“It was. Trust me,” Leah muttered, refusing to make eye contact.
When she didn’t play along, Trudy sighed irritably. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “I saw him the other day at the airport, did I tell you? I went to pick up my kid from his trip to see Grandma, and who comes striding down the Jetway out of first class like he owns the place?”
Leah looked up again. “From Vegas? You saw Michael get off a plane from Vegas?”
“Vegas,” Trudy reached over and bonked her on the shoulder. “What makes you think my mother lives in Vegas? She lives in Atlanta! And Handsome got off the plane from Atlanta. But he was just passing through. He said he’d been to Cairo to climb some pyramids or something like that.”
“Cairo! As in Egypt? That Cairo?”
Trudy laughed. “Oh right, it was just a fling!” she cried dramatically. “You seem pretty interested to me.”
“Shut up,” Leah said, and ducked again.
“Fine,” Trudy said with an exaggerated sigh. “So anyway, I picked up Barton that day, and do you know what my mother did to his hair?” she demanded, launching into a tale of her mother’s lame ideas about child-rearing as Leah tried to process what she’d just heard.
Leah had wondered—oh, who was she kidding? She’d obsessed—about why he hadn’t called her. Or if he would ever call her. And she’d assumed—in an obsessive manner again—that she had lost him twice in a lifetime. What sort of woman had two shots at the love of her life and watched them fall apart? She did not want to believe that it was really over, that a single day in a cabin with a madman could turn things around so completely. But it had.
Leah had done a lot of thinking about that day and the things she’d said after it was all over. She’d been hurt and frightened, and so damn angry that he hadn’t fallen all over himself to apologize to her for it all that she’d lost sight of some of the stuff he’d said. Like how he couldn’t live with her uncertainty, that he’d tried, and he’d been honest, but couldn’t apologize enough for who he was to suit her.
And all she’d talked about was how “sorry” wasn’t good enough.
Funny how crystal clear her thoughts were about him when he wasn’t around to muddy the waters. Her thoughts were pretty crystal clear now that she didn’t want to be without him. She loved him like she had never and would never love another man, she was certain. In spite of Juan Carlo, and all the women Michael had dated showing up everywhere, and even though he had left her so cruelly five years ago, she loved him.
After weeks of obsessing about it, it all seemed simple now. Her heart had finally won out over her fear of being hurt again. What she wanted, what would make her happy, had trumped the fear of the thing that would destroy her.
As Trudy talked, Leah remembered a time in New York, just a couple of months after she and Michael had started dating. She’d run into an old boyfriend—hard to believe that she’d been a dating fiend before she met Michael, but she had—and once, when she’d tried to remember them all, Lucy had to fill in some of the blanks.
Anyway, she’d run into John, and they had chatted a little bit, and he’d remarked that she looked great. Leah remembered very clearly what she was wearing—a black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, some killer Manolo Blahniks (an extravagance she couldn’t afford even then), and a full-length camel coat. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was holding a bag with two giant muffins, hoping to catch Michael before he went to work.
“Thanks,” she’d said to John, beaming at the compliment. “You look pretty good yourself.”
He laughed and shook his head. “I look like I’m going to a stuffy law office. You look . . . shiny. Very shiny. It must be a guy.”
Leah had blushed a little, but laughed at his calling her shiny. “Okay, I’m busted, there’s a guy. How’d you know?”
“Just a guess,” he said, taking her in from the top of her head to the tip of her toes, “because you never looked that good with me. It’s sort of corny, but my grandma used to say that the heart has a way of shining through when it’s full. You know what I mean? You always looked good when we were dating, but you were never quite so shiny,” he said with a laugh.
At the time, Leah hadn’t understood exactly what he meant. But she did now.
She hadn’t shined in three months.
THE following month, a new cast member was introduced to Coming to America. Nina Anderson was to play Meoma, a Native American woman who would become the love interest of one of the lead actors. She would make her debut in the last episode of the first season as a teaser leading in to the second season. Assuming there was a second season.