Forever Vows, page 10
“I’ve never known anyone to care one way or another about someone’s reputation.”
“You’ve been hanging around with the wrong people.”
“I think you’re right.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, putting an arm around her. “I’ve got you.”
James was coming back down the hallway.
“I found something,” he said.
Bella and I would have to continue this conversation later.
Right now we had a mystery to solve.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Isabella
Daniel and I sat next to each other on the sofa in front of the fireplace.
My brother, James, was appropriately baffled when we showed him the letters we’d found.
“If no one ever read them?” he asked, carefully flipping through them. “Why were they hidden away like that?”
“That’s what we can’t figure out.”
“There are fifty-two of them,” James said, setting the stack of letters back on the coffee table.
“He must have written her every month,” I said, picking up the letters and looking at the dates, but the print was faded. “We’d have to open them to see the dates.”
“Well,” Daniel said. “Before we do that, let’s see if they’re in here.” He slid the large Bible toward him and opened it up to the middle.
“You act you’ve done this before,” I said.
“Maybe,” James said. “Maybe I was curious about my ancestors.”
I’d never really been curious about people in history. It never really occurred to me to be. It never occurred to me that I might have people in my past who had been in similar situations to me.
Benjamin had obviously loved Abigail very much. It was likely that Abigail loved him as well, but something had happened. Something other than the obvious—the war.
Something had happened that had prevented Abigail from opening her letters.
“Look,” James said. “I found them.”
“Tell us,” Daniel said.
James read silently for a moment then looked up. Tori came and sat down next to him, Biscuit sitting at her feet.
“They were married,” James said, taking his wife’s hand.
“When?” I asked.
“March 5, 1861,” he said.
“That was right before the war started,” Daniel said.
“You know your history,” I said, looking at Daniel with surprise.
“I know a little about a lot of things. I have a good memory for trivia.”
James was scowling.
“There’s a note here. Shortly after Benjamin left for the war, she left. She went home. To her family.”
“He sent the letters here,” I said. “But she wasn’t here to get them.”
“Or read them,” Daniel said.
“No,” James said, reading again. “Something happened.”
We all sat quietly waiting for James to continue.
“She never came home. She never read the letters.”
“And someone hid the letters for her,” Daniel said.
“But why?” I asked, not realizing it was out loud.
“We’ll never know,” Tori said.
I looked at Daniel.
James took a breath and continued. “She died in childbirth.”
A silence hung over the room.
A log burned in two, sending out a spray of sparks.
“We have to read the rest of the letters,” I said. “We have to do it for her. And for him.”
“I agree.”
“She never came home,” Tori said. Tori’s eyes were moist.
James pulled her close. Kissed her on the cheek.
“What happened after that?” I asked. “To the baby?”
Daniel scanned the page.
“It doesn’t say. But…” He looked up, his eyes touching each of us in turn.
“Benjamin was an only child. So somehow he ended up with the baby here.”’
“He remarried,” Tori said.
“What?”
“Look,” Tori said. “He married again in 1867. They must have raised the baby as their own.”
“This makes me so sad,” I said. “I’m not sure I can stand to read the letters.”
“We don’t have to do anything today,” Daniel said.
“We were about to order pizza,” James said. “You two want to join us?”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Daniel
We had a companionable pizza dinner. The four of us. James and Tori. Me and Bella.
It felt right.
James and Tori, still newlyweds, were cute together. Happy. And obviously deeply in love.
After dinner, James and Tori went outside to sit on the swing together.
I much preferred Bella’s idea of sitting in front of the fire in the parlor.
She sat on one end of the sofa and pulled her feet up under her.
I sat down next to her.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just thinking about how sad it was that Benjamin wrote all these letters to his new wife and she never got to read them. I guess there was no way for him to know that she had died.”
“I wonder if he knew she was pregnant.”
“Kinda of hard to say. Things were different back then.” She picked up a throw and wrapped it around her
“I hope he knew,” I said. “But he found out when he got back, I guess.”
“Not really the same,” Bella said. “At least he found out.”
I put another log in the fire and flames shot up, sending new warmth through the room.
“It’s a good reminder,” I said. “to live in the moment.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“Are you cold?” I asked.
“A little.”
I moved closer, putting my arm around her. She sighed and rested her head on my shoulder.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about.”
“What’s that?” She adjusted the throw to snuggle in deeper.
