“Tonight?”Landon’s blood pressure dropped.
“Yeah.Maybe we could grab dinner?”Celia suggested.“I can call Sophie and ask her to stay with your kids for a few hours.”
Landon admitted that it sounded perfect, hoping that his joy didn’t overwhelm her enough to make her cancel.He could hear her smile through her voice.“Pick me up in an hour?”she suggested.
* * *
With a pounding heart, Landon drove the few blocks to Ivy’s place, the same house where Celia had grown up, the two-story next to the inn.When he cut the engine out front, he half imagined James Harper storming out of the house and demanding of Landon why he was distracting his eldest daughter when she had so many chores to take care of, an inn to run.But the only person who came outside was Celia herself, dressed in a dark blue dress that buttoned up to her chin, yet showed her sculpted, long arms and tan legs.Landon got out to meet her but struggled to decide whether to hug her.Eventually, they settled on a brief and not-so-intimate hug before returning to his truck and heading off.
“I thought we could get Italian?”he said timidly, squeezing the steering wheel.He’d wanted to pick somewhere sort of romantic and adult, something to impress the woman who’d lived in the big city for twenty-four years.
Celia was quiet for a moment.“I don’t know,” she said.“I’m craving something messy.Something hearty.Something that will calm me down.”
Landon smiled.“You want Ralph’s Burgers?”
Celia snapped her fingers.“I want Ralph’s Burgers.”
Hilariously, Landon ended up parking right in front of his house so that they could walk the five minutes to Ralph’s.There, they sat at a corner table lined with old newspapers and ordered the exact burgers they’d ordered back in the ’90s and early ’00s: a blue cheeseburger for Celia and a bacon, mushroom, and swiss for Landon.They shared a french fry-onion ring mix that, they agreed, scared them much more now than it had back then.“My arteries!”Landon joked, crunching into an onion ring.Celia looked at him the way he remembered his first wife looking at him on their first date: with curiosity, with something brewing like love.
He put a french fry down and felt his smile melt off his face.
“I’m sorry,” Celia said suddenly, dropping her own fry.“I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you.Being back has been really emotional for me.I’ve had to face some things about myself, about my mother, about my family.I’m trying to own up to what my daughter and my sister are saying about me.”
Landon pressed his lips together.“What are they saying?”
“That I ran away when things got hard,” Celia said.“That I’m always giving up when the going gets tough.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Landon said hesitantly.“Your career alone is proof of that.”
Celia raised her shoulders.“I had nothing but success in my career until very recently.I was always rising in the ranks, getting incredible assignments, and meeting essential people.I had no reason to doubt myself, not the way I doubted Bluebell Cove or my ex-husband.”
Landon pressed his palms on the table, fizzing with curiosity about her ex.
“He’s long gone,” Celia admitted.“But maybe Sophie’s right.Maybe I didn’t give him enough of a chance.”
“It sounds like he messed up,” Landon said tenderly.“Marriage isn’t easy.Both parties have to make sacrifices and learn to build something.And it’s like the rules of the game change every few years.You have to recalibrate if you really want to love someone well.”
Celia looked at him as though she’d never seen him before.From the speaker in the corner came “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a song they’d loved as teenagers.They’d known all the words.They’d belted them out across the cove, half sure that their musicality reached the ears of people in Iceland and England and the rest of Europe.
“My wife passed away,” Landon said.“She had cancer.It happened really quickly.The kids and I have been trying to get our bearings ever since.They still remember her, but I know their memories are fading.They’re recalling the stories I tell them rather than their own.That’s hard.It’s like she gets less and less real every day.”
Celia reached across the table and took Landon’s hand.Their half-eaten burgers were suddenly too large for their middle-aged stomachs.
“I am so sorry that happened to you,” she breathed.“You are so capable of love.I know she felt your love till the very end.”
Landon felt like butter, oozing onto the table.He watched as Celia got up, collected two boxes of their burgers, and packaged the food to go.
“I want to go to the cove,” she told him.“We can eat the rest of our food down there.”
As they walked from the burger place, through the forest, and down to the beach, Landon and Celia said nothing.This far north, the sunlight would continue deep into the evening, making the forest and the stones gleam.When they reached the water, they sat on massive rocks and watched the ocean thrash and churn and the seagulls swoop overhead.Celia admitted, “This is the first time I’ve come down here since I got back,” which both surprised and didn’t surprise Landon.From here, they could see the dramatic cranes, arching their arms, preparing to rip into the soil and the cliffs and the forest, all in pursuit of Hanson Smith’s massive development.Landon felt a rage that he knew he couldn’t quell.
“Did you ever figure out that I was dating Hanson senior year?”Celia asked suddenly.
Landon lost his breath.He turned to look at Celia, whose eyes were focused purely on the construction site before them.
“You never told me,” he said.
Celia shrugged.“It was a big secret.Maybe dating a girl like me would have ruined his popular-guy reputation.Maybe he wasn’t sure if he liked me enough to tell the world.But for several months there, we had something that felt pretty real.I had all these fantasies about it.I was sure that he would join me at Georgetown and become this big football star and give football interviews that mentioned what a genius his girlfriend was.”Celia laughed at herself.“I was just a girl with a crush.”
