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“Is as manipulative and controlling as you are,” she said as calmly as she could manage, then she turned and went back the way they came in.
Tristan caught up with her in the long hallway. “Jecca, you don’t have to do this. It was your dad’s idea to give you the room on the end of the hardware store. He said you’ve always wanted your own studio.”
She turned to him. “You don’t listen any better than he does.” She didn’t raise her voice. She was too angry for that.
“We’ll forget this,” he said. “No studio on the side of a store. We’ll—”
“No,” she said softly, “we aren’t going to do anything at all.”
“Jecca . . .” he began and put his hand on her arm, but she jerked away from him.
“Do you think that because of your prestige in this little town, because you’re a doctor, all of it, do you think you have the right to cajole me into doing what you want? That you can buy my father and me a building and I’ll do whatever you plan for my life?” She took a deep breath. “I told you that there isn’t work here for me, but it seems that you didn’t listen.”
Tristan stepped closer to her. “Jecca, my only defense is that I love you, love you, the woman you are. I love that you’re fun and creative, that you can put a chainsaw together. I love that you found out that Nell was being tortured by a bunch of jealous little brats and you fixed it. You didn’t just talk about the problem but you saw a solution and you did it. All for a little girl you hardly knew. I’ve never met anyone like you. I don’t think there is anyone else like you on the earth. I love you and I want you to stay here with me. Is that so bad?”
“That you did everything behind my back, yes it is,” she said, but then she relented. “Tristan, I love you too. I know it. I feel it, but there’s more to life than romantic love. What happens after I throw my arms around you and declare my love?”
She didn’t wait for his answer. “For weeks, maybe months, a year even, I’ll float around in a dreamy cloud. We’ll have a big wedding and invite your hundreds of relatives. We’ll go on a glorious honeymoon. And then what? I pop out a couple of kids? I take a cooking course so I can have dinner on the table every night when you get home?”
She slowed d">San stepown. “Don’t you understand that soon I wouldn’t be me any longer? What you like about me would starve to death.”
“That’s what Kim told me,” he said. “Staying here with nothing to do would kill your soul.”
“It’s like you said. You told me that sometimes a career chooses the person. Nell is creative. She loves making things, but you said she’s going to be a doctor, that it chose her. You shrugged it off, as though it were a given.”
Jecca took a few breaths, then calmed herself. “What if after you spent your childhood teething on a stethoscope a woman said to you, ‘I love you. Give up being a doctor and live for me?’”
Tristan took a step back, and she felt that for the first time he really and truly heard her. He wasn’t just listening to the words then dismissing them as though they meant nothing.
“Could you give up being a doctor?” she whispered. “Take another job doing something else?”
“No,” he said, and she could see that he at last understood.
What Jecca was realizing was that this was the end, that after today she and Tristan would no longer be a couple. No more snuggling in the evenings, making love in the moonlight. No more seeing Nell and Lucy and Mrs. Wingate. Never again seeing Kim’s jewelry shop because she’d not be able to return to Edilean and see Tristan again.
“I have to leave,” she said. Her heart was pounding in her throat. “I have to go now. Alone. I must get away.” Her voice was urgent, showing how close she was to panic.
She held out her hand to Tris and he said nothing as he put his car keys in her hand, and she quickly walked to the car. She was glad it was a short distance to Mrs. Wingate’s house—and she was glad no one was home when she got there.
She didn’t think about what she did but just shoved clothing and toiletries into a bag. It took her just minutes to gather all her watercolors, put them in the box her father had made (she didn’t waste time thinking that he too had betrayed her), grabbed her keys, got into her car, and started driving north. She knew that if she hesitated, she’d go running back to Tristan and throw herself on him. How could she leave a man she loved so very much?
But she knew the answer. It was because she did love him that she was leaving. Everything she’d said was true. If she married him now—which she knew was what he wanted—she’d make him the unhappiest man on earth. Their love would be torn apart by her desire—her need—to create.
By the time Jecca hit I-95 she was fighting the urge to go back. But she didn’t. Tristan deserved better than a wife who wasn’t happy within herself.
It was late when she reached New York City, and she went directly to Andrea’s gallery. Her apartment was still sublet to Sheila’s cousin, so she couldn’t go there. She could have gone to a hotel but she didn’t want to.
She was so exhausted she could hardly remember the alarm code, but she managed to turn it off, then back on. She unzipped her suitcase enough to take out a jacket, wrapped it around her, then stretche thhe cod out on the hard bench in the middle of the gallery. She wadded up a blouse to use for a pillow.
Tomorrow, she thought as she started to fall asleep. Tomorrow she’d figure out what to do. And maybe tomorrow Tristan would . . . No, she couldn’t think of that.
She fell into an uneasy sleep and didn’t awaken until the burglar alarm went off, then was quickly shut off.
“Jecca!” said a quiet, solemn voice. “I was hoping it was you. The alarm company said there was activity last night.”
It was difficult to wake out of her deep sleep, but the voice was of a person one didn’t ignore. She looked up to see Garrick Preston—Andrea’s father—staring down at her. Since he was six foot four, that was a long way down. Behind him was his secretary, a tall, beautiful young woman who changed every year, and his bodyguard, a young man trained in several forms of combat.
“Sorry,” Jecca said as she struggled to stand up. The long drive and the hard bench, combined with emotional trauma, had taken a toll on her body.
