara’s admission that Nikki had called her that morning, angry and demanding to talk to her. Nikki must’ve just found out she was adopted. She had driven to that motel, and had met her identical twin.
Nikki was dead, her charred remains sitting in the county coroner’s office, waiting to be claimed.
His beautiful Nikki was dead, had died thinking he hated her and wanted a divorce.
It was too much for Jake to bear.
He didn’t know where to go, or what to do, so he just ran. He ran and ran until he was exhausted. The cold air stabbing at his lungs was nothing compared to the coldness stabbing at his heart.
***
The next few days passed in a blur for Jake. Identical twins share the same DNA, but have different fingerprints. Selena’s DNA positively identified the remains as Nikki’s, and then an old fingerprint file of Nikki’s proved Selena wasn’t her.
People tried to talk to him, to comfort him, but he was numb. He and Selena largely avoided each other. Neither knew what to say.
Jake would sometimes catch her staring at him with a mixture of compassion and sadness.
He found that it hurt to look at her.
One morning, as he mentally prepared himself for another trip to the funeral home to make sure everything was in place for the service tomorrow, he passed her in the hall and was startled when she grabbed his arm.
When he stopped, she released him abruptly, as if the physical contact between them had burned her. Her gaze met his briefly before she turned away, her eyes filling with tears.
“Jake, we need to talk.”
He nodded, unable to speak for the lump that had risen in his throat at the anguish on her face. Part of him wanted to reach out and hold her, but another part found it impossible to do so.
He pushed open the door to the nearest room, which happened to be the bedroom he had shared first with Nikki, then with Selena. He realized his mistake as soon as he opened the door, when a barrage of memories that threatened to defeat him assaulted him, but it was too late to run. Selena shut the door behind her.
Jake steeled himself for what she had to say, knowing he had no answers to give her right now. She surprised him by pulling off the rings on her left hand and holding them out to him.
“These belonged to her. They should be buried with her.”
Jake turned his back to her as he struggled to contain the sob that rose in his chest. This was too much, too much to bear.
He was blinking back tears when he turned back to her, only to see that she was also removing the eternity band he had given her. She laid them all on top of the dresser.
“That’s yours,” he managed to say.
“No.” Her bottom lip quivered. “It never really was.”
Then she fled the room, leaving him shattered in her wake.
***
The day of the funeral was the worst day of Jake’s life. It was surreal to be standing there burying his wife, when Selena stood beside him, so much like her, staring at him with those haunted green eyes.
He kept berating himself that he should’ve known, a husband should’ve known. She was so very different from Nikki, but he had never considered the possibility that she wasn’t Nikki.
Sara and Doug were heartbroken. They loved the girl they had claimed for their own daughter when she was three days old, even though they hadn’t always been good at showing it. They admitted everything about the adoption, saying they never told Nikki the truth because Sara believed Nikki wouldn’t be able to truly accept them as her parents if she knew the truth. Doug saw no reason to go against her wishes, reasoning that, as long as Nikki had a good home, it wasn’t necessary to upset her life. He hadn’t wanted her to always wonder about her biological parents and why they had given her up for adoption.
The day they laid Nikki to rest was cold and blustery. Eliot tried to persuade Jake to come home after the service, but Jake told him he needed time alone with her. When the last mourner left, Jake watched the men pile the dirt on the shiny silver casket.
He stayed well after they were gone, sinking to his knees near the freshly piled mound, hating the thought of leavi
ng her in this cold, lonely place.
***
The moment he stepped inside the house, he sensed Selena was gone and he ached from the loss of her. Catherine sat alone in his living room. Her eyes were red and swollen.
“Where is she?” Jake asked.
“She’s gone,” Catherine answered softly. An envelope lay in her lap and she handed it to him. “She asked me to give you this.”
Wordlessly, Jake took it and sank into the chair opposite from her. His shoulders slumped in defeat, he began to read.
