by Ruthie Knox
This was where Julie would end up. It was where he would end up, too, if he stayed in Potter Falls and became what everyone seemed to expect him to be.
Carson Vance. Beloved husband and father.
A man who built his world around a woman. A man who could lose everything at any time.
He couldn’t do it.
It took him less than ten minutes to pack.
Julie watched him stuffing clothes into his bag, and she wanted to take it all back.
I’m sorry I told you to make up your mind.
Don’t go.
Come back.
I’ll be here whenever you want me.
Her weakness disgusted her, and she said nothing.
He zipped the pack shut and dropped it on the floor by the door. Then all that was left was the tricky business of negotiating some kind of farewell.
Travel safe. Don’t get shot. You’re killing me, and I hate you for doing this.
I love you.
You bastard, I love you.
He pulled her into his arms, and it wasn’t all that difficult, after all. He was so far away already. His shirt smelled like someplace she’d never been, and he was in the air, on a jet that would take him to places Julie couldn’t imagine.
Places she’d never wanted to go.
He kissed her forehead instead of her lips.
“I’ll be back in a few months, Jules.”
She couldn’t wait for him anymore.
Chapter Twelve
It got dark and started to snow, and the cab Carson had hired to take him to the airport slipped on bald tires and plowed into a snowbank next to the interstate on-ramp.
He tried to push it out while the cab driver reversed, but the car wouldn’t budge.
Carson climbed back in. Four miles outside of Potter Falls on Christmas Eve, and he was stuck in a car with a stranger who’d told him this was his first winter in Upstate New York—a stranger who hadn’t understood the importance of either snow tires or carrying a shovel in the trunk.
An infant of a man.
At least his name wasn’t Jesus. According to the ID card, it was Bahdoon.
Carson didn’t think he’d be able to find another ride to the airport. This wasn’t cab country. It had taken him almost an hour to scare up Bahdoon and convince him to come down from Fenimore to drive eighty miles to Albany on a holiday.
He sat in the cab, staring out at the falling snow as the engine ticked cool and the driver spoke what might have been Somali into a cell phone.
Leo Potter’s Mercedes approached at a crawl and pulled to a stop on the opposite side of the road. In the pool of light beneath an arc lamp, Leo got out of the car in his dress coat and wingtips, looking as though he’d just emerged from a menswear ad. He crossed the road and peered in the back window, then tapped with one knuckle. The driver must have pushed the button, because the window lowered with an electric whir.
“You need a ride?”
Carson stared at him, but he couldn’t seem to pull his thoughts together. The wise man? he wondered, Or the ass Mary and Joseph rode into Jerusalem?
“I don’t know,” he said finally.
Leo opened the door. “Scoot over.”
Carson did, and his oldest friend and worst enemy tucked himself into the car, a blast of cold and wintergreen riding over the warm-maple-syrup smell of the cab’s heater.
“So you’re leaving?” Leo asked conversationally.
“Trying to.”
“Where are you headed?”
“Dubai.”
Leo whistled. “What’s it like there?”
“I don’t know. Never been.”
They fell silent.
“I’ll drop by to see Julie,” Leo said. “After you leave, I mean.”
Carson’s hands made fists on his lap. “Let her alone.”
“Just to see if she’s okay. I’ve got a girlfriend, Carse. And even if I didn’t, Julie’s not … I get it. She’s yours.”
“She’s not mine.”
“Oh, she’s yours, all right.”
Leo draped his gloved hands casually over widespread knees. “Was she ticked about the shoe factory?”
“She’s livid.”
“I told the paper not to print it. I’m not going to take the offer. It’s a salvage firm that wants it. Apparently there’s a market for some of the raw materials—those big limestone blocks and steel beams and whatnot.”
The black thing in Carson swirled around, fogged up his head and made him incautious. “That would be a desecration.”
Leo pinned him in place with one of his all-knowing green-eyed glances. “I know.”
He looked away. The driver paused, then spoke to whoever was on the other end of the phone. A tow truck, Carson hoped. A friend. A brother.
Not a wife or a girlfriend. Now that it was too late, he didn’t want to be responsible for taking this man away from his family tonight.
“I have a theory,” Leo said.
“No theories.”
“Okay.”
A few seconds of silence. Then Leo again. “Did you ever meet my dad?”
“Of course I did.”
“Well, sure, everybody met him. But did you ever talk to him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He was a ruthless bastard.”
Carson had known that. Everyone in town knew it. Carson and Leo had never played at Leo’s house, and Glory virtually adopted Leo when they were boys. These things didn’t happen for no reason.
“I loved your mom,” Leo said. “She was the nicest lady I ever met. You know what she told me once? ‘You’re a good boy, Leo. And you’ll be a good man. Don’t mind your father. He’s unhappy, and it makes him cruel. You have a good heart.’ ” He glanced at Carson. “We were ten. I thought, ‘How does she know I’ll be a good man?’ But after that, I wanted to be.”
His mother had been able to do that. She had that kind of magic that could lift people up, make everyone pull together.
