by Gina Rossi
I don’t know what to say. I gaze at the people walking in and out of the reception space, disconnected, like I’m busy with an out-of-body experience. “Were Agat’s leaf circles some kind of warning?”
“No. The fault was electrical. Product failure on a part that should have been recalled—”
“But Lucas—”
“It had nothing to do with Agat,” says Lucas the Engineer, and I don’t know whether to believe him.
“You can’t live like this. Looking over your shoulder all the time, suspicious of every sign, every gesture—”
“Lara, I don’t.”
“I do!”
“You won’t have to any more,” Lucas says, his face set. “That was Angie on the phone. Agat died this morning.”
“Oh.” I look up at him. There’s no relief in my heart, only sadness. “Was it…peaceful?”
“Yes, because Angie finally gave in to her insistence that she, Agat, was Alice’s grandmother.”
“Agat died believing that?”
“She did, and it made her real happy. Angie said she died at peace, a beautiful smile on her face.”
“How lovely.”
“That’s what I thought.” Lucas sits next to me, taking one of my hands in his. “In hindsight, Agat was only strange after she got sick. Before that, she was a really interesting person.”
“You’re very forgiving, Lucas.” Worn out, I put my head on his shoulder. We sit together, holding hands, saying nothing, watching folk walk in and out.
After a time, Lucas speaks. “Let’s go to the bar and have a big glass of an important, Californian red.”
“Let’s.”
“We’ll wait there for Alice to come back.” He glances at his watch. “She shouldn’t be long. Then we’ll take her up for her bath, and put her to bed.”
“I’ll unpack.”
“Gigi’s available to babysit, so we’ll go along to Merlot’s for dinner, if you’re not too tired.”
I was, but not any more. “I’d love that.”
“You might want to dress up a bit.” He takes my hands in his, and studies them.
“All right.” Warmth spreads through me and it’s got nothing to do with the festive red and gold tea light flickering on the table between us.
Lucas’s phone rings. It’s the electrician. The system at Blue Rocks is up and running. It’s been checked and triple checked, inspected and passed. We can move back first thing tomorrow.
“Let’s go now,” I say. “Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.”
“We’ll freeze. We’ll go tomorrow, early.”
“I’ll need to buy groceries. Quite a lot.”
“We’ll do it on the way.”
“That tree has to be decorated. All the food has to be cooked.”
“Alice can’t wait to help with everything.”
“Have we got a gift for Buster?”
Lucas laughs. “My dad might come up from Florida for New Year.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that already! What other good news are you hiding?”
“Debra had the baby this morning.”
“Lucas!”
“Debra and John are the proud parents of Elizabeth Alice.”
“You should have told me immediately.”
“I like to keep the best for last.”
I gaze at him, smiling. “You are a beautiful, if wicked, man.”
And that’s what we do while we wait for Alice: tell each other things, put ideas out there for discussion, exchange views, and make plans, small and big, forge decisions like precious elements fitting this way and that, the stepping stones in the journey toward the start of our joined lives.
We never made it to Merlot’s.
Epilogue
Bliss, to get away from the tail of winter in Maine, lovely as it is, although I wouldn’t want to miss the spring. It’s March, and I’m lying on a lounger in six inches of crystal-clear Indian Ocean on a private island in the Maldives. We’re on honeymoon. Lucas swimming way out in the turquoise lagoon, and Alice less than twenty yards away, making a wonky sandcastle in the shade of a thatched umbrella. Who, in their right mind, would take a five-year-old on honeymoon?
I would. Lucas would. Besides, Alice presumed she’d be coming from the start, and believed Buster would be coming too—we had quite a time convincing her that he wouldn’t enjoy himself. She wasn’t interested in kind offers to come and stay from friends in Lobster Cove, from Debra and John, and even Grandpa. Although Lucas wanted to spend our honeymoon in Venice with the Vitruvian Man, I persuaded him otherwise. Venice, stunningly beautiful as she is, is no place for a five-year-old with all that open water, and not a blade of grass to be seen. We’ll do Venice some other time.
Lucas proposed to me on Christmas Eve. We’d finished decorating the tree when he went down on one knee right there in the hallway, joined by Alice.
“Lara, will you marry me?” he asked.
