Julia wrapped an arm around his waist and smiled up into smiling eyes. “Oh, and you did fight, all the way to the tattoo parlor.”
“Same one I used,” Noah said with pride.
February was bleak. A cold wind blew off the ocean, rushed up the hillsides, and whistled through the trees. Noah had warned Julia. But she didn’t complain—because February, it turned out, was for them. There were no kids, no parents, no aunts. A few friends stopped by, but they were incidental. Julia and Noah moved up to the hill house and burrowed in. They had books and food and a fire in the hearth. What could be better?
Well, that was for the first two weeks of the month. They spent the last two on a sailboat in the Caribbean.
Julia returned to two pieces of news. First, Charlotte was so pleased with Kim that she was taking the girl with her to Europe on a buying trip. And second, Monte had agreed to the last of the divorce terms, so the papers were being filed.
March brought work thoughts. For Noah, that meant attacking the traps that were piled behind the shed, repairing broken ones, fixing latches, replacing hog rings, painting buoys. It meant looking over the Leila Sue and deciding what she needed to get her in tip-top shape. It meant doing the paperwork for his license.
For Julia, it meant helping organize the local spinners and weavers for a show of their products in Boston. It meant taking pictures of their goods and producing a publicity flyer. It meant making travel arrangements for twenty-some artisans.
Midmonth, Janet and Molly made a surprise appearance. Janet complained some about the chill of the wind, but was otherwise in good form.
Then came April, and Julia found herself wondering where winter had gone. The days were noticeably longer again, and the sun warmer. With the Leila Sue tuned up, cleaned and polished, and back in the water, Noah loaded on his newly tagged traps and freshly painted buoys, and set the first strings of the year.
Julia went along for the ride, taking pictures to her heart’s content, giving Noah a hand with an ease that came from being totally familiar now with the job.
Alex Brier marked the start of the lobstering season by printing four of her pictures on the front page of the Gazette.
In May, Julia’s photographs made their formal debut when the lobstering book was published. Since the book held local interest, it was reviewed prominently by the Portland press, one member of whom happened to be putting together a book on the culture of Maine. Would Julia work with him to illustrate it? he called to ask. This time, the subject matter went beyond lobstering. If Julia agreed, she would be traveling around the state.
“Is that a problem?” Noah asked gently, when she expressed her qualms.
“I do lobstering,” she reasoned because this other project was large and intimidating. “I don’t do potato farming, or innkeeping, or blueberry growing.”
“You do spinning, and weaving, and rabbitries. You do skiing in the Canadian Rockies and sailing in the Caribbean. You just bought a second camera—”
“A small one for my pocket.”
“It packs four megapixels, and the test shots you made with it were fabulous. You also bought a Telephoto lens for the bigger camera. Seems to me you’re perfectly set up to do the job.”
“You think so?” she asked, still dubious.
He smiled his answer, then added, “Unless you don’t want it.”
“I want it,” Julia said with more than a glimmer of excitement. She loved taking pictures. But she wasn’t a professional photographer. She was a daughter and a mother. She was a significant other, sometimes a sternman to Noah. She was the first one to pitch in when a friend was sick, and she made a mean batch of cookies.
But she was also a survivor. She never quite forgot that. There were no longer middle-of-the-night jolts from the burst of a purple boat in her dreams, but she rarely awoke in the morning without thinking, Here’s a new day. Life was fragile. Happiness and fulfillment, even success, weren’t things to postpone.
Allowing that glimmer of excitement to grow, she took Noah’s hand and said, “Yes, I could do this.”
In June, with the first anniversary of the accident approaching, Noah turned the tables and took her hand. She kept saying that he had saved her life, but the opposite was true. For knowing Julia, he was more open and relaxed. He communicated better than he had. His relationship with Ian continued to solidify, and he was in love.
He waited until her divorce was final, but not a day longer. A whole year had shown him how perfectly Julia fit into his world. But he knew of the fragility of life, too.
So, the very first morning she was formally free, he forwent lobstering in favor of sleeping in with her at the hill house. Then he brought her breakfast on the bedroom deck, and, with sea, sky, and trees looking on, he put three stones in her hand. They were diamonds, set vertically in platinum, and they hung from a chain that was as elegant and as delicate as she was.
“The two small ones at the top are from earrings my father bought my mother. She didn’t live long enough to enjoy them, so I want you to do that in her stead. The big one, here, is from me. If you’d like all three put into a wedding band, I’d love that. But a simple gold band would work, too. Whatever you want. It has to be different this time. For both of us. Y’know?”
She did.
Table of Contents
Colophon
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
The Summer I Dared: A Novel Page 38