“Do you happen to remember that day? Back when we were nine?”
She tilted her head so she could look up at me.
She was thinking, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“That day when you climbed up in the tree to take a picture of baby birds?”
“Yes,” I said with a laugh. “That day.”
“I remember.”
“Is that all you remember about it?”
“It seems I remember a few other things, too.”
“Like?”
“I remember you kissed me,” she said. “Then you declared us married.”
“Forever and ever.”
“Yes,” she said. “Forever and ever.”
“My grandmother told me it didn’t work that way.”
“You told your grandmother?”
“I had to tell someone. I was bursting with the news.”
“I didn’t tell anybody.”
“Well. Anyway. Grandma told me that there was more involved. She said if I still loved you, I could marry you for real when we were old enough.”
“That didn’t happen.”
“No. It didn’t.”
Not yet anyway.
We were old enough now and I still loved Bella.
Grandma was right that it was a lot more complicated than a kiss and a promise.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Isabella
I sat snuggled under a fleece blanket in front of the fireplace, my head resting on Daniel’s shoulder.
Since he liked a big fire, the flames glowed brightly, giving off warmth.
My brother and his wife had gone to sit outside. It was too cold, but, I don’t know, maybe they found a way to keep warm.
I had begun to think that Daniel had forgotten about that day beneath the maple trees.
The day he had kissed me and declared us married.
Even at the tender age of nine, I had known that there was more to it than that, but that didn’t keep the moment from branding itself on my psyche.
It was a relief that he remembered.
He didn’t say what he thought about it now.
He had been so sure about it then.
So bold for a nine-year-old.
That kiss back then was nothing like the kiss we’d shared in the attic. Kisses. We’d shared kisses in the attic.
“What should we do with the letters?” he said.
“I still think we should read them.” I took a deep breath. “Just not right now.”
“Okay. Later. Maybe one a day.”
“There are fifty-two of them,” I pointed out.
“I know.”
I did some math in my head.
“We’d have to read one a day for nearly the whole two months you’re going to be here.”
“Is that so bad?” he asked.
I smiled and looked at him. Then looked back into the flickering flames.
“No,” I said. “It’s not too bad.”
“It’s a plan then,” he said. “We’ll read one letter every day.”
“So… what if you’re on a flight?”
“Then I guess you’ll have to wait until I can get here.”
“You’d come out here every day? Just to read a letter?”
“It’s actually on my way home from the airport. But it wouldn’t be just to read a letter.”
My heart skittered as I dared to think that the real reason Daniel wanted to read a letter each day was to have an excuse to see me.
“Okay,” I said. “I can wait.”
He lightly touched my chin and bent down to kiss me again.
“This,” he said, his breath brushing against my lips. “This is real. This is now.”
I knew what he meant.
He meant the letters belonged to someone else. Someone who had lived their lives.
And we had our lives to live.
Our lives were now.
We would make our own memories.
And hopefully there wouldn’t be anything to separate us for any length of time.
I didn’t want to think about what would happen when he went back to Houston.
That was one of those things I preferred to put off until later to think about.
Right now all I wanted to think about was Daniel, the grown up version, and the way he kissed me.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Daniel
I had a flight down to Cincinnati the next day. Skye Travels was not considered the biggest private airline company in the country for nothing. They stayed busy. Several flights a day busy. It explained why Noah needed someone to cover while one of his pilots was out, even here in his satellite division in Pittsburgh.
Fortunately it was a day trip and I was back in Pittsburgh before dark.
I would no doubt eventually have an overnight flight, but I’d deal with that when it happened.
I took the little Cessna in for a smooth landing. Taxied over to parking and went through my post flight checklist.
To say that I was happy about the way things were going was most definitely an understatement.
Fate had brought Bella back into my life and since I had a healthy respect for fate, I knew there had to be a reason for that.
I certainly was not going to ignore it.
I was going to spend as much time as I could with her.
I’d wanted to marry her when I was nine. I could honestly say that things hadn’t changed since then, at least not that particular thing. But the reality that I could actually marry her if I wanted to, for real, had changed.
As I was finishing up, a text came in from my grandma.
Grandma
Are you okay?
Just landed.
Grandma
I love the green walls in the breakfast room.
I agree. It turned out nicely.
Grandma
Do you want me to make something for dinner?
Well hell. When I’d been thinking about seeing Bella every day, I’d failed to take into account that my grandmother was expecting to see more of me while I was here.
