Allison set up that night’s five o’clock news to record, then flipped the TV off, still smiling in a way that told him she wasn’t done teasing him yet. “You’re like the Hulk in The Avengers.”
“What?” Theo didn’t pay much attention to movies, but he was pretty sure being compared to a big green monster wasn’t all that complimentary.
“Yes. He was their secret weapon. Wait, no. I know. You’re more like Danielson’s crane move in Karate Kid.”
She demonstrated the move, looking absolutely ridiculous. She almost made him laugh, except he was stuck on the idea of the media giving the Destiny Falls fans the idea that Bomb Squad’s fate rested singularly on his shoulders. He’d come a long way in the weeks since Allison arrived at Cloud Nine, but he still hated the feeling of being pressured to succeed. “You know I’m no hero, Allison. I don’t want to be. How about I’m just Theo the mechanic out to play a game of hockey?”
She kissed his temple. “That’s good enough for me.”
“Before the Bomb Squad news segment, you were about to tell me about an idea you had.”
She looked suddenly sheepish. “It’s no big deal.”
“That’s okay. Tell me anyway.”
She hesitated for a moment, then reached for a desk drawer. From it, she pulled a piece of paper. “I tried my hand at a budget and a profit projection. I don’t even know if that’s a real business term, but . . .”
Her words fading away, she shook her head, as though she’d flustered herself. Theo frowned, deeply regretting his contribution to her lack of confidence with his weeks of telling her she was unfit to run the business. It bothered him more every day, what he’d put her through. It reminded him of what he’d put Noelle through. With both women, or girl, as Noelle was, he’d had the power to build them up, but all he’d done was break them down.
He couldn’t change the past, though. Not even a past like his that was littered with regret. He took her chin in his hand, turned her face up toward him, and kissed her until he felt her body relax.
“Tell me about your plan.”
She drew a fortifying breath, then said, “I did some reconnaissance yesterday.”
“Reconnaissance how?”
“I posed as a potential customer at two other canal cruising boat rental companies, to get the lowdown on our competition.”
Theo had done that when he’d first started at Cloud Nine, but it’d been a while. “What did you find out?”
“Neither of them had anything but the basics, a lot like Cloud Nine right now.”
“Sounds like you want to change that.”
“I think we can do better than that and it’ll draw customers in. Maybe even locals. I was thinking we could offer a bunch of add-ons—picnic baskets, baskets for romantic evenings with wine and strawberries, that kind of thing. I used to organized gift baskets for charity events all the time, like Olivia and I are doing for the gala. But for Cloud Nine, we’d have an extremely high profit margin because those kind of baskets aren’t that expensive to set up.”
Her voice trailed off as Cloud Nine’s front door opened. Theo looked up and couldn’t believe his eyes. He shot to his feet, bringing Katie up with him. “Noelle?”
She stopped and smiled. “Theo.”
She was taller than he remembered. Tall and blond and wearing a lot of jewelry, as though she’d fallen into a lot of money since he’d last seen her.
“What are you doing here? I mean, I’m sorry. It’s just such a surprise.”
She started talking, but his pulse was pounding so hard and fast that he had to walk close to her and tilt his head to hear what she said.
“. . . and I saw you on the news. Can you believe that? Earlier this week, CTV did a special interest piece on your hockey team and a game you have coming up soon. I never thought I’d see you again, and I’d made my peace with the feeling that we parted with so much left unfinished, but seeing you on TV, it was like a sign that I was supposed to come find you.”
When Theo had considered the ramifications of the exhibition game’s media attention, he’d wondered if his parents might see it, but for whatever reason, he hadn’t considered Noelle. Somehow, in his head, she’d gotten stuck in the image of a seventeen-year-old girl. Awkward and gangly, but pretty and young. Somehow he’d forgotten that she would have grown up, the same way he had.
He’d trapped her in amber, but here she was, with laugh lines bracketing her lips, wisdom in her eyes, and her posture straighter. She seemed relaxed in her own body, and taller, a more complete vision of the person he’d only glimpsed behind the shell she’d held around her spirit to protect her from her family.
It was in that moment that he realized he’d never actually known her. Their bond had been forged solely on escaping their screwed up families and their church.
Noelle smiled at Katie, then Allison. “This is your family?”
In his shock, he’d forgotten about introductions. He didn’t see a need to correct her on the family part. In a huge way, she was right. This was his family, his future. The business, Allison, and Katie. He’d never thought about it like that, but he liked the way it felt, her looking at the three of them and seeing a unit. He was starting to think of them as a unit, too.
“This is Katie,” he made her hand wave, “and that’s Allison.”
Noelle extended a warm, genuine smile to Allison, who stood and shook her hand.
“I’m happy to meet you, Noelle.”
“Likewise. I suppose Theo never mentioned me, but we grew up in the same small town together outside of Quebec.”
