Hill Country Hero
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Kit Hawthorne
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21
CHAPTER ONE
THEY’D SCHEDULED THE bonfire for a cool September evening right on the verge of fall—a fitting time of year, Annalisa thought, for something so momentous. She’d always loved fall. The gentle melancholy of cooler, shorter days brought relief from the brutal heat and glare of a Texas summer, along with the hope that other things could change for the better, as well. Most people thought of spring as the season of fresh starts, but for Annalisa that season was fall—and a fresh start was what she desperately needed.
Eliana gave her an encouraging smile as she poured a glass of blackberry mead and held it out. “You’re doing the right thing,” she said.
Annalisa took the glass and stared out over the twilit pasture of her friend’s ancestral ranch. “I know I am. It’s just hard to do it.”
“Of course it’s hard. But I’ll be here to help you every step of the way. And then it’ll be done, over, finished, and you’ll never have to go through it again.”
The bonfire had been Eliana’s idea to begin with. She’d said that Annalisa needed a ceremony to provide closure, and she was probably right. Annalisa had realized for a while now that her lifelong crush on Javier Mendoza was a lost cause, but she couldn’t find a way to move past it on her own.
Oh, she’d dated other men through the years, with varying degrees of seriousness. But whenever a relationship ended, her mind and heart always went back to Javi. It was maddening, the hold he still had on her after all this time. She’d barely even seen him in person over the past two years, ever since he’d moved away from their hometown in the Texas Hill Country to work in the oil fields in the western part of the state. But out of sight was definitely not out of mind.
All her life, it seemed, Annalisa had been waiting for Javi. Waiting for him to call her, to text her, to break up with whatever girl he was dating at the moment. Waiting for him to move back home where he belonged. Waiting for him to open his eyes and see her as something more than the friend he could always count on.
Well, not anymore. It was high time Annalisa faced the truth—that Javi was never going to feel for her what she felt for him. Time to let go of the hope that had been fettering her and sabotaging her romantic relationships for years. Time to stop waiting and get on with her life.
She drew her legs beneath her on the sturdy outdoor chair. A nice blaze was already crackling away in the firepit, but the heat hadn’t reached her yet. The firepit was part of an outdoor patio complex—far enough from the house for privacy, but close enough for security. Annalisa hadn’t grown up in the country the way Eliana had. She was a town girl, and wide open spaces made her nervous.
The house’s shadow stretched to the back fence and into the pasture, where some cows were moseying along to wherever it was that cows went at night. Recent rains had brought bursts of green to a landscape beginning to mellow into fall colors, while brightening the russets and pale yellows of the faded grasses. Away at the horizon, the elms along the creek showed a sprinkling of gold.
Dalia came out the back door with two fleecy blankets in her arms and a black-and-white dog at her side. “In case you get chilly after the sun goes down,” she said.
She seemed tolerantly amused, as she usually did by Eliana’s schemes. The two sisters didn’t look or act much alike, but once in a while Eliana showed a steely core that made Annalisa think of Dalia. Annalisa needed to develop a steely core of her own.
“Thanks,” said Annalisa, taking the blanket Dalia held out to her.
The dog came over to Annalisa and gave a polite wag of his stub tail, as if he knew she needed encouragement. He was a pedigreed border collie, so he probably did. Annalisa scratched behind his ears and rubbed his soft white throat.
Dalia absently pulled Eliana’s glass of sparkling grape juice away from the edge of the small side table to a safer spot near the center. Eliana was Annalisa’s designated driver tonight, so no alcohol for her. She’d volunteered for the job, and it was a wise precaution to take. Annalisa was going to need a lot of liquid courage to get through this.
Dalia glanced into the box resting beside Annalisa’s chair. “Are those the mementos?”
“Yes,” said Annalisa, hoping Dalia wouldn’t take too close a look. She felt a little sensitive about the contents of her box around capable, no-nonsense Dalia.
Dalia didn’t pry. She pointed to the garden hose, capped by a spray nozzle, lying within easy reach. “The water’s already turned on full blast. When you’re done, remember to thoroughly hose down the embers. The burn ban’s lifted, but you’ve got to be careful with fire.”
“I know,” said Eliana, sounding mildly offended that Dalia thought she needed to be told this.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it, then,” said Dalia. She looked at her dog. “Durango, stay here with them and keep them company.”
Durango immediately settled down at Annalisa’s feet.
“That dog is scary smart,” said Eliana. “He understands human speech.”
“Of course he does,” said Dalia. And she went back to the house without another word.
