Chapter 23 #2
“I don’t know, honestly. Everyone was so excited about finding this.”
“Well, it could be worth another look, even though it’s probably a dead end. But it was fun using Gramps’s books to crack the code.”
I’d handed the book to Eli the next day, along with Dad’s notes, before heading back here.
I knew if I went to see Jude myself, he’d ask innocent questions about Chelsea, and that would lead nowhere good.
Eli, at least, knew I didn’t want to talk about her.
The only thing he’d let slip was she’d officially quit her job at the Rolling Hills, and that was only because he’d mentioned the new event planner.
I’d finally cleared the construction site, and the tent was only a thirty-second jog away now.
But just then I heard someone cursing, and looked over to see Lucy, standing next to her car.
She was struggling to pull the hood of her coat back up over her red curls while simultaneously attempting to get a giant golf umbrella up, all while holding the biggest white binder I’d ever seen against her chest.
I ran over. “Which one can I help with?”
“The umbrella,” she laughed. “And quick!”
Not that we both weren’t soaked already.
“I should have left the binder in the car, but the umbrella would have fallen over and—”
“Got it,” I said, pushing the enormous umbrella up and holding it over both of us.
Lucy let out a breath and pulled her hood over her head next, though it was kind of moot now, as water dripped from her deflated locks. Finally, she looked up at me.
“Awww, Seamus, I’m so glad to be doing this with you today!
” she exclaimed, giving me a squeeze, even though I’d just seen her this morning.
But this was the first time we’d had a work meeting in a couple of weeks.
And Lucy was always effusive with me. She and Graydon had taken me in like a sad puppy, even insisting I stay in the little suite they’d stuck in the back of their converted barn when they found out I was living at the Lakeside motel just outside of town.
I returned her embrace with something like gratitude.
I’d grown close to Lucy and Graydon in the six months since I’d been here.
To their twins, too, who both called me Thaymuth.
On top of making myself say ‘yes’ to more things, since I’d moved here, I’d forced myself to try to have more genuine relationships with people. To let my guard down more.
Like I had with Chelsea.
Then I cursed myself for thinking of her once more.
“Okay, so you have to see the wallpaper against the latest renderings,” Lucy said as we headed for the tent.
I loved how enthusiastic and no-nonsense Lucy was about everything, whether it was lasagna, her kids’ drawings, or the shade of couch cushions in the hotel lobby.
I also appreciated how she’d pinpointed right away that there was something personal going on with me, and that I clearly didn’t want to talk about it.
Of course it had been her I’d ended up talking to the most, and she’d been an excellent ear the few times I’d had a beer too many and mentioned Chelsea’s name. Lucy, besides being a designer, happened to be a life coach, though she promised me early on she wouldn’t coach me without permission.
“Hang on,” I said, remembering my papers under my jacket, and while I tried to juggle those out so I could properly carry them over to the tent with Lucy, my eyes went back to the other side of the site where I’d just come from.
“Oh, let me take those,” Lucy said, pulling the stack from my hand and sticking them on top of her binder.
But I hardly noticed.
I don’t know why I’d looked back that way.
And I don’t know why I froze when I did.
Maybe because the pickup pulling into the lot looked so familiar.
It was white, with a red stripe down the side.
It looked a helluva lot like Eli’s truck.
But that was ridiculous, because Eli was in Quince Valley.
But when the truck pulled in—next to mine—no one got out.
That wasn’t unusual; people often sat in their trucks in this weather, calling whoever it was they needed to see so they didn’t spend undue time getting soaked.
“Seamus?”
Shit. Lucy had asked me something.
“Sorry,” I said, my eyes still on the truck. I could vaguely see movement behind the still moving wipers, the shadow of a single person. “Say again?”
They looked too small to be Eli.
“I said I chose a shade for the lobby. It’s called Pickled Pickle.”
I reared back, my eyes finally back on my friend and colleague. “Excuse me?”
Lucy leaned toward me and hollered, “Pickled Pickle!” So loud I winced.
Then we both burst out laughing.
