Then a few years later came Jonah. I hadn’t meant for us to grow so close.
My eyes welled up with tears while I brushed my fingers over Roger Stanton’s face. “I didn’t want to return him to sender. That’s all you’ve ever been to me. Why is that?” I asked the picture another poignant question, “Did I make a mistake where Jonah was concerned?”
Roger stared back at me silently.
“Jonah ended up married and happy, as far as I know,” I told Roger. “He even has a little girl.”
I’d watched her grow up the last four or five years through the Christmas cards Jonah sent Dani. The ones she’d tried to hide from me. Obviously, Jonah and I hadn’t done a good enough job keeping our feelings secret even though we never acted like a couple in public, not even in front of our friends. No one ever said anything to me about him over the years. But they must have known, as no one questioned why I didn’t get invited to his wedding seven years ago. Our circle of friends here had done a terrible job of keeping their plans from me to fly to Nantucket to watch the blissful event.
Jonah had married a beautiful woman named Eliza, and they had a gorgeous baby named Whitney. Their Christmas card every year was a stab in the heart, but I’m the one who stuck the knife in there, so I had no one but myself to blame. The baby girl with bouncing sandy brown locks and her daddy’s green eyes could have been mine, but I had made the right choice. Jonah got the family he always wanted. His wife, Eliza, from all accounts, was lovely and ambitious; a Princeton graduate with an amazing mind for business, as Brock called it. That was before he realized I was in the room.
But looking at Jonah’s wedding photos and Christmas cards over the years had cemented my choice. His life was so different from my own. See, I would have never wanted to get married in Nantucket in a dress like Eliza’s. Don’t get me wrong, she looked lovely in the lace trumpet gown, but I would have preferred a short, cotton, off-the-shoulder number. And I would have been barefoot under some pine trees in the mountains. Definitely not at a country club with several hundred guests all dressed to the nines. And those Christmas cards he sent every year looked like they were posing for a company brochure in front of a boring gray canvas back drop. He and his wife both wore suits and their darling daughter was always dressed in something just as stuffy and stiff. If it was our family, we would have been out in a sunflower field and casually dressed. And probably barefoot. I wasn’t a fan of shoes.
I was happy for Jonah. Really, I was. If anyone deserved to have the unattainable, it was him. I knew he was meant for a life I couldn’t give him. He didn’t really want an eclectic artist with an ugly past. He had been wrong—I did save us from ourselves. I didn’t throw us away, I let us go onto something better. The studio was doing better than ever, and it had been nine years since my heart was broken for the last time.
I took one more good look at the picture of my parents. I was sure my twenty-year-old mom thought her life would turn out much different than the one she ended up living. She’d chased after that dream for many years, the white-picket fence complete with an adoring husband. As happy as I was when she gave up on men, I was always sad she never had what she desired. She was never happy. She literally died trying to fill the void Roger Stanton left in her—she’d contracted hepatitis B from one of her lovely husbands and, unfortunately, it turned chronic and eventually into liver cancer. At least now she was at peace.
I wiped a tear off my cheek. “I am happy, Roger,” I lied to him. “Unlike Mom, I never needed you for that.” Or did I? Would I have been happier if he’d rescued me? Could he have changed my life? Would I be with Jonah now? I couldn’t think like that.
I threw the stupid picture in the box and buried it under all the rest of the crap from my past before I shoved it back in the closet.
I held up the stained sweatshirt and the holey mustard sweater. “Which one, Goldie?”
She swished her fin at me in disapproval, clearly communicating, “You need help.”
I know.Chapter Two“Why are you both staring at me like that?” Dani and Kinsley had been shooting furtive glances to each other then at me all night. I didn’t have time to keep guessing why—I assumed they had some unpleasant news to share and I just wanted them to get it over with. I’d had a customer special order custom Tiffany-style Christmas ornaments, and she wanted them well before Thanksgiving. She should have thought about that before placing the order on November 5th.