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Maybe it was time to revisit my dream.
I took a sip of wine. “What if…” I began.
Two Months Later
“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, here,” I said triumphantly, finishing the last pace and marking the spot with my toe. JD pushed a stake into the ground and Cody hooked red marker tape around it. We all took a few steps back.
In the center of the field of long grass, we’d created a blueprint, rooms and hallways drawn life-size in shining red tape that shone and danced as the wind played with it.
“So that’s the living room?” asked Cody, pointing. “And what’s this?”
“That’ll be a porch, running all along the side of the house, so we can sit out at night.”
He ran along one of the hallways, excited. “And this room?”
“An office, for me,” I said. “So I can work from home.”
I’d take the leap and gone solo, opening a one-woman architecture business here in Mount Mercy. I’d still have to travel to New York sometimes to check in on projects like the hospital, but there’d be less and less of that as time went on. I was already getting interest from people in Mount Mercy and the surrounding towns and I’d said I’d look into some improvements for the team’s base. I was going to be busy. And then there was the most important project of all: overseeing construction of our new house.
“And this room?” asked Cody.
“Entire room is devoted to Legos.”
He ran over and hugged me.
JD and I had bought a plot of land on the edge of town and I’d designed a ranch-style house that would have great views out across the mountains. The same house I’d glimpsed in my dream, on the plane on the way to Poland.
JD adjusted his Stetson, put his arm around my shoulders and pointed to the area in front of the house. “Figure I can run a fence down here, divide it into two pastures. Then build a stable over here, nothing fancy…”
Cody’s face lit up. “We’re going to have horses?!”
JD grinned, picked him up and swung him up onto his shoulders, then walked him around where the horses would live. I noticed the gap that had opened up between Cody’s pant cuffs and his sneakers: he was going to need new pants again. He’d really started to shoot up in height, over the last few months, just in time to start at his new school in Mount Mercy in the fall. Moving from the city to this tiny, quaint little town was going to be a big change but he seemed more excited than scared. He’d grown in confidence so much since he met JD. Working for myself, I’d be able to set my own hours and see a lot more of him.
I heard the sound of an engine in the distance. “That’ll be them,” I said. “We should head down there.”
With Cody still on JD’s shoulders, we walked through the pastures, towards the trees that marked where a creek ran across the bottom of our plot of land. It was August and the sun blazed down from a cloudless sky, baking us. It was a relief to get under the shade of the trees.
A big black SUV rumbled along the dirt track that edged our property and pulled onto the grass. The doors flew open and people started spilling out: Kian and his girlfriend Emily, Bradan and Stacey and Gabriel and Olivia. Another black SUV followed at a discreet distance: Emily’s Secret Service protection.
The back of the SUV was full of coolers and we all helped with the unloading, setting up folding tables and laying out food. There were platters of thick-cut, hearty sandwiches, crispy bacon and slices of roast chicken peeking out between lush green lettuce and juicy tomatoes. There were salads: kale with creamy mozzarella, tomatoes and wild rice, a white bean salad wrapped in lettuce leaves, pasta salad with flaked tuna, sun-dried tomatoes and herbs. And then the sweet dishes started arriving: Poke cakes and lemon drizzle cake, an enormous pie of some kind and trays of cookies. That’s a lot of food.
Stacey beckoned me over. “Can you give me a hand? There wasn’t much space in our SUV with six of us, so most of the food had to go with the Secret Service.”
Oh.
A Secret Service agent opened the rear door of their SUV and I stared. There was at least twice as much food again: more sandwiches, chips and dips, cold meats and a cheese board, three more salads and two trays of baked, sweet treats that smelled amazing. We can’t possibly eat all this!
But then Cal and his girlfriend Bethany arrived with Rufus, and Danny roared up in his vintage Jaguar along with Erin and Gina and that made fourteen of us. As Erin set up a wireless speaker system and hung lanterns from the trees for when it got dark, I helped Danny unload the drinks from the trunk of his Jaguar. There was a cooler filled with beer and pitchers of orange iced tea and three sorts of aguas frescas, Mexican fruit coolers: watermelon, peach and mango. Danny grunted as he hefted the cooler. “You okay?” I asked. I still felt guilty that he’d gotten shot protecting me.
