I gawked. “That’s a ring.” A classic diamond solitaire offset by two smaller baguettes in a platinum band.
He nodded. “It was my mother’s.”
Mrs.Dr. Harris.“What does she think about this?”
“She gave it to me after her birthday dinner last night.”
Which didn’t really answer my question. Or maybe it did.
“I’m sorry.” My voice was husky. “I can’t.”
Chris’s face clouded. “But I love you. I thought you loved me.”
“I thought so, too.” I didn’t want to hurt him. “I thought we were soulmates. But you’re Roy Gardner.”
He levered off his knee to perch back on the couch. “Who the hell is Roy Gardner?”
“InAnne of the Island? Anne falls for him when she goes away to college. She thinks he’s her One True Love because he fits her romantic ideal. He brings her flowers. He writes her a poem for her birthday.”
He glared, incredulous. “You want poetry.”
I tried and failed to imagine Joe writing a sonnet to my eyebrows. Yeah, no. He couldn’t even find the words to tell me he loved me, even though I was positive—almost positive—he did.
“I don’t need poetry,” I said. “The thing is, Anne doesn’t really love Roy. She’s in love with the idea of him. He’s perfect. He’s just not right for Anne. She’s been in love with Gilbert all along.”
Chris’s hand closed tight on the ring. “You mean, there’s someone else.”
I was still mad at Joe. He might be done with me. But whatever happened, he was there, a part of me now. I’d never had to make myself smaller when I was around Joe. He’d never asked me to be less than myself. He’d always encouraged me to be more.
“That’s really none of your business. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.” Chris got off the couch and started to pace. “What am I going to tell my mother?”
“You don’t have to tell her anything.” I was pretty sure Mrs.Dr. Harris would do all the talking.
“Anne, you can’t throw away everything we’ve shared, two years of our lives, because of some rebound relationship.”
“I’m not throwing away anything. I’m grateful for…for the time we had together. It taught me what I want.”
And what I didn’t.
I stood, ready to walk him out the door.
I’d always had this picture of how my life was supposed to look, based on a world that didn’t exist anymore and the girl I used to be. Whether things worked out with Joe or not (Please, please let them work out), it was time for me to follow my own path, to find my own voice, to make something beautiful and useful of my own. Not derived from a book I read or a story I told myself, but built from what I found along the way. All the moments. All the love.
“Goodbye, Chris.”
—
I stood onthe upper deck of the ferry, watching the approaching shoreline. The Grand Hotel rose like a castle on the hill. The waves danced. The air sparkled.
After the heat and grit of Chicago and the white-knuckled drive on I-75, I was grateful for the wind that whipped the clouds into horsetails and swept my mind clean.
“Almost home,” Zack Bartok said beside me. We’d spent half the trip from St. Ignace to Mackinac talking about Daanis, admiring pictures of Rose with baby Namid.
Another thread in the web of connection tethering me here.
I used to think there were four kinds of people on Mackinac: the tourists, the part-timers, the islanders who stayed, and the ones who moved away. But the truth was, the island didn’t judge. The island was simply there, the place where I belonged, at least for the next nine months. The place where my roots would always be.
