I pushed myself off of the couch then, letting the photos fall in a spray at my feet.
More memories of the last time I’d seen Bradley charged through me. His bare shoulders glistened in the sunshine as he worked at the clay with a shovel in my back garden. His lips whisperingthank youat my neck as I delivered ice tea and he swayed us back and forth in the backyard, begging me to go out to dinner with him.He wasn’t Tav, but how could he feel so right?I remembered thinking.
I refused to answer Tav’s phone call that night.
I felt like a teenager again, the hit of the drug Bradley was offering was too irresistible to pass up, but visions of Tav had lingered in my mind.
I loved him. Tav and I would be married someday.
But then why was I dancing with Bradley under the sunshine in the backyard?
Because we’re friends, I’d told myself.
Tav had questioned Bradley’s return to my life from the beginning. Steph had said a high school fling was just what I needed.
I’d laughed her off because Bradley and I had never been a fling. Friends, best friends, for a long time, but nothing more.
Until that night on the dance floor when she failed to show up and his lips had grazed mine, his fingertips sending a rush of adrenaline through me.
I wanted him that night, but I wanted Tav forever.
Even when Tav and I were under the same roof, he was often a million miles away in his own digital universe.
I still remembered the unfamiliar weight of Bradley’s palm resting at my back. Always the gentleman, even now it struck me.
When a slow song from our teenage years started, Bradley had guided me tenderly to a quieter corner of the bar. His hips vibrated against mine, our breaths mingling as he ran his lips along my jawline.“I never could get over you.”
Before I could answer Bradley, a dark shadow caught my eye in the corner.
Tousled blond hair, cheekbones carved in granite. A rogue grin and just the right breadth in the stretch of the shoulders.
Tav?
I blinked at the visions, even as I sat at the chalet and thought back on that night before the baby, before losing mom, before the pain. I wondered if it was real.
If it wasTavwho’d been watching me as I danced with Bradley on the dance floor.
Tav was supposed to be in Charleston that night. Meetings with a naval contractor, he’d said over the phone.
But had he really been in Lancaster?Following me?
Before I could decide whether to cross the dance floor and confirm his identity or cower in Bradley’s shadow and assume that my eyes were playing tricks, Bradley had snagged my hand and guided me off the dance floor and to the front doors. He’d bundled me in his car and driven me home, chatting the entire way about a new job his landscaping firm had landed that would double his yearly income. And with this new job, he would be never more than five minutes away from me all day long.
He’d meant it as a reassurance of his steadfast presence, but did it mean more now?
I twisted my fingers together, eyes tracking the full moon over the chalet as it fell across the night sky. Fragments of mist and milky way swirled at the edges, much like my memories of that night. Had Tav been real, or just another mirage conjured by my imagination? Had he come to me that night, or were my thoughts merely just tiny fragmented bits of memory bouncing around my mind, neither fiction nor reality?
Tav’s late night declaration rang in my mind again.
I know the baby isn’t mine.
Was he right?
For the life of me, I couldn’t remember.
Twenty
She rarely moved.
