Although their differences had been challenging, Olivia was beginning to learn to embrace them. Jake was the first man who listened intently, no matter what she was talking about, whether it be the curve of a clay bird’s wing she was sculpting or the daily concern she held for her child. Every day she reminded him of their differences, and every day he reminded her that in spite of them, his instincts were telling him to let things unfold between them. To give it a shot. And his instincts had been good, so much so that Olivia had eventually allowed him to meet Luci. Never before had she introduced a man to her daughter. What was the point?
Now life had brought her to Washington, Connecticut, a rural hamlet of artists and families. Just outside of New York, but oh how far outside it felt amid the greenery and the hills and the lakes. Jake turned to her and squeezed her hand. “Is that the Big Dipper?” He pointed up at the sky and she followed his gaze.
“I think so. The north star is just above it.”
“My father used to point out the constellations to me from the boat. On warm nights we’d go out to the middle of the lake,turn off the engine, and just float beneath the sky. He could name them all.”
Olivia pictured it. “That sounds nice.”
“Will you do that with me this summer?” Jake asked.
She smiled at him gratefully. “I might.” Right now she relished the thought of going in to bed. Not of making love, something they’d often done, but of something they so far never had: falling into the cool, crisp sheets together, with her resting her head against this wonderful man’s broad chest. She relished the thought of him staying overnight so that they’d wake up in the morning together, when Luci could come bounding in and jump into bed with them. Like a real family. She blinked in the growing darkness.
“There’s something else I need to ask you,” he said.
“About the constellations?”
“About us.”
And before she understood what was happening, Jake rose from his Adirondack chair and promptly knelt beside her own. He took her hand. “Olivia Cossette. You are more exquisite than any of the stars in the sky. I have fallen in love with you, and I don’t want to spend another summer without looking up at the stars by your side. Will you marry me?”
Olivia gasped.
From his shorts pocket Jake retrieved a ring that sparkled in the light from the firepit. He slid it onto her finger.
Olivia stared at the man kneeling before her in the firelight. Then back at the cottage, where Luci was tucked in her bed sleeping, then back at Jake. She started to cry. “Yes!”
Jake pulled her up onto her feet and she threw her arms around his neck.
“I can’t wait to tell our families,” he whispered.
Tears slid down Olivia’s cheeks. Luci would have cousins. And aunts and uncles. A big boisterous family for holidays and birthdays. Who sang Christmas carols and argued at the dinner table and played board games and went boating on the lake. Finally, she and Luci would have a family.
As she stood in Jake’s arms, she recalled the day she told her father that she was moving to Connecticut with Luci. Pierre’s expression had crumpled.
Leaving the city was unthinkable. “Why would you leave New York?” he cried. “Here, there is everything! Everything a person could need. And me.” His sharp brown eyes had softened with sentiment.
She’d taken his hands in her own, large calloused hands dotted with Band-Aids from kitchen work. “Connecticut is just next door, Papa. This job will be good for me. And for Luci. Think of the things she can do in the country.”
“Bah.” He’d pulled his hands away, crossing his arms and staring across the stainless steel expanse of the empty kitchen. It was late afternoon. Soon the prep workers would file in to start on the evening’s menu.
“I will come back,” she promised. She retrieved her apron from the back of the meat locker door and tied it tightly around her waist. “You’ll see.”
Pierre shook his head wistfully. “Non, ma chérie.You will fall in love.”
Fall in love? She had not known if he meant with the Connecticut countryside, or the job, or a man. Indeed, she had gone and done all three.
Emma
The school bus lumbered down her neighborhood road, and Emma glanced up reluctantly from her book. Almost home.
She gazed out the window. Stately white colonials sat atop grassy rises, their pillared entrances flanking Belgian block drives. The lawns were all the same: blunt-edged and freshly shorn, with sharp rows of boxwoods sheared into submission beneath gaping picture windows. Up the street, her own house was just as unyielding in its bland conformity. Across the aisle Laura Brentwood cleared her throat for at least the tenth time, a nervous tic that Emma tried to ignore. They were the only two sophomores riding the bus. A handful of freshman boys had staked out the back-row seats and inhabited them loudly, probably relieved to flex their muscles in an upperclassman-free zone. Emma got it, but she was also over it. You wouldn’t catch an upperclassman dead on the bus; every junior or senior in this neighborhood had a license and a car, or friends who did. Emma sighed. Next year she’d escape it, too.
Outside the bus window she caught glimmers of her lake peeking out from behind the waterfront houses and foliage. She was still staring out the window when she heard the horn. Amanda Hastings’s silver BMW roared up alongside the bus inthe opposite lane. The top was down. There were two girls in the backseat, their hair blowing behind them in a tangle of brunette and blond. Courtney Alcott and Jen DeMaio, two of Amanda’s groupies. Emma couldn’t make out the boy seated between them, but she had no doubt who was up front in the passenger seat next to Amanda. Sully McMahon glanced up at the bus windows, his expression cool. Emma ducked.
The horn blared again.
“What the…?” The bus driver slammed on the brakes and the BMW blew past and cut in front of them. One of the girls waved.