Allison put her arm around Theo’s waist in a gesture of support. “He did mention you, and I’m glad you’re here. I bet you two have a lot of catching up to do.” To Theo, she said, “I’ve got this, if you want to go sit somewhere.”
He did his best to thank her with his eyes, then handed Katie over and gave her a quick kiss.
“Maybe we could walk,” Noelle said. “I’ve never been this far south. That river is beautiful.”
“The canal. Yes, it is.”
He heard the faintest hint of her French accent, but she’d so far spoken only in English, so he went along with that. He preferred it, actually, because the language change helped him feel even more distant from the shared pain of their pasts. For some reason, it was more comfortable to talk to her this way.
“Your daughter is beautiful, too,” she said as they walked in the direction of Locks.
“She’s not mine.” But that felt like equal parts lie and truth. In so many ways, both Katie and Allison had become critical components of his life. “Allison is my—”
What was she? His lover, his business partner, his salvation. She almost hadn’t been, he realized with a now-familiar pang of regret. What would he have done if he’d scared her away in those early days, as he’d tried tirelessly to do? He would never have known what he was missing out on. Something would have always been missing and he wouldn’t have known what.
“She’s my everything.”
Noelle smiled. “I could see that in the way she looked at you. She’s a lucky woman.”
“I think it’s more the other way around with the luck. She puts up with me.” He took her hands and turned to face her. “Tell me life has been better for you than it was when we parted. You look fantastic.”
“My life is fantastic. I found my everything too. He’s a real estate investor in Toronto. We’re ridiculously happy.”
Looking at her, he believed it. A weight lifted from him that, until this moment, he hadn’t realized had been pressing on him. “Toronto? No wonder your English is so good.”
“I’m teaching him French, but it’s slow going.”
“Children?” he asked, though it made his heart hurt anew to get the word out.
“No, by my choice.” His face must have mirrored his sh
ock because she added, “You seem surprised by that.”
“Can you blame me?”
She shook her head. “You and I didn’t part on the best of terms, and I’ve prayed for the chance to apologize to you for the terrible position I put you in. What I did, it’s haunted me. There’s a part of me that hasn’t been able to be happy with my life thinking that I’d never get the chance to make amends. Seeing you on TV was . . .”
Her words trailed off, then she shook her head. “I knew it was my chance to tell you how sorry I was for getting pregnant.” She took his hand. “I lied to you and I used you. Please tell me you can forgive me.”
“Noelle, please don’t. Not after I all but forced you to give the baby up.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. The same way you said you’ve been haunted, I’ve been, too.”
She looked out over the canal, at the curve and the green water, the bridges, the buildings. “This place is incredible.”
He wasn’t sure where she was going with such an abrupt topic change, but he decided to follow. “It is. It’s been my home for more than ten years now.”
She put her back to the canal and faced him. “If you had married me, then you would never have known about this place. You would have been stuck in that town. I would have been stuck there. Our child would have been stuck there, too.”
“But don’t you wonder? He or she would have been seventeen this year. Don’t you wonder what might have been? We forfeited our chance to know that child.”
A shadow crossed her features. She looked down at her joined hands. “I know. I do wonder. Not always, but in quiet moments. How could I not? But it’s not so simple, is it? I wonder about that baby, but I love my life. I can’t imagine it any other way, and the thought that I was so close to marrying and becoming a mother at seventeen, trapped in that town, that child trapped with us. I can’t imagine a worse fate. I regret so much about how I handled things with you and my parents, but at the same time, how can I regret any choice I made when it led me to my Elliot?”
He struggled with the same hard truths. If he hadn’t made the choices he did, then he wouldn’t have found Destiny Falls. He wouldn’t have met Allison or played on Bomb Squad. All this time, he and Noelle had been struggling with the same demons, trapped in a gray area between regret and peace. “There’s no easy answer. No neat bow we can wrap this one up in. I was so wrong to do what I did to you, pressuring you like that, but like you said, we would never have been happy there together.”
“Is there ever an easy answer in life? Is there ever anything purely good or purely wrong?”
“No.” He took her hand and cradled it between both of his. “When did you get so wise?”
“Oh, I wised up fast after you left. My parents kicked me out. I took the train to stay at my cousin’s apartment in Montreal. I got a job as a waitress and moved up to an assistant manager. The restaurant’s corporate owners transferred me to Toronto and one night a group of businessmen dined at the restaurant. The rest is history.”
They stopped and looked out at the water.
“Are you still a waitress?”
“Not for a long time. I manage Elliot’s charitable foundation.”
Which meant she’d done well for herself. She certainly had a monied air about her.
“And what about you?” she said. “The news said you were wounded in the army.”
It was such a small part of who he was, yet such a large part. His disabilities were responsible for a million details and choices he made every day. “I survived a roadside bomb explosion with a brain injury. Hearing loss and vision trouble, that kind of thing.”
It was the explanation he was most comfortable with except with his closest friends. In light of how many men in his unit had lost their lives or limbs, Theo’s injuries were minor, indeed.
