by Kayla Perrin
“Because I made a promise to look you up if I was ever in Hawaii.”
“A promise to who?”
This was the hard part.
He didn’t want to dredge up hurtful memories, but there was little help for it. Everything from here on out was going to be a field strewn with land mines and live grenades.
“Sean,” he said. “I made a promise to Sean.”
Baden jerked as if he had hit her. Then, blinking several times, she stood up and took a step backward, as if away from the Grim Reaper.
“Sean is dead.”
Her words sounded hollow, devoid of inflection or any emotion.
From his pocket he pulled out a small envelope. Inside was a photograph that he more than suspected would just make things worse.
He held the envelope out to her.
“Sean gave this to me and made me promise to deliver it to you, in person, if anything ever happened to him.”
Baden eyed the envelope as if Jesse were asking her to pet a hungry rattlesnake. “What is it?”
He leaned forward closing the distance between them and handed it to her.
For a long moment, she held his gaze and then, reluctantly, she lifted the flap on the white envelope. Inside was a photograph of a pretty brown-skinned girl of about fifteen. Her hair was braided and she wore cutoff jean shorts and what looked to be a cotton T-shirt. Something in the girl’s features seemed vaguely familiar, but Baden didn’t think she knew her.
Then it clicked.
It was the eyes.
The girl’s eyes were Sean’s eyes.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Who is this, Jesse? Is this his daughter? Sean had a daughter? He had a secret family? Is that why he...”
She choked on the words as thoughts tumbled through her mind and long-lost pieces of the puzzle began to appear and slip into the places where for so long there had been nothing but a void.
“I always sensed that there was something he was holding back. He was married, wasn’t he?”
The words, flat and lifeless, seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her.
“Baden...”
She kept right on talking. “I knew there was something going on with him. Things weren’t right, not the way they should have been, but I just chalked it up to both of us being stressed about work and all the wedding plans.”
“Baden,” Jesse said, taking her arm and guiding her around the chair. “You need to sit down. Please calm down, baby.”
She yanked her arm free and tried, but failed, to blink back the tears.
“Don’t try to tell me how I’m supposed to feel, Jesse. You don’t know how I feel. You don’t know what a betrayal this is.”
“Baden,” he said gently, “turn the picture over.”
Even as he said it, he turned over the photograph in her hand. “He left a message for you.”
“What?”
He pointed. “A message for you.”
Baden swiped at the tears and glanced down. There was writing on the back of the snapshot but she couldn’t seem to focus her eyes through the tears. She sniffled, wiped her eyes more thoroughly and looked at the handwriting on the opposite side of the photograph.
She immediately recognized it.
It was Sean’s bold and confident script. She used to tease him about the A+ grades he must have gotten as a boy on his penmanship tests in school.
Sean.
Her eyes misted and she had to blink away new tears.
Letting Jesse Fremont in had been a mistake. She’d known it the moment she’d seen him standing at her front door outside her sanctuary. He was here dredging up the past...a past that was buried and doing just fine there.
Slowly, the words became more than a blur, more than scribble on the back of the photograph. There was a notation on the top, in Sean’s writing but faded a bit as if it had been there for a while longer than the other words, Me. 1993.
Baden’s gaze dropped lower, and she saw the short note written in fine-point blue Sharpie, Sean’s pen of choice. She’d purchased a dozen of them for him after he had complained about the cheap ink pens issued by the police department.
She blinked back the distracting memory and focused instead on the rest of the words on the back of the image.
Dear Baden. I am sorry. So very, very sorry to have put you through what I did. I loved you then and now. But I wasn’t honest with you. A relationship should be based on love as well as on honesty. This is the me I used to be.
S—
She cast blind eyes up at Jesse. “I don’t understand.”
But the shell-shocked expression on her face told him she did understand. She was having a hard time wrapping her head around the proof she held in her hands.
“How?”
This time when Jesse guided her toward the chair, she didn’t resist. She sank into the plump cushion with the photo in one hand. Her mouth was open, but no words spilled forth.
Jesse had seen the look many times in his career.
Accident victims wore that expression. Tragedy survivors who have not yet realized that they were survivors seemed to be marked with that look. It was shock. They were dazed, confused and unbelieving, even as the reality slowly seeped in, forever changing their reality and view of the world.
She clutched the photo in one hand. Jesse held the other, trying to offer her what comfort he could.
“But, I...” She looked at Jesse, trying to make sense of it. “How can this be?”
When she began to weep, he was there, witness to her heartbreak.
Baden’s tears were not the great big racking sobs of someone out of control. They were, instead, silent and all the more sorrowful.
He cursed Sean for leaving him to do the cleanup work, to be the messenger of this news that should have, rightfully, come from Sean. Not from him. Just not from him.
