Heartwishes (23 page)

“What about Gemma?” Mike asked.

“The last person on earth I’d forget is Gemma,” Colin said as he looked at her. “I hope you get everything you wish for in life.”

Everyone turned toward Gemma and noted the way her face turned red.

“To answered wishes,” Rams said and they all took deep drinks.

In Miami, sitting at her father’s bedside in the hospital, Nell held up her bear. “See, Daddy, I told you.”

“Told me what, sweetheart?”

“That Landy’s necklace blinks.”

“It sure does.” He took the bear and held the necklace for a moment. It was a pretty thing, with a tiny, glistening rock inside a little cage made of gold. The necklace looked as though it could be valuable. “Where’d you get this?”

“It was in that box of junk jewelry I bought at the church rummage sale,” her mother, Addy, said from the other side of the bed.

“Where’d it come from to get there?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” Addy said. “Why are you interested?”

“No reason,” he said. “It just doesn’t look like junk and maybe somebody’s looking for it.”

Nell took the bear from her father. She didn’t like what he was saying. She’d almost forgotten that daddies made rules that weren’t to be broken.

“I don’t think so,” Addy said. “That necklace was stuck inside
two flat pieces of lead, like somebody’d been using it for fishing. Nell and I had to use the vise on your workbench and two screwdrivers to get it open.”

He chuckled. “Like mother, like daughter.”

Nell clutched her bear and its necklace to her. “I like it.”

“All right,” he said, “you can keep it.” He looked at his wife. “But later . . .” He left the rest of the sentence blank. She knew what he meant. When they got back to Edilean she’d find out where the necklace came from.

14

C
OLIN LEFT
M
ERLIN’S
Farm and his friends reluctantly. He’d wanted to drive Gemma home, but she’d declined his offer. He knew what she meant, that he was to clear things with Jean before Gemma would be alone with him.

He knew that Gemma was right, but that didn’t keep him from dreading the confrontation with Jean. He parked behind the sheriff’s office and started to get out, but instead, he sat in his car and looked up at his apartment windows. Gemma said she wanted him to tell her about his life, but he didn’t want to do that. For so many years, he’d gone in the wrong direction, trying to be what he wasn’t. His lifelong obsession with wanting to help people had, at times, made him almost forget himself.

Obligations to his family, to people he’d grown up with, to his hometown, and especially to a woman he’d once loved with his whole heart, had nearly overwhelmed him. These weren’t things he wanted to tell a woman he thought he might have a future with.

As he looked up at the windows of the dreary apartment he hated, he envisioned what was coming. Jean loved drama and scenes—which was why she was so good in a courtroom—and he didn’t know which way she was going to play this particular episode. Would it be tears, which would end up with Colin comforting her? Or would it be anger and her shouting at him and saying that he’d betrayed her?

Back when he was younger, her scenes had been something he needed. A rip-roaring good argument with Jean—who could give as good as she got—helped release some of his own rage at the way his life was going.

After one of their fights—and the following makeup sex—he’d be able to stand working at his father’s car dealership for another six weeks or so. When the pressure inside him had built until he’d been ready to explode, he knew just how to push Jean’s buttons to make her angry enough that they could have a fight.

But all that had ended long ago, Colin thought, as he leaned back against the seat of his Jeep. He had walked out just as she’d taken a job in D.C.

Closing his eyes, he let himself remember those first days with Jean.

When Colin was in his last year of school—University of Virginia—his father was begging him to join his car business.

“I’ll give you anything you want,” his dad said. “Have a lawyer draw up a contract. You want fifty percent—eighty percent—whatever, you got it. You want me to retire and turn everything over to you and your brothers, I will.”

The only thing Colin wanted, had ever wanted, was to be the sheriff of Edilean. The fact that the town didn’t have a sheriff didn’t bother him at all.

His father, in an attempt to “reason” with him—meaning to
make his eldest son see things his way—said, “You need a job that pays you, one you can make money at. It’s a matter of pride.”

He’d added the last because he knew his son didn’t need money. When Colin was sixteen, his father had complained about the software that kept track of all the cars his dealership sold. Peregrine Frazier had ranted and raved about it in detail, saying that the program was made for one dealership and about a hundred cars. “It gets confused when I put more than that in it,” he said in derision.

At the time, Colin was a senior in high school and taking a computer course. The next morning he talked to his teacher about the problem, and together they wrote a new program.

Colin presented it to his father on the day he graduated.

“I’m supposed to give
you
a gift, boy,” Mr. Frazier said, looking at the four CDs in puzzlement. “Is this music?”

“Stick it in a computer and see,” Colin said.

When Mr. Frazier saw what the software could do, he copyrighted it, paid a lot to have some IT guys smooth it out, then marketed it. Every penny in royalties that came in was split between Colin and his teacher. The money was enough that both of them never had to work again.

When Colin graduated from college he didn’t want to sell cars, but he hated to see his father beg. Worse, he couldn’t bear to tell him no. And too, there was the weight on him that his ancestors had always worked with anything with wheels. To not do so was letting down generations of Fraziers. So Colin had agreed to try it. He’d gone to work in the Richmond dealership and done his best to sell cars.

But he’d hated it. Selling was not something he liked and he was very, very bad at it. His sales were so low the other salespeople laughed at him.

It was Jean who changed everything.

Colin had been out of college for only a few weeks, was just twenty-one years old, and working for his dad. Jean came in to buy a car and she was so beautiful that all Colin could do was stare at her. His brother ended up making the sale.