As soon as the door shut behind her, Eliana turned to Annalisa with a businesslike air. “Okay. Let’s get started. Take out Item Number One and tell me about it.”
Annalisa took a deep breath, reached into the box and selected a crumpled paper.
“This is a rodeo program for the Seguin County Fair, my sophomore year,” she said. “Javi had already graduated and started working with his dad by then. He was at the rodeo with his family, and I was there with mine. We didn’t actually sit next to each other, but I was close enough to hear him talking and making wisecracks about the different riders. I can still remember exactly how he looked in his dark-washed jeans and cowboy boots and white T-shirt. I mean, he’d always been handsome, but he’d really bulked up since high school, and he just looked like such a man.”
“He always did seem older than he was,” said Eliana. “I guess that’s because of what happened. He had to grow up fast.”
“He did,” said Annalisa. “It was rough on the whole family, of course, but somehow it seemed to hit Javi harder than his brothers.”
He’d carried his burden of anger around with him for over twenty years now. Even when he was laughing and having a good time, like at the rodeo, it was still there. You could see it in the set of his shoulders and the fire in his eyes. But he’d never turned his anger on Annalisa. And she knew why it was there—as a hard protective shell around a core of pain.
“Now toss it,” said Eliana.
Annalisa stared down at the worn and wrinkled paper. Javi had held another just like it in his own hand that night. He’d turned and looked at her once, just after the rodeo clown had made a particularly bad joke. She could still see the way he’d grinned and rolled his eyes.
Eliana’s voice cut through the memory. “Annalisa Cavazos! Stop stalling and burn that program. You knew this was coming. You’ve made up your mind. Now toss it. Do it!”
Annalisa took a deep breath and dropped the worn program into the fire. The flames flared up, and in a few seconds the paper was gone.
“Yay! You did it!” said Eliana, raising her glass. Annalisa raised her own to meet it in a soft clink, then took a sip of blackberry mead. It was sweet and fruity and made a blossom of warmth in her throat and chest.
“Okay,” said Eliana. “What’s next?”
Annalisa picked up a small gold metallic bag. “Item Number Two. Party favor bag from Marisol Garza’s quinceañera, my junior year. Javi was there. We didn’t go together to that, either, but we saw each other and talked awhile. A band was playing. Javi didn’t ask me to dance, but he did say my hair looked nice.”
“I remember Marisol’s quinceañera,” said Eliana. “Your hair looked amazing. And as I recall, other boys did ask you to dance, but you turned them all down.”
“I did. I wanted to stay available in case Javi asked me. I really thought he would. Why didn’t he? It wasn’t as if I didn’t know how. He was the one who taught me to dance, that summer when I first started going to Gruene Hall on the weekends with the crowd, when I was fourteen and he was eighteen. I was pretty good, too.”
“Of course you were good! You still are.”
Annalisa ran a fingertip along a white crease that marred the paper bag’s shiny gold surface. Why hadn’t Javi asked her to dance that night? They were old friends, after all. Maybe she’d made it too plain that she wanted him to, giving off a vibe of attraction that had pushed him away. She should have acted as if she didn’t care. Danced with other boys. Maybe that would have gotten his attention. Maybe he’d have stalked onto the dance floor and cut in, and taken her in his arms, and looked down at her with those clear green eyes, and—
“Toss it,” said Eliana.
Annalisa steeled herself and tossed the bag into the firepit. The shiny gold paper blackened and turned to ash.
Eliana cheered again, and Annalisa took another swallow of mead, a big one.
“What’s next?” asked Eliana.
Annalisa reached into the box and took out a small wooden boomerang, just the right size for her hand. “Item Number Three. Carnival prize from the Persimmon Festival, summer before sixth grade. Javi won it for me at the ring toss booth.”
“He won it for you?” Eliana asked, gently probing.
“Well, he won it, and then handed it to me to hold because I happened to be standing there, and he never asked for it back.”
“You happened to be standing there?”
Annalisa squirmed. “Okay, I was watching him play and cheering him on. And I may have been following him around the festival before that.” She shuddered. “Ugh, this is so embarrassing. I was such a silly little love-struck girl. What must he have thought of me then? What must he think of me now?”
Eliana gave a snort-laugh. “He must not be too repulsed, the way he keeps popping up in your life. The man is like a boomerang himself.”
The V-shaped piece of wood turned blurry with tears. It was true. How many times had she waited and waited and waited to hear from Javi, and finally told herself, That’s it, he’s gone for good this time, only to have him show up again, usually with some thorny problem for her to help him sort out, acting as if he’d never been away? For a few days, or a few weeks, the two of them would be texting back and forth constantly, and then he’d vanish again, into the void.