Julie’s magic.
“You have great parents,” Leo said.
“I know that.”
“You’re from a great place. You’re in love with a great woman.”
“Knock it off.”
“Are you ready to hear my theory yet?”
“No.”
Leo twisted sideways and draped his arm along the back of the seat, watching Carson with those eyes that saw too much. “Okay, here goes. I think you decided at some point a long time ago that small accomplishments don’t count. Only big, impressive stuff. And you didn’t think you could ever impress anybody in Potter Falls because of the way your dad is, so you made up your mind to leave.”
“I don’t even like you,” Carson muttered.
“Of course you like me. You can’t quit liking somebody after you grow up being best friends with him. It doesn’t happen. You stopped being my friend because I disagreed with you, and you found it threatening.”
“Is that the whole theory?”
“Pretty much.”
“It’s dumb.”
Leo smiled. “Maybe.”
The driver finished his phone call. Leo leaned forward and put his elbows on the back of the front seat. “I’m Leo,” he said. “You want a lift back home?”
“No, thank you. The tow truck will come.”
“All right. Keep warm.” Leo turned to Carson. “What about you?”
Even if he grew wings and flew, he was going to miss his flight.
He couldn’t muster up the energy to care.
“I guess so.”
They clambered out of the car. Carson retrieved his backpack, which seemed to weigh three hundred pounds, and they crossed the slick road.
After stowing his pack in the trunk, Carson got into Leo’s car, and the engine came to life with a purr and a blast of heat.
“Where to?”
“My dad’s, I guess.”
In silence, they drove through downtown Potter Falls. The lights were out at th
e diner. Three of the storefronts were boarded up, one with windows that had been soaped opaque back when Carson was a teenager.
It hurt him to look at it.
Leo turned right on the far side of the bridge and drove down to the water to park beside the factory.
“What if I gave it to you?” he asked. “Would you stay?”
“I don’t want it.”
“You want it.”
He wanted it so badly, he ached.
He didn’t want it nearly as much as he wanted Julie.
“You couldn’t just give it to me.”
“I’m Leo Potter. I can do anything I please.”
Carson made a choked sound that was supposed to be a laugh and came out more like a sob. God, what was wrong with him? He felt like he was being crushed, pressed flat by an enormous weight. He’d stayed here too long, gotten himself in too deep, and now he was drowning, and no one had told him the water would be so heavy. No one had told him it would hurt this fucking much.
“I can’t fix it.”
“I’ve seen the projects you’ve worked on. Bring in the right architect, find the right contractors, and you’re perfectly capable of handling it.”
“I can’t be who you want me to be.”
He meant any of them. His parents. Julie. Leo.
“You already are,” Leo said mildly. “You just have to talk yourself into believing it.”
Carson got out of the car. He didn’t know where he was going. He just needed to move.
He walked toward the water, gazing up at the empty windows of the factory.
This town is dying.
So was your mother.
Julie had given her a kidney and another fifteen years.
Leo was trying to give him the factory.
A second chance.
You decided small accomplishments don’t count.
But of course they did count. Julie’s counted. There was nothing small about what she did—she healed people and fixed things. Julie Long had planted herself in Potter Falls sixteen years ago, and here she flourished. She’d opened an inn, and the world came to her.
Whereas Carson kept flinging himself out into the cold, alone, barking orders in an effort to make things happen. To make things better.
Only it didn’t ever get better. What had he accomplished that someone else couldn’t have done just as well?
Leo’s stupid theory—it was the truth. He’d needed to get out of Potter Falls because of his dad. Because a fierce ambition and a desire to prove himself to Martin Vance had pulled him out into the world.
It had been so long since he felt that pull. That wanderlust. Years since he woke up in the morning excited to build something. He’d never been to Dubai, and he didn’t give a damn.
But the factory—he wanted to see the goddamn factory fixed up.
He wanted to see Julie’s house in the spring, to put a new coat of paint on the shutters in the summer, and to risk his ass on her steep roof cleaning out the gutters in the fall.
He wanted to hold her in the morning in her deep, soft, warm bed and smell her coconut shampoo and feel that belonging, that rightness he’d only ever found with her.
He wanted it, but he didn’t know how to take it.
Leo’s shoes crunched over the frozen snow that covered the river rocks.
Carson was tired of getting in his own way. Tired of working hard all the time and changing nothing. Tired of always moving away from where he longed to be.
“Give the factory to Julie,” he said.
Leo told him, “Give it to her yourself.”
Chapter Thirteen
At the mansion, Carson paused before closing the passenger door. “Thanks for the lift. I’ll call you sometime if this—if everything works out.”
“I’d like that.”
He climbed the back steps and watched the red eyes of Leo’s taillights brighten then disappear as his oldest, best friend pulled out of the driveway.
Probably not the ass, after all. More like his guardian angel.
In the mudroom, he leaned his backpack against the wall and hung up his coat and hat, ignoring the instinct that told him to drop them all on the floor and rush to her. He didn’t even know where to find her, or what to say when he did. He didn’t know anything.
