Page 28 of Windward Hearts

Now she eyed the project with interest. It wasn’t precisely a brag to say that now, at thirty, she had more patience than she had possessed when she was six years old. But an enduring project that would, at the end, give her an object that she could hold up as a sign of her perseverance and success was definitely appealing.

There was probably some sort of psychological link between her job vanishing into a puff of air after a decade of labor and this desire, but Hope didn’t think that was bad, just logical.

Miriam saw her looking at the project and smiled.

“Would you like to help?” she asked. “This is the kind of work that goes more quickly with two hands.”

The sentence was barely out of Miriam’s mouth before Hope was reaching for the sewing basket. She didn’t bother to hide her eagerness. She knew that Miriam would be just as pleased for the help as Hope was to offer it.

“Okay,” Miriam said when Hope had threaded the needle with the right color and weight of thread. “So see the width of my stitches?”

Hope nodded, peering at her grandmother’s neat, precise work.

“Try to do them about that long,” Miriam said, “but honestly, this project is just for fun, so it’s a good place to get the cobwebs out, so to speak. Follow the lines, but again, it doesn’t need to be perfect.”

This warning proved useful, because Hope did, indeed, have some cobwebs to work out. After a few minutes of stitching, though, she felt the old muscle memory begin to come back, and her stitches grew more even, the tension in the thread more regular.

They lapsed into a comfortable silence for a little while, each stitching from one corner of the quilt. Eventually, though, Miriam made a querying hum.

“So, Hopey,” she opened, her mischievous smile dancing around her lips. “Tell me. Any potential paramours in your life?”

Hope paused in her work to give her grandmother a wry look.

“When would I have found any potential paramours?” she asked. “I left my whole life in Boston behind, and since I’ve come here, I’m mostly hanging out with you. I have no complaints about that, obviously, but it doesn’t exactly leave me overflowing with date possibilities.”

Miriam hummed noncommittally.

“Okay, then,” she said. “Well, indulge an old romantic, eh? Tell me about the last romantic intrigue you enjoyed?”

Hope laughed at her grandmother’s dramatic phrasing. “‘Intrigue’ is going a bit far,” she said. “But I guess it’s been almost a year now.”

The length of time shocked her a little. She hadn’t quite realized how long had gone by without any romance in her life.

Her mind wandered briefly to Jared’s comment about her being pretty… but she pushed that awkward experience away as quickly as she could. She had acted like she was fourteen years old with her first crush. It was not the cool, adult attitude she had hoped to show the handsome chef, and, days later, it still made her cringe with embarrassment if she thought about it too hard.

She quickly turned her thoughts back to Tony, her last boyfriend.

“His name was Tony. He was a prep cook at one of the other upscale restaurants in Boston. A place that specialized in steak and other prime meat cuts. Good food.”

“Darling, I don’t care as much about the place the man worked as the man himself,” Miriam gently teased.

“Oh, right.” Hope pulled a face. “Well, that probably reveals part of why we broke up after a few months. We were both more interested in our jobs than we were in each other. It wasn’t fraught or anything,” she clarified. “There was no ‘oh you work too much’ drama, because we both worked the same crazy hours. We just… drifted. And eventually, after a string of texts where we both apologized for not managing to make any concrete plans, we realized it just wasn’t working. I saw him at a few industry events after, and it was totally fine.”

Miriam was giving her an assessing look.

“What you need, my dear,” she said with the air of someone delivering great wisdom, “is an affaire de couer.”

Hope smiled. “Just because you say it in French doesn’t mean that trying to find someone to fall in love with is any easier,” she reminded her grandmother.

“No. But have you been really trying?”

The question was delivered without judgment, but it still lodged heavily in Hope’s chest.

“No,” Hope admitted. “And I was so busy with my job, which I really liked! So it didn’t seem like a bad thing. I don’t know. I kind of think it still doesn’t seem bad, per se. But it does… sting a little, that all that hard work ended up not getting me anywhere. I don’t know. I guess I feel a little bit like I did have a breakup from a relationship that I really cared about. It’s just that they were professional relationships, not romantic ones.”

Hope wasn’t entirely certain that this all made sense; she was still working it out on her own. But Miriam nodded with understanding.

“Life gets busy,” she said. “And it can be hard, maybe even impossible, to attend to all things at once. And when we lose those things, it hurts, even if we understand how or why it happened. And those are different variations of the same hurt, even if they aren’t exactly the same.”