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Chapter One
Dear Emily,
Forgive my familiarity. We’ve never met and yet I feel as though I know you. You will be receiving formal notification, but I couldn’t leave it at that. The decision has been made to officially pronounce Winston’s death. This will award you the death benefits and pension you deserve, and yet somehow, I sense that isn’t what matters to you.
As Winston’s immediate superior I could go on about the standout soldier he was. But during this last tour... I walked into the trap with him. Ahead of him. I unknowingly led him to his eventual death. He saved my life. And we spent days in hiding together. Perhaps I am being selfish, but I need you to know that you are all that kept us alive. His talk of you. His love for you. His belief that that kind of love was real.
In any event, it’s been two years since he left to find water for us and never came back. Two years since I was discovered by friendly forces. Two years of trying to understand why I am here and he is not. He had everything to live for.
Please know that for the rest of my life, I am here for you, a willing servant, pledging to have your back or do whatever I can for you, no matter what...
A signature followed. Contact information. Emily couldn’t see any of it through her tears. She wadded up the letter and threw it across the room, half watching as it hit the wood blinds open to the California sunshine outside her living room window. Their living room window.
Dressed in black pants that hugged her ankles, a loose cream-colored sheath, and a short black-and-cream three-quarter-sleeve open sweater, with three-inch black stilettos, she tried to pretend that this day was like any other, that she hadn’t been up all night, that she was prepared for the meeting she would be leading that morning in the largest conference room of the LA marketing firm she’d been with since college.
The forty-five-minute drive north might have been preparation enough if she hadn’t spent the past twelve hours vacillating between grief that cut the air out of her lungs and an anger that was equally debilitating.
In the ten years she’d been with the firm, she’d never called in sick. She’d been at work when officials had come to her two years before to inform her that Winston was missing in action in Afghanistan. She’d remained in her office, mostly comatose, but there, until the end of the day, but had put in for a couple of vacation days before she’d left.
She usually scheduled vacation for birthdays and anniversaries.
And this?
What was it really, but a formality? Something everyone around her assumed?
Good news, even, as it released benefits to her that she didn’t already have.
She didn’t need them.
/> She needed Winston.
Staring out the blinds, at the grass that she kept carefully manicured just as Winston had, she let the sun’s bright glint partially blind her for a moment or two as she tried to look past it to find some kind of direction.
For two years she’d refused to believe the love of her life was dead. Winston wouldn’t leave her on earth alone. They’d promised when they were fourteen that they’d be there for each other for the rest of their lives. And at fifteen, when they’d proclaimed their romantic love. And again at twenty-two, when they’d stood in front of an entire town’s worth of family and friends and made the vow publicly.
For two years, she’d refused to believe.
For two years she’d been alone, living in an emotional freezer, waiting.
No answers appeared in the brightness outside her window. Stars and yellow-lined pink smears dotted her vision as she moved toward her purse and keys. She had to get to the office.
She wasn’t dead, and work was the life she had.
Almost at the front door, Emily glanced toward the living room. Tearing up again, she went back, picked up the wadded paper, carefully smoothed it. Carried it out to the car with her. Drove all the way to LA with it on her lap.
She parked in her designated spot five minutes ahead of schedule. Dropped her keys in their pocket in her purse. And very carefully, she picked up the letter, folded it and slid it in her wallet.
* * *
Emily wasn’t 100 percent on board with her plan a month later when she presented herself at the fertility clinic in town. Her heart was all there, 150 percent. Her body, the same.
But her mind...wasn’t totally convinced she hadn’t lost it.
“Let’s head back to my office,” Christine Elliott, the clinic’s founder and manager, said as she collected Emily from the large and oddly calming waiting room. Instead of sitting in seats placed close together, forcing patients to face each other, the comfortable armchairs were arranged in separate areas, only two to four per grouping, with large floral arrangements separating them. Healing tones of new age music played, and the wall art, with predominant shades of purple, was somehow comforting.
The air was infused with a hint of lavender. She recognized the scent immediately only because, in her attempts to survive over the past couple of years, she’d gone through a phase of relying heavily on aromatherapy.
And, okay, still dabbed her wrists with pure lavender oil on occasion.
She’d taken up carrying peppermints with her at all times, too—just in case they really did promote calm and mental clarity.
As they reached the door bearing Christine’s placard at the end of the inner hallway, Emily pulled an individually wrapped little white circle out of her pocket and slipped it into her mouth. Fresh breath was always good.
In a short flowered summer dress, Christine could have been heading out for a day of shopping and lunch with friends. Emily liked that. Just...it felt better entering her office for “that” conversation with a woman who looked like shopping and lunch, rather than austerity.
Not one who’d ever really spent tons of time contemplating her wardrobe once she’d purchased clothes—figuring she did the work in the store so whatever was in her closet had already passed inspection—Emily had troubled herself for most of her shower time that morning, trying to determine what to wear. Would she do better if she appeared casual, like she was fully sane and prepared to calmly bring a child into the world all alone?
Or would businesslike and competent serve her better?
Her white capris and short black top with jeweled thongs didn’t seem to matter a whit as she took a seat on the couch Christine indicated for their meeting.
The first time she’d been in that room—the only other time she’d been there—she and Winston had been shown to the two leather-bottomed seats in front of Christine’s massive light wood desk. She’d liked sitting there. The woman’s desk looked like something out of an upscale trinket shop, with everything carefully placed to show it off in its best light. To tempt you to want to own it. Angels in various forms. A china horse. Florals and a small colorful metal heart sculpture.
The couch, also light-colored and leather, faced the chair Christine had landed on. Emily had nowhere to look but in the other woman’s eyes.
“You asked to speak with me specifically,” Christine opened the conversation. No “How have you been?” Or “Nice to see you.”
Emily nodded, her light blond hair loose and straight around her shoulders. She used to curl it. Pull it back in clips. It all seemed like too much trouble these days.
“You were behind me in school...what, a couple of years?” she asked inanely, panicked for a second as she grappled with the reality of what she was doing. Christine had never attended parties or been a part of any crowd that Emily knew of, but she’d recognized her when she and Winston had visited the clinic.
He hadn’t remembered her.
“Three years. I was a freshman your senior year.”
“You used to leave during lunch. The McDermott Street door was down the hall from my locker and I’d see you...”
Only seniors had been allowed to leave for lunch.
“You always left alone...”
She’d wondered about it, in the way you’re curious about something in the moment and then forget about it. It hadn’t been any of her business.
And still wasn’t.
“My grandmother was diabetic and needed an insulin shot,” Christine said, not seemingly at all put out by Emily’s rudeness. Or the unprofessional and inappropriate topic of conversation.
“You were, what, fourteen?”
Christine’s short dark hair barely touched her shoulders as she shrugged. “I wanted to help, thought it was cool and seriously didn’t mind doing it. Gram said Gramps hurt when he did it. Besides, she always had a great lunch ready for me when I got there.”
Still...she’d been fourteen. A kid. Missing out on all of the gossip and drama in the lunchroom. And the friendships that formed or solidified because of them.