The kitchen was quiet and dark.
“Julie?” he called, walking toward the front of the house. “You up, Jules?”
Quickly, he searched all the downstairs rooms, but she wasn’t around. It was late, nearly ten o’clock. She usually didn’t go to bed this early, and he couldn’t imagine she would have on Christmas Eve. She would be angry, defiantly going about her life, talking to her guests, hardening her heart against him.
He’d blown his last shot with her—he was sure of it. She’d given him everything this time, taken him into her home and her bed. Julie had held nothing back, and he’d not only left her again, he’d done it with no honest acknowledgment of what they had between them. No explanation, no real good-bye.
He hadn’t even given her a Christmas present. He’d bought her a set of silicone pot holders from Bruce at the hardware store, but when he’d gone to set them on the countertop, it had struck him what a singularly small and petty present they were. Here, they seemed to say. These will keep you from setting the kitchen on fire while I’m gone.
So, in the end, he’d left without a gesture of any kind. Just a hug and a kiss on the forehead, and a promise to be back in a few months.
He might as well have punched her.
He found two people in the library, neither of them Julie. He didn’t stop to talk. There was no way he could concentrate enough to be polite.
Carson took the steps two at a time, all the way up to the attic, propelled by an urgency that seemed to come from outside him. He ascended so fast, his vision went gray at the edges. “Julie?”
The apartment was empty.
The darkness pressed down on his chest, pushing through him with a fast, cold pressure that forced him to brace his hands on his knees and suck in deep breaths, one after another.
She wasn’t here.
It hit him hard—so hard he tried to laugh, except his lungs wouldn’t work.
He was such an idiot.
He’d thought his father was trying to trap him, that Julie would entice him away from his real life. He’d thought this dark feeling was something optional that he could detach and leave behind, that he could be ruthless about sentiment because he didn’t need it.
Carson had been wrong about everything.
This was panic. Pure, black, dense panic at Julie’s absence and the unraveling of all his plans and everything he thought he understood.
Panic like he hadn’t felt in sixteen years, since he stood over her unconscious body in a hospital bed and saw that he could lose her, too. He could lose everyone.
He loved her. He’d loved her forever.
And he needed her to be here, safe where he’d left her, even though he didn’t remotely deserve it.
He had to find her, and he had to do it now.
But not looking like this. She’d made a stern face at the travel clothes he put on for the airplane. The clothes belonged to a different man—one he needed to leave behind.
Carson quickly unbuttoned his shirt and stripped it off. Dropped his pants and then remembered to unlace his shoes a few seconds too late and ended up hopping twice on one foot, awkwardly, before he came crashing to the ground.
He gave up and lay down so he could bang the back of his head into the wood floor a few times.
All these years, he’d been running away from death. He was afraid to lose her, so he’d left her.
Fucking idiot.
He loved Julie Long—loved her certainty and her competence and her independent streak, her passion and her sense of humor and her crazy, giant house and the way she kept taking him back and forgiving him for being a complete asshole.
Carson loved the way she loved the town he’d tried to a
bandon, loved that she’d befriended his parents, loved that she’d called him back here to try to mend his relationship with his father.
And if he didn’t tell her soon, it might be too late.
He shoved off his shoes and flung his pants into the corner, stood up, and found the pile of clothes he’d left behind in her closet. Duofold shirt, flannel button-up, dirty work jeans. This was who he was here, with Julie. This was the man he hoped she wanted.
He tugged on his boots, glanced in the mirror and saw a frantic stranger staring back at him with red cheeks and black eyes and flattened, straggly hair.
Nothing to be done about that now.
He thundered down the stairs to the first floor and stuck his head back in the library. “You know where Julie went?”
A rude interruption. It took the guests a few beats to process the question, and Carson gripped the jamb in both hands, tilting his torso into the room, ready to burst from the doorway and run just as soon as he had a direction.
“She’s still at the church, I think.”
He must have looked confused, because the woman clarified, “The Methodist church? She took a bunch of people to the Christmas Eve service. We’re Catholic, so we’re holding out for the Midnight Mass. She said she’d be back in time to drive us if you want to wait.”
He was already gone. He snagged his coat off the hook and burst out the back door.
Six blocks to the church, four of them uphill. He took the first two at a sprint.
Heavy, wet snow fell on his bare head and cooled the back of his neck as he ran. His boots slipped. His breath came out ragged and too loud, and when he started uphill, his thighs and lungs screamed at him to stop.
Carson ignored them. He got a stitch in his side, and he ignored that, too.
He owed her this. He owed her more than this.
He owed her the rest of his life, and half a lifetime’s penance.
When the slick sidewalk and the tilt of the road made running impossible, he staggered. He lurched. The snow stuck to his boots and made them heavy. Gravity tugged at him, but he refused to be subject to it.
His frantic pulse beat out her name. Julie. Julie. Julie.
In the churchyard, he didn’t even pause. He pushed open the oversized entry doors of the Potter Falls Methodist Church in the middle of the Christmas Eve service and brought it to a grinding halt.