“And me,” Alice said.
Buster wandered in to see what was going on, and sat next to Alice. Faced by this row of people, I had to laugh.
Lucas surveyed his committee. “I think you’ve been outvoted, Lara.”
“Yes,” I said, smiling.
“Yes what?” Lucas asked.
“Yes to everything.”
We were married ten days later, at the town hall, followed by a party at Blue Rocks that went on until sunrise. We invited everyone we knew in Lobster Cove and beyond, and every single person accepted, and came, and enjoyed themselves. There was one exception: Julie. She stayed in London with Derek and Jamie—the most perfect and beautiful baby in the world, wouldn’t you know?—and watched the proceedings on Skype. I missed her, felt—feel—disconnected right now, but we’ll have plenty to share one day soon.
Lucas comes back to shore, standing up in the clear water and wading, knee-deep to inspect Alice’s masterpiece. He is glorious—tall, wide-shouldered, lean, dark-haired and so deeply tanned, all over, he’s been mistaken twice for a local. I gaze at him, loving him with all my heart, and touch my stomach with the fingertips of my left hand, looking down at my wedding ring, a hoop of square-cut sapphires, each a different colour blue or purple. “All the blues of Maine” was the brief to the jeweller, Lucas told me, and the result is meaningful and utterly beautiful.
Lucas kneels next to Alice and begins the salvage operation as warm water laps the base of her castle’s walls. I’m no engineer, but I envisage a moat. He’s been sketching, filling up that fat sketchbook I caught him doodling in all those months ago, when I stood in his studio and suggested my job at Blue Rocks was done. “No need. What’s the rush?” he said and I’m overjoyed I didn’t. Frankly, he’s brilliant at design—creative, artistic and practical. Last December, when I went away to London, he bought a plot of land further up the coast, on the other side of the yacht club, and that’s what he’s sketching—a house for that land. Architecturally, it’s breath-taking: a modern classic with all the beautiful details you can see on many of the lovely old houses and mansions of Lobster Cove.
He calls it The Sea Horse House and says we’ll transfer the sea horse door there, if we move out of Blue Rocks. It’s not his only project. Agat left her little house to Alice, and Lucas will renovate that, and rent it out to holidaymakers. It’s full of character, imbued with local culture, and I know he’ll incorporate all the best elements of Agat’s legacy, and make it beautiful. That’s what he does: he makes things beautiful. Even stuff like ugly old oil rigs and my messed-up, one-time failure of a life.
“Thank you for waiting for me,” he says, often. “Thank you for being so patient.”
I did wait for him. I waited for him to choose me, and to say he believed in me. I met Lucas, and instantly my life was better.
Lucas wants to sell his company and sell Blue Rocks. He claims the house belongs to a part of his past on which he’s locked the door. He says it was an overly ambitious project, explains that he doesn’t want the memories any more. Actually, the
house isn’t called Blue Rocks now. I had the weather vane replaced—that poor, pierced mermaid—with one made by a local craftsman in Lobster Cove, and the house simply became The Mermaid House instead.
“Why a new mermaid?” Lucas asked.
“Because she’s prettier, and Alice likes her.” Deep down inside, I admit it’s an homage to Bonny. She trapped Lucas, but she also set him free. She wasn’t of this world, and she isn’t now. However, she will always be Alice’s biological mother, represented by the lovely bronze mermaid swimming above the grey roofs of the house Lucas once loved, in the blue ocean of the sky. Quite apart from anything else, as Alice’s stepmother, I’d prefer her to remember her natural mother as a mermaid, rather than an egg.
Me? I am the sea horse, a creature of this world.
A cheer goes up. Lucas and Alice celebrate the resistance of the sturdily reinforced castle as a tiny wave trickles into the moat, posing no threat whatsoever. I lay my hand flat on the warm skin of my stomach and close my eyes. We won’t be able to give Alice a sister or brother this birthday, but I’m pretty sure she’ll have someone to play with by the next one.
A word about the author…
Gina Rossi was born in South Africa and grew up there. She now lives and writes romance in the Channel Islands, happily married with four grown-up children in the UK. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) and the Romantic Organization of South Africa (ROSA). The Sea Horse Door is her fourth novel.
Thank you for purchasing
this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.