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“Right and the Mona Lisa is just a painting.”
“Did you just compare my work to the Mona Lisa? Wow.” Taylor glanced toward what she’d spent most of the night working on. It needed to be bisqued, painted, and glazed still, but pride swelled in her chest as she stared at the piece. She smiled at her best friend. “It’s not nearly that spectacular, but it’s the best I’ve ever done by far, so thank you.”
“It’s amazing.” Amy plopped down on the sofa next to her and stared at the piece. “If I could make something like that, you’d better believe I’d give it to Greg.”
She didn’t bother pretending that she didn’t know what her friend meant. She knew. Just as Amy knew. As always, she’d made a piece of herself—but for the first time a part of someone else had emerged from her clay.
She walked over to the table, stared at the piece. It was abstract, but there was no denying the heart overflowing from the hands that held it.
Jack’s hands.
Her heart.
Because Jack held her heart.
“Jack is a traveling man with all his worldly belongings fitting in a Jeep. I don’t think he’d want to lug this thing around in Jessica.”
She thought back to the day she’d gotten sick, the day he’d left, to his words as he’d stood by her bed. She’d pretended to be asleep because she hadn’t trusted herself to say another word. She’d needed him to leave before she forgot how he had a wandering soul and how hard she’d worked for her independence and begged him to stay.
Not just until her illness passed, but for forever.
He’d cared for her. She knew he cared. Had she asked him, he might have stayed. But how could she bind him that way when the very essence of him was freedom?
“He’s in Chattanooga, you know.”
No, she hadn’t known. She’d not heard from Jack since he’d left her room that night. Neither had she reached out to him. There had been nothing else to say. She was living the life she wanted, the life she’d worked hard for, and so was he.
Her fingers itched to run over the hands holding her heart. Jack’s hands.
Things were as they should be.
Are they? Are they really?
“Just for two days,” Amy continued. “He’s working a tough-guy competition. Greg is driving down to see him tomorrow and take in some of the action. You should call.”
Jack was in Tennessee. An hour from her. Oh, Jack. Just knowing he was near made the air in her chest feel thick, making breathing difficult.
“He knows where I am if he wants to see me.”
Her comment to Amy echoed through her head, causing similar words to replay. Words she’d replayed hundreds of times over the
past two months.
If she ever needed him, she knew how to get in touch with him.
What if she’d needed him before he’d left? Still needed him? What if she always needed him? What then?
Nothing had changed. Jack was a free spirit. She wouldn’t be the one to attempt to shackle him.
She was a woman who had fought hard to win her independence, to find her voice, to find herself, and she wasn’t willing to give it up.
“What about you?” Amy asked. “You know where he is. Do you want to see him? Does he know you want to see him?”
She wanted Jack to be happy, not trapped in a white picket fence world with her.
Who says you have to live in a white picket fence world? Or that you even want to?
She’d been raised to think that was what she wanted, needed, but hadn’t she learned to think for herself long ago? Hadn’t she put aside others’ expectations to discover what her own expectations from life were?
