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EPILOGUE
Twelve Months Later
December 24th
Kara walked out of the meeting and flipped up the hood of her jacket. Rain was falling from a deep, gunmetal-gray sky. The forecast was for a wet and gloomy holiday. “No white Christmas this year,” the weatherman had said when she’d turned on the news this morning.
Perfect.
Enough with the snow for the holidays. Maybe someday she’d feel differently about it. But not this year.
She climbed into her vehicle, a five-year-old Subaru Outback she’d settled on the year before, and drove through the city streets, strings of lights glowing brightly, storefronts painted with snowmen and Santas or Nativity scenes all the while touting end-of-the-year sales. Christmas and commercialism. Never far apart.
Better than Christmas and massacre, she told herself, then angry at her thoughts, turned on the radio and caught the tail end of “The Little Drummer Boy” before the first notes of “Silent Night” wafted through the speakers. “No!” she said aloud. Not now. Probably not ever. She switched the channel to some hard rock from the 70s.
“Dream On,” by Aerosmith.
Slightly better.
No, a whole lot better.
And in her warped opinion, more soothing.
She was probably in the minority on that one, but she didn’t care and drove along the river, the water nearly black as it reflected the dark, moody clouds overhead. It had been a long year. She was still hounded by the press, and there were details of the trust and estate that hadn’t been quite settled, but a new attorney was working on it, a lawyer in his forties, all business, all by the book, about as far from Merritt Margrove as one could get. He was also working with the insurance companies in dealing with the aftermath of the accident in the mountains a year earlier. Thankfully Sven Aaronsen had pulled through after a month in the hospital and several months of physical therapy. Now, she’d heard, he was driving again, even though his blood-alcohol level had been elevated at the time of the crash. And hers—under the limit as far as she knew, but still she felt responsible. She would do right by Aaronsen, but for now, the insurance companies were still haggling it out.
She parked in a space on the street in front of Tate’s building, let herself in and was greeted by Rhapsody, who, as usual, raced down the steps, barking and leaping and generally going out of her mind. “I missed you, too,” Kara said, ruffling the dog’s coarse fur before Rhapsody escaped, running up and down the stairs crazily until Kara reached the loft.
Tate was at his table/desk and kicked out his chair as she appeared. “Hey,” he said with a smile, whirling the chair to face her. “How’d it go?”
“It went. Pretty good.” She peeled off her jacket and noticed the Christmas tree in the windowed corner of the loft, her first in years. She felt at home here, with Tate. She’d crashed a year ago and never left, even going so far as putting her Whimstick house on the market. Soon, she would list the house in the West Hills of Portland. Now that Faiza and Roger had moved to sunny southern California to chase after the Hollywood dream and Kara was the legal owner, she wanted to get rid of it. Once her childhood home, now an albatross around her neck.
She sauntered up to Tate, fished into the front pocket of her jeans and dropped the coin on the table near his laptop. “One year sober,” she said.
His teeth flashed in a roguish grin. “And it’s been a great year.”
“It has.” She straddled him then, wrapping her arms around the back of his neck and kissing him. They’d become lovers the night that he’d returned from the hospital, something that just happened between them, a spark fueled by adrenaline, trauma and the knowledge that in one single heartbeat, a life could change forever.
Rhapsody whined, begging for more attention. “Oooh. Duty calls,” she said, pulling away and climbing off the chair. To the dog, “You want to go for a walk?”
“I took her out not an hour ago.”
“But it’s Christmas and she wants to go again.”
“You want me to go with you?” he asked, and there it was again, that unspoken need of his to care about her, his worry about her mental state. Not that she blamed him. She’d been a frightened shell of herself a year ago. And to this day she still counted door locks each night, even though she lived with Tate and he was in the house. It was just a habit she hadn’t quite broken. “Nah, I’ll be fine.” She snapped on Rhapsody’s leash. “It’ll be a short one.”
“I’ll hold you to it. And I’ll order Chinese for dinner.”
She couldn’t help but grin. Pointing a finger at him, she said, “Do that. Let’s make it a holiday tradition.” Donning her jacket, she headed downstairs again, the dog’s toenails clicking loudly on the steps.
Outside the wind had picked up, not much traffic on the streets, darkness pressing in, streetlamps glowing through the pelting rain. Holding the leash tightly, Kara jogged to the edge of the river and stared at the ever-moving depths as Rhapsody sniffed at the sea wall. Between the lampposts, strings of colored lights winked in the rain. Only a few cars passed, their tires noisy on the wet streets.
Turning from the river, Kara looked up to the corner windows of Tate’s loft. She found his silhouette, a haloed shadow visible next to their Christmas tree, a twelve-foot Douglas fir gleaming in lights and tinsel.
Her heart swelled and the wordsOne Day at a Timerang through her mind. He was right. The last year had been a good one. It had started out awash in painful, heart-wrenching memories. The worst was of Marlie. She missed her sister each and every day and probably always would, but she had to admit, each and every day this past year had been better than the last. She crossed her fingers. Hoped her luck would last.
Smiling, she waved up to Tate, then tugged on the dog’s leash. “Come on, Rhaps,” she said, jogging back to the loft, “we’re going home.” Ridiculously she blinked against a sudden wash of tears, then repeated, her voice catching, “We’re finally going home.”