“We can’t paint the walls pickle pickle,” I said.
“Pickled pickle,” Lucy corrected. “And of course we can.”
“What’s wrong with regular green?”
She gaped. “Seamus, this is the greens. There are 500 shades of green in this sampler alone.” She pointed her chin at the binder in her arms next to my papers.
I shook my head, slightly bewildered by her side of the business.
And still distracted by the truck I swear to God looked just like my best friend’s.
I’d just talked to Eli last week. He didn’t say anything about coming here, even though it was through him I’d gotten this job, and he swore he planned on coming at some point in the two years I was here.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to carry those?” I asked as we started moving again.
“No, you keep that umbrella steady.”
Something still felt off. There was a person running toward the office, now. I couldn’t tell who it was from this distance, just that it looked to be a woman. Maybe. But then she was gone, into the trailer.
So it wasn’t Eli’s truck. Obviously.
Chelsea?
I wanted to smack myself. Why would Chelsea be driving Eli’s truck?
Without Eli? I was just seeing her because the truck looked like his.
When I first left home, I’d seen Chelsea everywhere.
In every young woman who looked remotely like her.
Every wave of brown hair and smattering of freckles.
Every laugh from a woman walking down the street.
It was never her, of course. I hadn’t had one of those jolts in a while, but that’s all this was.
I felt a hand on my arm. Lucy, keeping me from moving forward. “Seamus, are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Oh. Uh…” I swallowed, looking down at her. Lucy, if anyone, would understand.
“For a second I thought that was Eli’s truck,” I confessed, my voice close to cracking. “And that it was Chelsea driving it.”
Lucy looked toward the truck. There was no one there anymore, the person having disappeared into the office. It was probably any one of the dozens of people who came and went from the office every day. Lucy turned back to me.
When she looked back at me, her eyebrows were slanted in concern. “I thought that had stopped? Have you talked to her recently?”
I forgot I’d told Lucy about seeing Chelsea everywhere. I shrugged. “She sent me a text on my birthday, but that was weeks ago.” I know I looked chagrin when I added, “I didn’t respond.”
“What?! Why not?”
I rubbed the back of my neck with my free hand.
Because I wanted to say I’m sorry. That I was still hopelessly in fucking love with her and I made a mistake leaving.
I was too weak to care right at that moment that it was what she’d needed, so it had been safer to tuck my phone away.
I glanced at Lucy. She knew. She’d seen everything run across my face.
“You didn’t know what to say,” she offered.
“Yeah.”
Lucy tucked the papers and binder under her arm and wrapped her other one around me, tipping her head against my shoulder. “Oh Sea. I’m sorry.” Then she yelped as she nearly dropped the stack of papers and the binder.
I reached to grab them and nearly lost the umbrella.
“God, what a shit show!” Lucy laughed. “Come on, let’s get into the tent.”
I sighed, following her, but allowing myself one last glance at the other lot.
The person was standing there, I swear, looking right at me.
Then they opened my truck’s door.
For a moment I was too confused to react.
To register what the hell was happening when they thrust a bag in my door and then ran around to the driver’s side of their truck.
The last thing I saw was a pair of red sneakers slipping inside before the truck’s engine revved and it peeled out of the spot.
“Chelsea,” I whispered.
I felt the umbrella pulled from my hand, and when I looked at Lucy, I saw she was holding it now.
“Go,” she said.
I looked back, my heart in my throat.
“Go!” she yelled.
I didn’t wait then. I turned and sprinted toward the other side of the lot.
The running I’d been doing in place of baseball training this spring had paid off—I made it back to my truck in under a minute. But it still wasn’t fast enough to catch up to the truck. Its taillights bumped over the dirt road and out of sight by the time I was halfway across the building site.
“Chelsea!” I yelled as I ran, knowing I sounded like a lunatic.
By the time I reached my truck, my chest was heaving and I had to lean over, my hand on my truck’s hood. Running in steel-toed boots had turned my legs to jelly.
It was her. I knew it was her. I had to catch her.
