As she lay in bed with him that night, his even breath was against her ear, his arm around her waist. He cupped her breast with pleasurable possession, even in his sleep.
She wasn’t far from sleep, either, but her gaze drifted to the walls. To the gift Cassandra had given her for her last birthday.
It was a random assortment of frames, different sizes, different styles, that had been welded together in a pleasing arrangement. The frames were filled with pictures from her past and present. Unexpectedly, Cassandra had put one of Rachel as the center picture. It was a photo that had been shot during her and Jon’s wedding. She was standing on the second-floor balcony of Lucas and Cassandra’s plantation house, about to throw her bouquet.
In the first few days they’d been together, Jon had as much as said he was going to marry her. You’re the type of woman who needs commitment. Love. If I wasn’t prepared to bring those to the table as part of what I can offer you, I never would have started this.
She hadn’t been sure she’d ever be willing to get married again. Her first husband had broken her heart in so many ways she figured it could never be glued together again. Jon hadn’t glued anything together. He’d made it whole once more, helping her find the strength to heal. So, no more than six months after they started being a couple, when he asked her to marry him, she told him yes.
She hadn’t wanted anything fancy. Just a simple affair, and Jon agreed. They’d exchanged their vows under the branches of a two-hundred-year-old live oak in the back yard of Lucas and Cassandra’s house. A reception of no more than fifty people had followed. Close friends from her yoga studio, and physical therapy clients. An aunt who’d driven in from Florida. Jon’s friends, and the K&A men and their wives, as well as Cassandra’s siblings.
The picture in the center of the frame arrangement had been taken just before the bouquet tossing. She’d looked toward the setting sun, its beams projecting through the branches of the nearby trees making her golden hair gleam. Her gaze was soft, happy and pensive at once. Though the photographer couldn’t have known what moment he was capturing, Rachel remembered it vividly. She’d been in the grip of emotions so strong she could barely breathe. She’d realized she was coming out of a darkness that would always be a part of her, stepping into a future she’d never anticipated having. And everything about that day had given her all the more reason to set aside her fears and try to embrace that future with every part of her heart.
Most the women attending were already married, so instead of throwing the bouquet as a token of luck for the single women, she threw it purely for the fun of seeing who could catch it, and with the promise of a kiss from the man of the lucky woman’s choosing.
Letty, the adolescent daughter of her physical therapy work friend, Beatrice, had caught the bouquet. The precocious, outgoing girl had wanted to kiss Tory, the teenage son of Sarah, one of her yoga students. A smile touched Rachel’s lips as she remembered the flash of panic on Tory’s face, followed by an attempt to appear “cool” about it—did teens even use that word anymore? But there’d been an endearing, innocent awkwardness to it as the two teens executed a self-conscious pressing of lips, Tory flushing and Letty smiling as they were applauded.
It made Rachel think of Kyle, her son. Her gaze slid away from the center photo, to several of him at different ages. Her gaze stopped on the one of him around Tory’s age, standing by a boat with one of his friends. Because Cassandra had certainly worked with Jon on the selection, Rachel knew why that particular one had made it into the montage mounted on her wall. A reminder not only of her son, but of what her new husband had taught her she could expect from him.
It had happened a few months into their marriage. She’d stayed home, telling Jon she was taking a personal day to catch up on some gardening to-dos and errands. She’d sent him off to work with a bright smile that had died soon after he left.
It hadn’t been a complete lie. She went to the grocery store, bought the cake ingredients, and returned home to mix the batter. After she put it in the oven, she went out into the garden and tended the plot where her poppies would come up in the spring. She added a decorative border, using some creek rocks she had discovered and gathered on their extensive wooded property.
As the smell of the cake filled the house, she set out the candles, took a seat on the stool and waited. When the oven dinged, she put it on the rack, let it cool, and frosted it. White butter cream frosting on red velvet, Kyle’s favorite. She put the candles in, one by one, focusing on the placement. For each one, she remembered him at that age, until she reached nineteen, and there were no more memories. She instead imagined if he’d lived, the woman he might have met and married, the children he might have had. What he would have done when he left the military.
At various ages, he’d talked about being a dentist, a race car driver, a zookeeper, an architect. He’d liked to build things, so he probably would have ended up in a related field. Construction, maybe. He hadn’t had the patience for a lot of studying, but he could learn anything hands-on.
Going up to her yoga room, she removed the photo album from the table. The small lit candle next to it floated in a wooden bowl of water. She paused, holding the book to her chest.
This was wrong.
She’d learned to recognize the signs. Sadness could still grip her when she thought of the past, but these days it was more balanced by the other good things in her life. Yet right now she was gripped by the despair she’d felt on his past birthdays, when she’d been alone. The familiar, terrible feeling brought a spurt of panic, as if she was suddenly on the edge of a rain-drenched bank and was about to slip, fall back into the muck below, and she might not find a way out this time.
She shouldn’t have done this by herself. She should have told Jon what she did on this day, let him know. But she hadn’t. Maybe she should take the cake into town, to K&A, share a piece with everyone. Go to her yoga studio and repaint the one wall that she’d decided to make a softer yellow color.
She tightened her arms around the photo album. But this was Kyle’s day. She couldn’t…leave him, on his birthday. But she needed to call Jon. Right now.
Shifting the album to one arm, she drew the phone out of her pocket and held it against her forehead, emotions warring in her. Then she hit the one digit to speed dial his number.