Colin thought that was the end of the meeting, but she called him later and invited him out. They ended up in bed together, and two months later, they were living together in her apartment.

Like Colin’s father, Jean encouraged him to stay in the car business, and for four years they were a couple. He was pulled into her life of candlelit dinners and nights out. He was fascinated by her law cases, and they often stayed up all night working on them. It was the closest Colin had come to real work in the world of law enforcement he so loved. Jean’s world became his, but that was all right because being involved so deeply with her helped block out his unhappiness at his job. And besides, he was so young and inexperienced that everything about her was dazzling.

In college he’d been so involved in his studies—which consisted of anything that came close to pertaining to criminology—and sports that he didn’t have time for much else. There’d been girls, but none of them held his attention for very long. He wanted a woman who was interesting, and who was more involved in life than in just wondering what she should wear.

Jean, six years older than he was, a lawyer and well traveled, had fulfilled that need in him, and for those years their life together had been good.

Colin didn’t realize it, but he’d always assumed that someday they’d quit going out so often, quit flying to Napa for the weekend, and quit having their raucous fights. He thought they would become serious, and when they did, they’d move to Edilean. They’d live in a real house with a big backyard, not a terrace that looked out over a city. They’d have kids and attend church together.

Everything changed one evening when Jean came home and excitedly told him that she’d had a job offer in Washington, D.C.

“Of course I haven’t accepted yet,” she said.

Colin smiled. It was obvious that she’d wanted to consult him before making such a big decision. But she didn’t say that. In fact, she didn’t ask him a single question.

“I want to see if I can get the same amount of money from Briggs. I’ll play them against each other. I’ll let them conduct an auction over me and the highest bidder wins. Oh! I have to call Mom about this. She’ll be out of her mind with excitement.” Jean patted his leg as she got off the couch, wineglass in hand, and went to call her mother.

Colin had sat there in silence, and it was as though his whole life suddenly became crystal clear to him. He was working at a job he hated and living where he didn’t want to—all to please other people.

He knew that Jean was thinking of taking another job without consulting him because she was so sure he’d go with her that she needn’t bother to ask him.

And why should she? Colin thought. He could go anywhere. He had no doubt that his father would love a reason to buy a car dealership in D.C. If Colin wanted to go to Italy, his dad would probably buy a showroom there.

When Jean returned to the room, she was even more elated—and was completely oblivious to the fact that Colin was saying nothing. They ordered in some Chinese food and she talked all through the meal. It was only when they’d finished that she slowed down.

“You’re awfully quiet. Don’t you have anything to say about this wonderful news?”

“I’m going back to Edilean.”

“That’s a great idea. Your parents will be thrilled that I’m getting such a promotion. I’ll make partner in another three years.”

She went right back into talking about
her
plans, and
her
life.

As Colin cleared away the meal, Jean got on her phone and started calling people to tell them her good news. When he finished, he went to the bedroom and got his suitcases out of the closet.

She didn’t come into the bedroom for over an hour, and by then Colin was packed.

“Could I use your phone?” she asked. “The battery on mine gave out and I’m too excited to want to talk while plugged in. What are you doing?”

“I told you. I’m going home.”

“Okay. I’ll see you this weekend. I guess you’ll need your cell?”

“Yeah, I’ll need it,” he said as he picked up his two suitcases and walked out the front door.

By the time Jean showed up in town with her fabulous news that she’d accepted the job and would be moving to D.C. in two weeks, Colin had rented an office in town. And he’d already had the showdown with his father.

Colin had politely listened to every argument his father came up with as to why he had to return to Richmond.

“We
need
you!” his father had pleaded.

Colin never came close to losing his temper or his resolve. He’d at last made up his mind, and he wasn’t going to change it. “You don’t need me, but the people of Edilean do,” he told his father.

When Jean showed up in Edilean, she was angry. She burst into his newly acquired office and started in on him right away. “What the hell are you
doing
?” she shouted. “I’ve been left alone for two whole weeks, and I’ve had to make all the arrangements for our move by myself. Damn! But you can be so selfish!”

She looked around the place. Over the fifty or so years since the building was constructed, it had been many things. Its latest incarnation had been to sell sandwiches and sodas. Colin had
donated all the fixtures to a retirement home, bought a couple of old desks, some chairs, and an old filing cabinet at an auction. He hadn’t yet painted the three rooms.

“What is this place?” Jean asked, her upper lip curled in a sneer. “It’s disgusting. And filthy.”

“How about if I buy some mops and buckets, and you and I clean it?”

“I don’t have time for your weird sense of humor right now. Are you packed?”

They hadn’t seen each other or even talked on the phone for two whole weeks, and it looked like Jean thought Colin had been busy packing to go to her new job.

When he didn’t move, she sat down on the old wooden chair across from his desk. “What is it
this
time?” she asked in the tone of someone who put up with a lot from him.

Colin marveled at how different he felt about her, about life in general, now that he no longer had a job he hated. In just two weeks he’d achieved more soul-satisfying accomplishments than he had in years of working for his father.

“This is my office,” Colin said with a calmness Jean had never heard before.

“I don’t understand. How can you have an office here when we’ll be living in D.C.? Do you plan to come down here on weekends?”

It had taken nearly three hours of talking—with tears from both of them—before Jean fully realized that he was breaking up with her.

In the end, she held on to her anger. Whereas she’d dumped a lot of men, she’d never had anyone say no to her. But tears, anger, none of it made Colin change from his decision. Even when Jean said she’d refuse the new job and keep the old one, he didn’t relent.