Jesse wanted to maintain his good intention. He wanted to simply hold and comfort Baden as a friend would. But he’d give lie to his own truth if he did that.
Guilt assailed him. He had told her that he loved her.
He wasn’t even sure that his revelation registered with her.
And it was unfair for him to have just dumped that on her. Not when he knew what he did about the man she loved. After all, she was still emotionally Sean’s woman. Right now though, Baden Calloway was the woman he’d always wanted as his own.
And she was hurting. The very least he could do was comfort her as a friend. He held her close, but Baden suddenly pulled away.
Without even a glance at the photo, she dropped it and skirted his embrace. Her fist was again at her mouth as if holding in a scream as she practically ran from the room.
She was headed to what Jesse figured would be a bedroom or other private place to grieve or cry.
Jesse had had plenty of time, years in fact, to absorb Sean’s news. For Baden, it was new. And though both it and Sean were now a part of her past, she needed time to assimilate the information.
He ran a hand over his head, swore and then went to find her.
He passed two open bedroom suites. Had he not been focused on Baden, he would have paused to check out the spaces and the rest of the guesthouse. But he was worried about Baden. When he came to a set of closed double doors, he knew he’d found her.
Jesse knocked on one of the doors.
“Baden?”
He got no answer, but thought he heard water running.
Jesse sighed. He had to give her the space she needed right now.
He returned to the kitchen, picked up his glass of wine and then went to the living room to wait.
She eventually came out—more than half an hour later. She appeared in the living room standing in front of him red-eyed and with h
er face freshly scrubbed, looking nineteen instead of thirty-one.
“You stayed.”
He simply nodded from where he sat on the white sofa, one leg propped on his knee.
“I want to know about Sean,” she said.
* * *
The old photograph of the Sean she hadn’t known even existed lay face down on the oversize ottoman, a not-so-subtle reminder of their unfinished conversation about an unfinished relationship.
The irony was rich; one of those little sucker-punch gifts from the universe that left you gasping for breath and reassessing everything you thought you knew about everything.
“Are you sure?” Jesse asked. “We can talk later if you’d like, if you’re not up to it now.”
“I’ve been not talking about Sean for eighteen months,” she said. “So, no. Now, Jesse. I need to know now.”
She sat on the chair closest to him but continued to stare at the message from her former fiancé.
Baden glanced at the picture then picked it up and read again the message her Sean had left for her. It broke her heart all over again.
She was slow in turning over the photo to look at the young woman Sean Mathews had once been.
“I see him in her,” she said, touching the face of the girl in the image. “There’s a sadness there that seemed to always be with Sean.”
Then, suddenly, she sat up.
“What?” Jesse asked.
“Wh-what was her name?” Baden said nodding toward the picture.
“The same,” Jesse said. “It was just spelled differently. S-h-a-u-n.”
Baden nodded, as if that explained everything. But it didn’t. Not really.
“Why didn’t he tell me? We were together for three years. Three years, Jesse. That’s a long time to be with someone and not know such a fundamental part about a person’s life.”
“I don’t know, baby. That person in the picture didn’t exist for him. Maybe he thought you wouldn’t love him or maybe it was something that... Hell, I don’t know, Baden,” he said running his hands over his head and then his face. “I’ve been over and through this a million times myself, and I’m no closer to having any answers. Whatever Sean wanted to say or get off his chest died with him.”
“He spent a good portion of his life tormented and I didn’t even know.” Baden curled her feet under her on the sofa. “I thought about going home for his funeral.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She shrugged, then picked up one of the fringed throw pillows and hugged it to her.
“What would have been the point? Aunt Henrietta sent me all the newspaper clippings. I mourned in my own way. And this,” she said, “this note from my Sean about that other Shaun is like losing him again—for the third time.”
Tears sprang to her eyes again.
Jesse winced as if he’d taken a blow. In a way he had. She’d just professed to still loving Sean.
Sean had been dead for six months, and it had been more than a full year and a half since that fateful afternoon when Baden had walked out of the Chapel of the Groves in Cedar Springs instead of marrying his partner. She’d done it with élan, though. Beautiful in a white lace gown and tear-streaked face, she stood before their friends and family and announced that the wedding was off.
He’d never forget her courage that day. She’d stood at the altar, her Aunt Henrietta and Uncle Carlton on either side of her supporting her through the ordeal. They were the parents she didn’t have and loved her like one of their own daughters.
“I can’t do this,” she’d said. “I’m sorry. Everyone’s here and there’s tons of food and a beautiful cake, so please, go party,” she told the two hundred stunned guests.
