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“As comfortable as I’m going to get with this big belly,” she said. I could hear the smile in her voice. I moved my hands over the skin at the base of her spine. She sighed, her body relaxing.
“I love you,” I said simply.
“I love you too,” she whispered back.
As I massaged my wife’s back, my mind wandered, my heart full. I had thought once, that I had lost myself because of love. But the opposite was true. I’d found myself when I’d given my heart to Tenleigh, found what was important to me, what really mattered. And now, running my hands over her smooth skin, there was nowhere on earth I’d rather be than here in this bed, living the life I led. The truth was, we didn’t live a complicated life nor a fancy one. But we knew the simple joy of a warm night at home watching TV, the deep thankfulness of a refrigerator filled with food, the love of family and friends, and the quiet grace of white mist rising over the mountains outside our window on a cool, fall morning.
And suddenly, lying right there, I knew something. No, I didn’t know it. I felt it—felt it in my gut and felt it coursing through my blood.
“Ten,” I said, laying my hand on her belly, “you know that something?”
“What something?” she asked sleepily.
“That something I felt like I was meant to do.”
She turned her head and her eyes met mine. My heart skipped a beat. “Yes,” she said softly.
“I’m doing it.”
Tenderness filled her expression and she brought her hand up to my cheek as I leaned in to her caress and she ran her thumb over my cheekbone. “Is it enough?” she asked on a whisper.
I leaned forward and kissed her, never in my life feeling more sure about anything. I whispered against her lips, “It’s more than enough. It’s so much more than I ever dreamed.”
We had everything we needed. None of it was big. Most of it was simple. But what I knew in that moment was that the size of your home, your car, your wallet doesn’t have one single thing to do with the size of your life. And my life…my life felt big, filled with love and with meaning.
Want more of Mia Sheridan’s addictive, emotional love stories? Get lost in the romance of Wine Country in GRAYSON’S VOW
Kira
“Never fret, my love, the universe always balances the scales. Her ways may be mysterious, but they are always just.”
—Isabelle Dallaire, “Gram”
In a long history of bad days, this one was at the top of the list. And it was only nine a.m. I stepped from my car and took a deep breath of the balmy, late-summer air before walking toward Napa Valley Savings Bank. The sultry morning shimmered around me, the sweet scent of jasmine teasing my nose. The peaceful beauty seemed wrong somehow—the bleakness of my mood in direct contrast to the warm, sunshiny day. An arrogant idea, I supposed. As if the weather should express itself according to my mood. I sighed as I pulled open the glass front door of the bank.
“May I help you?” a cheery brunette asked as I approached her teller window.
“Yes,” I said, withdrawing my ID and an old savings book from my purse. “I want to close this account.” I slid both toward the teller. A corner of the savings book was folded back, revealing numbers my gram had entered when showing me how to keep track of our deposits. The memory tore at my heart, but I forced what I hoped was a cheerful-looking smile as the girl took the book, opened it, and began entering the account number.
I thought back to the day we’d opened the account. I’d been ten. My gram had walked me here, and I’d proudly deposited the fifty dollars she’d given me for helping with yard work throughout the summer. We’d made trips to this bank over the years when I’d stayed at her house in Napa. She’d taught me the true value of money—it was meant to be shared, used to help others, but also represented a type of freedom. The fact that I currently had little money, few options, and every material possession I owned was stuffed in the trunk of my car, was proof of how right she’d been. I was anything but free.
“Two thousand, forty-seven dollars and sixteen cents,” the teller stated, glancing up at me. I nodded. It was even a little more than I had hoped. Good. That was good. I needed every cent. I joined my hands together on the counter and exhaled slowly as I waited for her to count out the cash.
Once the money was safely tucked into my purse and the account closed, I wished the teller a good day and then headed toward the door. When I spotted a drinking fountain, I turned to make a brief stop. I’d only been using the air conditioning in my car sparingly so as to save on gas and had been consistently hot and thirsty.
