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Sixteen
She should go talk to Juniper. She should go talk to somebody. Anybody. But instead she found herself driving to the graveyard. It made her feel grim and sad, and she didn’t go there all that often, because there was something so definitive about it that she just hated.
But that plot had been meant for the both of them. And there was just something... There was just something... She parked in the cemetery parking lot and lowered her head over the steering wheel and started to cry. Deep, wrenching sobs. And somehow, she couldn’t make herself get out.
Finally, she did. Finally, she caught her breath enough to do that.
She got out of the truck and walked down the familiar path to where Chuck’s gravestone was.
“This is weird,” she said. “I’m not given to talking to you. I guess you know that. Or you don’t. I... I don’t know how I feel about it.”
But the stone was unresponsive. And the ring was heavy in her pocket.
Real.
The weight of it was real.
Present.
Here.
Now.
And suddenly, she felt so stark and clear what Juniper had said to her when she’d first confessed that she was pregnant, and the guilt that she felt. That Chuck would never be a father, that he would never have had that dream, but she was moving on and living. Because she was alive.
She didn’t know if she believed in the idea that a person had a set number of days. In the idea that when it was your time it was your time. In fact, she had resisted that hard, because it had felt like in no way could it be her twenty-six-year-old husband’s time.
But she supposed in the end it didn’t matter. He had the years and the life he’d been given. And they’d been happy.
Her heart had been his, because she’d given it to him, and even with her attraction to Kit, she had devoted her love and her body to the man she’d made her vows to.
Till death do us part.
And it had parted them. So much earlier than she’d anticipated. But it had.
And she was holding herself back. Holding herself back with a foot in her old life. No. Worse. With her heart in her old life.
What if she let go? What if she listened to Kit?
Listened to what he’d said. That love wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t gone. It was different. But it lived in her. What if she trusted that? And what if she quit feeling so damned guilty that she had fantasies about Kit?
She wanted to cry. Wanted to weep at the injustice of everything.
But not at the life she was living now. For the first time in a very long time. She was angry that the world was cruel and Chuck had died too young. But she wasn’t angry that she was here with Kit. She wasn’t angry that she was having his baby.
“I’m happy.”
And she had to put her hand over her mouth to stifle a sob.
She was happy. She loved Kit.
And the sound that tore from her body was half exultation, half despair.
She loved Kit Carson. And it wasn’t like anything else. They were everything. They were obsession and heat and fire and love. They were a previously undiscovered passion that she hadn’t known existed. They were connected. And they always had been. And if fate was real, then maybe she had to accept that she’d been walking toward him all this time.
Maybe she had to accept that she had been Chuck’s fate. And they’d had love. And it had been real. But where his road ended, hers kept going. He had been love. And it had been real. But her fate went on. It went forward.
She felt...giddy and guilty and afraid, because how could it be this easy? How could it be this clear? Was it okay that Kit felt like fate? Was it okay if he might be the love of her life?