She then turned to leave, her uncle’s arm around her shoulder as she clutched her aunt’s hand. “Oh,” she said, bravely facing the people who had come to wish her well. “As for the gifts, please take them with you or if you’d like, donate them to the Common Ground ministries.”
That was the last moment any of them saw her again.
Jesse had found out later that she’d left the church, changed her clothes and went to the Raleigh-Durham International Airport where she spent the night until the early morning flight that would take her to her honeymoon destination: Honolulu, Hawaii.
As for the elegantly wrapped wedding gifts, he wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Calloway sent their niece a copy of the story from the weekly newspaper the Cedar Springs Gazette about Baden’s generosity in the midst of her personal anguish.
Common Ground was a partnership among three diverse churches in Cedar Springs. Developed by the pastors as a means to spark a spiritual reawakening in the community while uniting the churches and offering aid to those in need, Common Ground operated a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, a medical clinic and a recreation program for kids, teenagers and adults.
As a result of the non-wedding of Baden Calloway and Sean Mathews, the soup kitchen got everything from an espresso maker to top-of-the-line cookware, while Cedar Springs’ homeless who spent nights in the Common Ground shelter benefited from and luxuriated on eight-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets and toweled off after showering by using fluffy monogrammed bath linens, all courtesy of the guests who’d come to wish Sean and Baden a happily ever after.
* * *
Embarrassed at how she’d completely fallen apart on him, Baden pushed back, sniffled and wiped her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I’d cried out all the tears in the bathroom.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about.”
She picked up the photograph that had fallen to the floor at some point. She sat there, staring at the girl.
“I never guessed,” she said. “I never even suspected anything like this.”
Jesse gave her the silence she needed to work through her feelings.
“Who would have even imagined anything like this, let alone suspected?” she asked. “I mean, I’ve heard of people finding out their partner was gay or married to a convicted felon, but this? There was nothing in or about Sean that even remotely hinted that he was born...”
Her words faded away as she worked through it all, still fuzzy on why Sean had kept such a big part of his past secret from the woman he had supposedly loved.
Then, as her brain started fully functioning again, she realized a hard truth: Jesse’s complicity in the matter.
“You knew! You knew and didn’t say anything.”
Jesse shook his head, denying the accusation.
“It wasn’t my place or my truth to say anything,” he said. “And until he gave me that photo a month before he died, I thought you knew. You were going to marry him,” he said simply. “I thought you knew.”
Baden shook her head.
“You were the future he wanted.”
“Apparently not enough,” she said.
She didn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
“The girl in that picture was his past, Baden. He loved you.”
Almost reverently she placed the photo on the oversize ottoman that served as a coffee table.
“I know.”
She sat there quietly, evidently for so long that Jesse got worried.
“You gonna be okay?”
She looked at him, almost surprised to even see him still there.
Baden took a deep breath and nodded.
Placing her hands on her thighs, she stared at the photo of the old Sean, and then placed it back in the envelope.
“I need some air.”
She stood up, but didn’t move.
When she swayed a bit, Jesse was beside her in an instant.
She stepped away from him.
“I’m not going to faint, Jesse,” she said. “At least I don
’t think so.”
He left her side and went to the kitchen. When he returned with a glass of juice from her refrigerator, Baden was nowhere to be seen.
Then he saw the sheer panel of curtains flutter. She’d gone outside. He went back to the kitchen, giving her a moment.
Lord knew the news he’d dumped on her would take a while to process. He’d had years to get used to the idea of Sean as that other person. That girl in the photograph with the sad eyes was another person, one he hadn’t known. How had Sean gone so far as to have asked Baden to marry him without telling her about his past?
Jesse found her on the lanai. She was staring at the sky.
It took him a moment to realize she was crying again.
Jesse came up behind her. He gathered her in his arms, his chin on the top of her head and held her, just held her, offering what comfort he could.
Her silent tears ate at him.
Did she cry because she’d been lied to by Sean? Were her tears of regret about the way they’d ended?
Before he could put voice to either question, she turned in his arms, wrapped her own around his neck and pressed her body and her mouth to his.
Chapter 6
He wanted to resist and knew he should.
He told himself that this was something she might regret in the morning.
He told himself that she was just trying to affirm her femininity in the wake of emotional upheaval.
He suspected it might be transference of emotion.
And he knew that grief and mourning came in all guises. In his years as a cop, first on patrol and later as a detective, he’d seen everything from total physical collapse and seemingly inappropriate-for-the-moment humor to stunned silence and abject denial. People reacted in all kinds of ways both expected and unexpected.
While he had had years to process and absorb the information about Sean’s former life, Baden was just discovering critical truths about the man she been ready to pledge her life and love to.
He silently cursed Sean for leaving him with the cleanup job, but was also thankful that his former partner afforded him the opportunity to see Baden again.