I quickly checked the schedule for tomorrow. I only had one quick morning flight.
Can we make it tomorrow?
Grandma
Of course.
Tomorrow, I decided, I would take Bella over to meet Grandma.
Is it okay if I bring a friend?
Thought bubbles.
A commercial jet passed overhead, coming in for a landing, its engines deafening.
Grandma
Bella?
How did you know?
Grandma
I know my grandson.
I stuffed my iPad into my leather case and prepared to leave the plane.
Grandma
Of course you can bring her.
Thanks, Grandma. Talk to you later. Call if you need anything. Okay?
Grandma would understand. She knew how I’d felt about Bella all those years ago.
I realized I hadn’t asked her about her date. I’d ask her tomorrow.
Maybe if things went well, she would see more of him.
It was selfish of me, but if Grandma started dating someone, then she wouldn’t be thinking about me so much.
I still had a ton of work to do on her house, but I’d get it done.
I could drag Bella along if she wasn’t working. I had to remember that she had things to do, too.
We’d make it work.
And we’d see what the future held for us.
Fortunately we lived in a day and age when we didn’t have to rely on letters to communicate and stay in touch. Letters that we didn’t even know were received.
And yet I’d still lost touch with her for years. That ability to lose touch with someone might be harder to do in modern times, but it hadn’t been eradicated.
I locked up the airplane and headed to my car.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Isabella
A new query had come in overnight, so I drove into Robinson Township to meet with a potential new client.
The new client was a writer of cozy mystery novels who’d had some success, enough success that she had decided to go full time.
It helped that her husband was a businessman who could afford to hire a nanny for their two children.
Her real name was Maribelle, writing under a pen name I didn’t recognize.
She showed me her little study where she worked. Books piled up everywhere. Stacked on the floor. Piled up on a bookcase. A playpen in the corner.
I didn’t see how anyone could work under such conditions, so I understood why she wanted a place of her own that would at the same time keep her close at hand.
She gushed about my idea of building the office cottages.
We talked for about two hours over coffee. I made notes about what she was looking for and formulated a general outline in my head. She showed me the backyard where she was thinking of building her office.
Unlike Melissa and Liam’s space, Maribelle’s backyard space was smaller but she didn’t have the trees. They had all been cut and the lawn perfected. Her building would be more straightforward.
Back home at my desk, while I sketched out some general plans, it occurred to me that she needed her office to be semi-attached.
A roofed walkway, I decided, with two or three foot barriers on either side to keep the snowdrifts out. She’d need an easy way to walk back and forth to the house to check on her babies. Even during snow storms.
That led me to thinking she needed a fireplace in her office cottage.
I lost track of time as I worked.
About three fifteen, my mother came to my office door.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi.” I blinked and looked up.
“You have a visitor.”
“I do?” My first thought was that I must have a client. But then I remembered that my website didn’t list my address. I wasn’t set up to have clients come here.
Momma put a hand on her hip and looked at me with a little smile.
“It’s Daniel Benton,” she said. “It’s been a really long time since we’ve seen him.”
“I know,” I said, not thinking fast enough on my feet to tell her that she was running a few days behind.
“He’s waiting in the kitchen for you.”
“Okay. Thanks Momma. I’ll be right down.”
Suddenly feeling nervous, I put away my supplies and headed to my bedroom to check my makeup and run a brush through my hair.
My hands were shaking a little as I went downstairs and found him in the kitchen talking to Cook.
He looked right at home, the two of them laughing. When Cook slid a slice of pie over to Daniel, I laughed to myself. It was a wonder he wasn’t big as a house.
“I don’t get homemade apple pie in Houston,” he said as I walked into the room. Of course he didn’t. His family was scattered all over the country.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.” His face brightening, he stood up and came right over to sweep me into a hug. He wrapped his arms around me and lifted my feet off the ground. Right there in front of Cook.
“How are you?” he said, setting me on my feet.
“Okay,” I said, having a bit of trouble catching my breath.
Cook laughed as he disappeared into the room behind the kitchen.
“I didn’t know what time to expect you,” I said, tucking my hair back behind my ears. It wasn’t a criticism. It was simply an observation. It was Daniel’s way to just show up unannounced. I was getting used to it.
Under normal circumstances I preferred more structure, but with Daniel, I didn’t mind.