I yanked open the door to my truck, and that’s when I saw it. A sketchbook.
It was the one I’d bought her, the one I thought for sure she’d tucked away on some shelf or maybe even in the trash. I’d thought it was a mistake to give it to her.
I picked it up, my hands gripping it as tightly as if I were holding a baby.
My hood had fallen back as I’d run over here, and rain slicked through my hair and down my face now, into my eyes. I wiped it away with the back of my hand, sat in my front seat, then opened the book.
There were pages and pages of drawings, in pencil, colored pencil, even paint, the pages thick with it.
My heart swelled a thousand sizes as I kept going. She did it.
My thumb brushed a page that stuck out from the rest. It must have been detached and slipped back in. I flipped to it, sucking in air as I landed on a watercolor rendering of the photo of me, Kevin, and Lois. I ran my finger over Kev’s turquoise shirt, my eyes welling.
I looked up, through the windshield. Far in the distance, Lucy was waving her hand frantically in a forward gesture.
Go.
I pushed the ratty tennis ball and satchel of plastic bags on the passenger seat aside, setting the sketchbook down in their place, my heart thumping. Then I threw the truck in gear.
I had no idea how to find her. The only thing I could think of was to get on the highway—she had to be on her way back to Vermont.
When I reached the end of the service road, I hesitated.
Barkley Falls, the closest town, was a mile to the right, the highway two miles in the other direction.
She’d been driving Eli’s truck. She had her own car—the only reason she’d be driving Eli’s truck would be because she was with him, and she wouldn’t have left him here.
A few minutes later, I spotted it. Parked right downtown, in front of the local diner, Aubrey’s.
I threw my truck into park on the opposite side of the street and ran across, without a thought about traffic.
A driver honked at me, long and hard. I jumped out of the way of the screeching car, my pulse in my ears.
I held my hand up in apology but didn’t look.
I couldn’t see anything except that face in the window.
Chelsea, standing, her green coat still on.
I stood on the sidewalk, rain sluicing down my hair and face.
She turned, walking toward the door, while I stood, praying I wasn’t dreaming all of this up. When she pushed out the door, her face was stricken.
“Was I too late?” she shouted over the rain. She’d seen me with Lucy. She’d thought—
I shook my head. “Never.”
She walked toward me. “I didn’t want you to wait, but I prayed you would. I didn’t want you to, but I did, I—”
I couldn’t wait. I ran toward her, scooping her in my arms and lifting her off her feet.
Chelsea’s hands went to my jaw, smoothing my hair off my face, laugh-crying.
Her wet hair was plastered against her cheeks and I smoothed it back, revealing all of her beautiful, rain-dropped face, that scar, weaving like the Quince.
I kissed her then, long and hard and with every cell in my body calling her name. Her tongue prodded, pleading against mine, her hands curled tight in my sopping hair, her breath pressing her body to mine.
“I love you, Chelsea Kelly,” I breathed. “With my whole goddamned heart.”
When she pulled away, her face was slick with rain and tears. “I love you, Seamus. I loved you before and didn’t know how to say it. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, baby,” I said. “Don’t ever be sorry. Everything that came before, it brought us here, and this is the only place in the world I want to be.”
She let out a sob. “Even all wet?”
“Even soaked to the bone.”
She laughed and kissed me again, and I knew right then that this was heaven.
That is, until a figure appeared at the door of the restaurant behind us.
“Hey!”
We both turned as I set Chelsea on her feet, though I didn’t dare let her go.
It was Eli, scowling. “That’s my sister.” Then he broke into a grin as wide as the sun. “Goddammit, Seamus. Just what I need, another brother.”
After we’d traded tearful hugs and arm punches and Eli’s puking face when we kissed again, Eli said he’d pay for their coffee and meet up with us later, saying he had something to do. I didn’t bother asking what it was. All I wanted was to hang onto Chelsea and never let her go.
At the door of the cafe, he asked, “Hey, can I tell her yet?”
Chelsea frowned. “Tell me what?”
I grinned, kissing her on her scar. “About Lola.”