My dearest Jake,
The decision to go back to Alabama with Chase is the hardest choice that I’ve ever had to make. Please don’t think I wanted to leave you while you’re hurting like this, but I know I’m only making it worse. If I listened to my heart, I would take you in my arms and never let you go. I realize you need time to think, and I don’t want to pressure you. I pray that you’ll find yourself on solid ground soon. I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m jealous of my sister, because I know that, even in death, she possesses the one thing I want most of all, your love. Search your heart, and if you find even a little of me there, hurry back to me.
Love,
Selena
Jake could scarcely see the words on the paper for the tears that stung his eyes.
He was so confused.
She loved him; he was certain of that, but he needed time to sort through his feelings for her. It wouldn’t be fair to her, to use her as a substitute Nikki, if he didn’t love her. He didn’t know what to think, much less what to do.
In the following days, Jake visited the cemetery every day after work, mourning the bold, lovely girl who had told him she was going to marry him before she had even known his name. It became a place of refuge for him.
He received no word from Selena, except for a polite note returning the money he sent for her continuing rehabilitation, saying that her insurance was taking care of it. It turned out she was a kindergarten teacher, a fact that hardly surprised Jake, although truthfully nothing surprised him much at all anymore.
The next Tuesday was bitterly cold and Jake skipped work. His breath hung around his face in little white clouds and brittle, frozen grass crunched underneath his shoes as he made his way through the cemetery, clutching his gift in his hands.
The world had turned gray. The sky, the clouds, the lumbering trees that stood guard around the gray stones.
Jake reached Nikki’s grave and was brought up short. They had delivered her tombstone.
Seeing her name etched in granite took his breath away.
He sat on the ground beside it, heedless of the cold that bit through the fabric of his jeans, and traced his fingers over the letters of her name.
“Happy Anniversary, Nikki,” he whispered, his eyes burning.
He squeezed his eyes shut and said, “I hope you can hear me. I’m so sorry I hurt you. We were too much alike, you and I. Too hot-headed, too quick to jump to conclusions. I’m sorry my temper made it impossible for you to turn to me. Even Derek was there for you, and I feel like such a bastard for treating you like I did.”
He shifted and stared down at the object in his hand. “I brought you something.”
Carefully, he sat the rose globe near the base of her tombstone. It was expressly made not to freeze.
The hot pink rose provided a shocking splash of color against the gray granite background.
“The color means ‘I will remember you always’, but I cheated with the flower. I didn’t think you’d mind. It’s supposed to be a carnation, but that seemed too plain.” Swiping at his eyes, Jake smiled. “You will always be a rose to me.”
As he stood to leave, he felt her.
The sensation staggered him. The warmth of her presence fell over him like a glass, abruptly shutting out the cold, howling wind. He could almost smell her perfume. The impression was so strong it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“Nikki!” he gasped, and closed his eyes.
The vision was so vivid, so striking, it almost brought him to his knees.
In his mind, Nikki stood before him, smiling like the night they met. Her laughter rang in his ears as she reached for his hand.
Jake could swear he felt the warmth from her fingers as they entwined in his, then the sweet rush of her breath and the softness of her mouth as she brushed a kiss across his frozen lips. His skin, so cold moments before, began to tingle.
He sensed her start to fade and whispered, “No…please…”
A mixture of emotions played in her sparkling green eyes and a tear streaked down one cheek as she pressed her fingertips to her mouth and gave him a tremulous smile.
Then she was gone.
He jolted back to himself like a man awaking from a deep sleep.
Although the logical part of him knew the whole thing had been nothing more than some weird manifestation of his grief, for a moment Jake could only stand there, dazed.
He closed his eyes again, but there was nothing, no sense of her.
Nikki had told him goodbye.
As Jake walked to his car, it felt like a burden had lifted from his soul.
***
Jake wasn’t able to go to Selena, however, even though he thought of her night and day. It came as a shock to realize thoughts of her replaced most of his thoughts of Nikki. It was her smiles and her laughter that he heard in his head, and her touch that he dreamed of. Guilt threatened to rip him apart.
Two months passed. His mother begged him to go to Selena, even Elaine did, but Eliot was the one who finally got through to him.
