When he finally set her down, she was full to bursting with happiness. “It’s good to see you too. Please come in.”
He closed the door behind him, and they chatted about his flight and drive from the airport as he followed her into the kitchen. She had a bottle of Tidal Bay wine chilling in the fridge, so she took it out and served it. They raised their glasses to Valerie and Drew. Then they enjoyed a delicious dinner of lobster linguine, by candlelight, at the kitchen island while catching up on everything, most notably the new book Peter was working on—another biography, this time about a famous mountain climber whose plane went missing in the 1990s.
Later, they sat on Gwen’s front veranda in two white-painted rocking chairs, looking up at the stars over the Minas Basin.
“It’s so beautiful here,” Peter said. “I can’t tell you how good it feels to be back. The peace and quiet has totally spoiled LA for me.”
“Maybe you should move here,” she casually suggested.
He turned his head to look at her. “I’ve certainly thought about it. Maybe I should think about it some more.”
Gwen smiled. “Maybe you should.”
They continued to rock in their chairs.
“I wonder what Eric is doing right now,” Peter said.
“It’s hard to say. Keri is obsessed with the wedding, so they might be practicing the choreography for their first dance, which we’ll probably see on YouTube.”
“That should be entertaining.”
The crickets chirped in a steady rhythm, and a light breeze wafted through the weeping willow in the front yard.
“You know what finally ended it for Eric and me?” Gwen asked, turning her head slightly in the chair. “The thing that opened our eyes to the fact that we couldn’t fix our marriage?”
“I’d like to know.”
“Well, it wasn’t just the problem of how we’d handled our grief differently or that I wasn’t ready to have a baby before. We talked about that, and I told him I was finally open to having another child, but then things took a weird turn.” Gwen paused as she gazed up at the Big Dipper. “First, we found out that the mother of an old college friend of mine had passed away. I suggested we go to the funeral to be there for her, and Eric said he preferred not to because funerals were depressing. I said, ‘But this is a dear friend of mine, and she was incredibly close to her mother.’ Eric wouldn’t stop bellyaching about it, so I gave up trying to convince him, and I just went on my own.”
“No one will ever say funerals are fun,” Peter said, “but they are important.”
“I agree,” Gwen replied. “But there was no arguing with him. He said life’s too short to spend it going to funerals. He hates hospitals too, by the way. Anyway, a half hour later, when I was looking at a video on my phone—one of the ones I shot in Alaska—he said, ‘I don’t think I could stare at a wall of ice for half an hour.’ I said to him: ‘I agree. You’d get bored. You’d start complaining about why the captain wasn’t speeding back to town.’” Gwen let her gaze sweep across the enormous night sky. “I think that was the moment we both realized that we justdidn’t match up. And I’m still not sure if it was losing Lily that changed each of us in different ways or if we were always mismatched and didn’t realize it. Maybe we got married because we felt the pressure to do that after so many years as a couple, just like Valerie felt a pressure to get married.”
Peter mulled that over. “It didn’t take him long to get back together with Keri. How did you feel about that?”
Gwen remembered the afternoon in her den when Eric had come by to ask for a divorce so that he could propose to Keri.
“I was surprisingly happy for him. Or maybe I was just selfishly relieved that he was motivated to get an uncontested divorce so that we could each move on as quickly as possible.” She looked at Peter. “I have their wedding invitation on my desk at work. It’s next weekend. I wasn’t going to go, but now that you’re here, you could be my plus-one.”
Peter chuckled. “I’m pretty sure you’d rather stick needles in your eyes.”
She joined him in laughter. “Correct. I’m not all that keen on going to my ex-husband’s wedding, and I’m sure Keri would prefer it if I wasn’t there. I’d much rather do something else with you.”
“Like what?” he asked, reaching for her hand.
They rocked back and forth in perfect unison. “Oh, I don’t know. Something boring.”
“We could watch a documentary about Audrey Hepburn,” he suggested.
“That wouldn’t be boring at all.”
“You’re right. Hey. We could go dancing.”
“That would be fun.”
Gwen rubbed her thumb over the back of Peter’s hand. “Thank you for the kind mention in the acknowledgments.”
“I meant every word,” he replied. “I couldn’t have written the book without you.”
Their chairs creaked as they rocked on the old wooden floorboards.
“Maybe I was your muse,” she suggested, glancing at him with teasing affection.
“You were definitely something—something I don’t ever want to be without.”
He leaned across the armrest to invite her for a kiss, and she leaned into it with boundless pleasure and happiness.
The End