“And then what?”
“I did my initial rehab in Montreal, but there were some innovative therapies happening here in New York, so I made the move. And I found work as an electrician for the man who runs the wounded vet hockey team; then I got this job managing the boat rental company you found me at.”
“And then Allison,” Noelle said.
It nearly made him laugh, it was such an understatement about how she’d crash landed into his life like a meteorite and turned his whole world on its axis. “And then Allison. Will you stay and have dinner with us tonight?”
“Thank you, but no. Elliot is expecting me at the hotel in Lockport. All I wanted to do was see that you’re happy. And now that I’ve seen that you are, and you’ve forgiven me, I can move on. I won’t worry about you anymore.”
She’d been worried about him? All this time that he’d been worried about her. It was baffling, how ironic life could be sometimes. “I won’t worry about you either.”
“There’s no need.”
He hugged her. “Thank you—for finding me, for accepting my apology.”
“We’ll always wonder, won’t we?” she said.
He didn’t need to ask her what she was referring to. They would always wonder what might have been if they’d become parents, what their child would have been like and who he or she would have grown into.
“We will,” he said. “I think that’s okay. I think we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t wonder.”
She offered him a smile at that. They walked in comfortable silence back along the canal, past Locks, and into the office. With every step, Theo felt lighter, freer, as if another link in the chain of regrets hanging around his neck had been broken.
***
Two days before the exhibition game and one day before the gala event, Allison drove herself and Katie to Lockport Community College. They were going to be really early, but she had some stops to make along the way and she figured they could go on a stroller walk around campus first.
She still hadn’t come clean to Theo or Chelsea about the water acclimation class, comfortable in her choice to wait until she had one successful class under her belt before announcing what she was up to, but she was spared from telling a white lie because Theo was busy at the exhibition game site, checking on the newly laid ice rink and monitoring the electricity output and cables as the gala tent was erected in the high school’s parking lot next to the stadium.
Her dress for the big event had been pressed and hidden in her closet for the next night’s big reveal. She couldn’t remember ever being so excited about a charity gala before, though she’d attended dozens of them over the years with Lowell. This time, though, she’d be among true friends, with the man she was falling in love with by her side.
She was nervous about getting in the pool, but was trying to keep her mind busy thinking about the gala instead of worrying. She knew she was getting in the pool, and she knew she was going to be perfectly safe—end of story. Or so she hoped to believe by the time they got there.
Her phone rang en route to the pool, so she tapped her hands-free device to answer. “Hello?”
“Allison. It’s Oscar.”
She and Theo had been waiting for weeks to hear that the change of corporate partnership paperwork had been processed. Oscar, Theo’s lawyer friend, had helped them file it and had created a new contract for the two of them to sign as soon as they became official partners in the eyes of the law.
He didn’t sound happy, which had her thinking that there’d been some sort of glitch in the system.
“What’s wrong? Is there a problem with the paperwork?”
“Are you and Theo available to meet today at my office?”
She didn’t like his tone. Not one bit. She flipped on her turn signal, then rolled to a stop in a McDonald’s parking lot. “Theo’s busy prepping for the exhibition game. I’m not sure what his availability is. Is everything okay?”
Oscar sighed, sounding conflicted about telling her what was going on. “It
might be better for me to tell you this first, before Theo finds out. It has more to do with you anyway, technically.”
She checked her watch. Two hours until pool time. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Twenty minutes later, she sat across the desk from Oscar Vintana, a handsome former marine dressed in a sharp business suit.
“You have bad news. I can see it in your eyes,” she said.
“I do, and I hate to be the one to break it to you. Do you want some water first?”
“No, thanks. Just, out with it please. The anticipation is too much.”
His jaw tightened, but he nodded. “Shorty never legally passed ownership of Cloud Nine Inc. to Lowell.”
Allison blinked. What the heck was that supposed to mean? Lowell was never the legal owner? Impossible. “I don’t understand. Lowell owned Cloud Nine. He paid taxes. He—”
“I know, but that’s different from filing for a change of corporate partnership. If you and Theo hadn’t pursued this at a state level, we wouldn’t have found out until an audit was performed or government regulation standards and practices for corporations changed and it was brought to someone in the state office’s attention.”
“Lowell was never Cloud Nine’s rightful owner?” Oscar had already said as much, but it still didn’t make sense to Allison on any level.
“No. Trust me that I made sure that was accurate before coming to you. He lost Cloud Nine to your ex-husband during a poker game, and from what I can tell, Shorty was thorough about changing the names on the company’s bank account and handing over the business’s tax information, but that’s as far as he went. In the eyes of the law, after Shorty Malone died, the corporation was passed to his heirs because the proper paperwork hadn’t been filed with the government.”
Then he laid it all out for her, complete with copies of Shorty’s original corporate partner filing thirty years earlier and the proof that no other change of partnership applications had been made in all the years since. Allison was too stunned to feel anything except panic.
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