They were at the rec center, playing a little one-on-one basketball in the bitter cold, but Eliot might have well been playing alone. Jake knew he was moving like a dead man, missing easy shots and playing nonexistent defense. He was barely paying attention when Eliot shoved the ball hard at his chest.
“What did you do that for?” Jake asked, startled.
“I think it’s time you got over yourself, man,” Eliot said. “She loves you. Do you understand that?”
“I lost my wife,” Jake snapped. “Am I not even supposed to acknowledge that Nikki’s dead?”
“I didn’t say that,” Eliot said. “But if Nikki’s death taught you anything, it should be that not even one day is promised to us, and you should appreciate love when you find it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hallmark.”
Jake shot at the basket and missed.
“Look, Jake.” Eliot poked him in the chest with his finger. “You’ve got to realize, this didn’t just happen to you. This happened to her, too. Selena didn’t ask for this, either. We told her she was Nikki. She had to put up with all that crap from you, and she fell in love with you anyway. Now she’s sitting in Alabama, brokenhearted, while you stand here feeling sorry for yourself. I keep telling her that surely you’re going to come to your senses—”
“You’ve talked to her?” Jake asked, surprised.
He knew Catherine did, but he didn’t let her tell him about it.
“Sure, I’ve talked to her,” Eliot said casually. “I like her. We became friends, and I’m not pretending she doesn’t exist, just because I found out she wasn’t Nikki.”
He shot Jake an accusing look, and Jake glared back.
“Tell me you weren’t happier with her than you ever were with Nikki,” Eliot challenged.
“Eliot, you’re overstepping here,” Jake warned, as he retrieved the ball.
“Tell me she didn’t give 110 percent, even when you’d given up on your marriage. You think Nikki would’ve done that? Selena fought for you, and she didn’t even know you. Do you really think Nikki would’ve put up with all your crap, even if she had felt guilty? Selena did, because she fell in love with you. You loved her, too, and you’re lying to yourself if you think you didn’t.”
Jake tossed the ball over his shoulder and started to walk away.
Eliot grabbed his arm. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved Nikki. She was a good friend of mine, but
I think you’re making her memory into something it wasn’t. If she hadn’t died in that crash, you’d be divorced today. You were both so spoiled and stubborn that you would’ve never gotten over this. When you’re through feeling sorry for yourself, remember that Selena was the only truly innocent person in this mess, and she is the only person who would’ve worked so hard to win the love of a dumb jackass like you.”
“Finished?” Jake asked, arching an eyebrow at Eliot.
“For now.” He grinned.
Jake pulled free from his grasp and started toward his car.
“Hey, where are you going?” Eliot called out.
“To Alabama,” he replied. “That is, if a dumb jackass like me can find the way.”
As Jake got behind the wheel, he watched a grinning Eliot sink a beautiful three pointer.
Even though he mocked Eliot for his sentimentality, his words hit him like a slap in the face.
He hadn’t been given a second chance to fix his relationship with Nikki, but maybe it wasn’t too late to make things right with Selena. He saw how stupid it had been, to deny love just because of the circumstances. And he had loved her. He loved her still.
By his own admission, he’d led an easy life, at least until recently. He’d been spoiled into thinking all things came with second chances, or maybe even thirds. Fate had delivered the harsh lesson that some things only came with one and Jake prayed he hadn’t let his only chance with Selena disappear. She had loved him unconditionally, and in spite of incredible odds. He felt connected to her after everything they’d been through.
Eliot was right when he said their marriage would have never survived if Nikki had lived. They had been too much alike, too spoiled and too stubborn, to have survived the fallout. Nobody wins a war of pride. Selena had taught him love wasn’t about right or wrong. It was about trust, and hope, and forgiveness. He only hoped she still believed that. After a quick stop in town, Jake was on his way.
Jake made the nearly 370 mile trip to Selena’s town in five hours flat, trying to make up for lost time. With every mile that clicked off the odometer, he felt more certain of his feelings for her. He missed her terribly, and he hoped she wasn’t tired of waiting on him.
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