He settled his eyes square on mine. “I didn’t not care about you.” He leaned closer. “I cared about you.” Then he added, “Too much.”
“Can you care about a person too much?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out.”
I studied his face. What was he saying? “Maybe you’re lying now.”
But he shook his head and picked up one of my hands and pressed it to his heart. It pounded in his chest. “I’m not lying now,” he said.
That was a heck of a confession. “Why did you lie before?”
“Because I thought it was better for you.”
“Why? Why would it be better for you to break my heart?”
He frowned and leaned closer. “Did I?”
“Pretty much.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think that would happen.”
“Because you thought I didn’t really like you?”
Ian nodded. “I thought it was just the aftereffects of the trauma.”
“Well, guess what? It wasn’t.”
“I thought I was doing you a favor, really. I thought I was the only one who would suffer.”
I had to ask. “Why would you suffer?”
He held my gaze. “Because I didn’t want to be without you.”
I kept not breathing.
This didn’t seem like it could possibly be happening—me in Kit’s red dress, talking to Ian, in a tux, on his knees, holding my hand against his beating heart. And yet there was no denying the boat, the water, breeze, the churn of the current.
We motored under a stone bridge, lit underneath by hanging lanterns, but I barely noticed. Until I heard my name, just as the bridge passed overhead.
“Margaret!” The voice sounded very close.
I looked up.
“Margaret!”
Hands waving on top of the bridge. Two sets of hands.
“Margaret!”
It was my parents. Together, side by side, standing on the bridge at the top of the arch.
“Why aren’t you at the reception!” I called up to them.
“We decided to ditch!”
“Did anyone think to tell me that?”
“Couldn’t find you!”
That’s when my dad put an arm around my mom. In that one gesture, I knew something. She was okay.
More than that: They were okay.
All that worry about her? I could let that go. They’d found each other, and they knew what to do. They’d either work it out or they wouldn’t. But my job there was done.
*
THE BOAT DIDN’T slow. We kept moving ahead. My parents receded into the Bruges night, waving a little longer, then dropping their hands and turning to continue their stroll.
Ian watched them, too, for a minute, before turning back to me.
“Why are you here again?” I asked.
“I came to find you.”
“You came all the way from Scotland to find me?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“Because I miss you.” The word sounded like “mess.”
“You do?”
Ian nodded. “Every day.”
I didn’t want to break this easily. I wanted to hold out and be tough and stay mad. Maybe it was the thump of his heart against my hand, or those earnest eyes, or that tuxedo he was not just wearing but rocking—but I couldn’t hold out. “I miss you, too.”
“Even after so long?”
“I think it might be getting worse, actually,” I confessed.
“I told myself I had to wait a year to find you again—give you time to settle and find your way. I consulted with my brothers, even, and everyone agreed—a full year at the minimum. Now, it’s a year. I had just bought a plane ticket to the States when I saw Kit’s post about you coming to Belgium.”
“You bought a ticket to the States?”
Ian nodded.
“But then you came to Bruges?”
Ian nodded again.
“Did Kit know you were coming?”
“In a way, I suppose. She texted me your flight schedule, and the hotel, and a photo of the wedding invite. And then she swore that you’d be all alone all evening long while she and your mother went to this crazy wedding. And then she told me she’d rented a room for me down the hall.”
I shook my head. Kit. So sneaky. “So you went to the hotel?”
He nodded. “When I found her there instead of you, she sent me running toward the church.”
“And they sent you running to the canal boats. And here we are.”
“But,” lan said, “she didn’t tell me about Scotland.”
I met his eyes. “No?”
“Why were you going there?”
“Oh, you know. Just general tourism. Visit Loch Ness. See a few kilts.”
Ian smiled a little. There it was.
It was so strange, looking back, to feel on that crowded boat like there was nobody else around. The sound of the motor disappeared, and so did everyone around us, and so did the past and the future.
“Back when we met,” Ian said, “I was supposed to be helping you—but it was really you who helped me. The way you teased me—the way you called out my bitterness—the way you surprised me over and over and showed me the world from different angles. It made me better to be around you. You made me laugh—probably more in those weeks we spent together than in my whole life beforehand. You taught me about goofiness. You showed me a different way to be in the world. You brought out some warmer, more hopeful part of my soul. Then, after I left, I had to go cold again.”
He went on. “I moved home to the gray skies, and I took a job I didn’t like. I didn’t even try to look for something better, because all I could do was count the weeks until I could get back to you. I made a pact with myself to give you a year—but I almost broke it a hundred different times. My only exception was if you started seeing somebody else. Then I was allowed to go to Texas and fight for you.”
I gave him a look like he was crazy. “Seeing somebody? Like who?”
“I think that carpenter working on the camp lodge has a thing for you.”
“He does not.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if the architect did, too. He’s a bit too enthusiastic.”
“That is bananas.”
“And of course I keep expecting Chip to crawl back begging any minute.”
“Unlikely. Since he’s married now.”
“Short of that, I had to wait a year.”
“For my sake.”
Ian nodded. “So you could get back on your feet.”
I let out a long breath. “Not literally, though. Because it’s not looking like that’s going to happen.”
Ian nodded. “Maybe not, but you’ve done great. I’ve been cheering you from afar.”
Something about not just what Ian was saying but the way he was saying it—so intense, so unflinching—had me practically hypnotized.
“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” he asked then.
Did I? I could barely think. “Are you saying you’re glad I’m better?”
He shook his head, like, Not quite it.
“Are you saying it’s been a tough year for you, too?”
Not it, either.
I shrugged. “You’re going to have to tell me.”
He’d been resting back on his heels a bit, but now he rose up on his knees and edged forward, leaning in close.
“I think about you all the time, Maggie Jacobsen. I can hardly sleep for missing you. I ache to see you and be near you. I love you with a longing that I can barely contain, and I fear it’s going to drown me.”
Those eyes again.
Maybe I should have leaned in to kiss him then, but I found I couldn’t move. It seemed impossible that I could want something so badly—and also get it. I’d been holding back for so long, I didn’t know how to let go.
Until he brought his hand up to the back of my neck and pulled my mouth to his.
Because at the kiss, I came to life again.
The world stood still, but the boat kept going. We drifted past stone houses with stairstepped gables and gardens with foliage so lush, it tumbled down to the water. We floated past boathouses with wooden shutters. We passed cafés with hanging lanterns and candlelit tables by the water. But we didn’t notice any of it.
Even as the boat taxi pulled up to the reception site and docked, and even as the bride and groom, and his parents, and the wedding party, and all the guests averted their eyes as they climbed up out of the boat and off toward the reception, we didn’t let go. We barely noticed them.
We just stayed lost in that one kiss we’d waited so long to find.
Epilogue