“Sorry,” Annalisa said as she wiped her eyes.
“Don’t be sorry. Go ahead and get it all out there, and feel the way you feel. That’s what tonight is for. Grief and closure. And then tomorrow...”
Annalisa sniffed. “I know. Tomorrow I move on.”
“Exactly.”
She closed her fingers around the lightweight balsa wood. The shape of it was familiar and comforting in her hand.
“Does it work?” asked Eliana. “As a boomerang, I mean. When you throw it, does it come back?”
“It does, when you throw it right. I got pretty good at it by the end of that summer. But mostly I kept it in the drawer of my nightstand.”
She took one last look at the boomerang before tossing it into the flames. It didn’t come back this time. The pale wood turned black around the edges, then all the way through, until there was nothing left of it but ash.
They proceeded through the box, with Annalisa explaining the significance of each item and its tenuous connection to Javi. There were a lot of wristbands from Gruene Hall, where they’d gone dancing as teenagers with a whole crowd of friends and Javi’s brothers. A lot of ticket stubs from movies and concerts they’d attended, also as part of bigger groups. She and Javi always seemed to have a crowd around them whenever they were together in person. It was almost never just the two of them.
Sometimes Annalisa and Eliana took long breaks between items to talk and drink. The sky darkened and the moon rose, and still they’d only reached Item Number Ten, with a whole layer of stuff left in the box.
Whenever the flames started to die down, Eliana got up to stir the embers and lay more wood on the fire.
“Oh, look!” she said after picking up a fresh log from the pile. “An orb spider.”
She held the log closer for Annalisa to see. Annalisa drew her legs closer to her chest and pulled her blanket tight. The spider was enormous, with a yellow-spotted black body and long spindly legs.
“Ugh! It’s hideous! Make it go away!”
Eliana gave her a scornful look. “Don’t be such a baby. Orb spiders won’t hurt anybody. And they eat garden pests. They’re our friends. Ooh, it has an egg sack.”
Annalisa shuddered. “Is it about to burst into a swarm of a zillion little spider babies that will creepy-crawl all over us?”
“No, this is the wrong time of year for baby spiders to hatch. There aren’t hardly any grasshoppers left for them to eat. I’ll just move this log over here so we don’t forget and burn it by mistake.”
She laid the log gently against the fountain, crouched down beside it and started crooning to it. “There you go, little spider mama. Crawl into a nice crack in the wood and go to sleep, okay? Okay. Bye, now.”
Annalisa burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Eliana asked as she came back to her chair by the fire.
“You. You’re not drinking any alcohol, but you’re acting like you are.”
“I know. I feel like I’m drinking alcohol, too. It’s the power of suggestion acting on my hypersensitive imagination and empathetic nature.”
“Are you going to be okay to drive me home?”
Eliana waved a hand. “Oh, sure. I’ll be fine once I get behind the wheel. I’m never empathetic then.”
That made both of them laugh, for far longer than the joke warranted. Annalisa was definitely feeling the effects of the mead. Her limbs tingled, and her head felt light with a pleasantly swimmy sensation that blurred the edges of heartache.
By the time she reached the bottom of the box, the stars were out, and she and Eliana were both making full use of the fuzzy blankets. Durango hadn’t moved from Annalisa’s side.
Annalisa lifted a gray T-shirt out of the box and pressed it to her face with both hands. The soft cotton gave off a tropical, sunscreenish scent, flooding her with memories that had never lost their sweetness. It was for good reason that she’d saved the T-shirt for last.
“Item Number Seventeen,” she said. “The summer after my freshman year of college. A group of us went tubing on the Comal River. You were there, Eliana.”
“Yes,” said Eliana. “I remember.”
The fire crackled. Sparks rose into the dark sky and vanished. Annalisa shut her eyes and let the autumn night dissolve into a summer day, the sun warm on her skin, her feet trailing in cool spring-fed water, floating past a constantly changing shoreline of gentle slopes that led to fancy riverfront houses and high bluffs covered with trees.
“The river was really crowded that day,” she said. “All these wild, noisy groups of college kids with their coolers of beer and their trays of Jell-O shots kept floating by. But none of that mattered. It was like Javi and I were in this perfect little bubble together and nothing could touch us. Whenever our tubes started to drift apart, he’d casually reach over and hold on to mine to keep us together. He’d taken his shirt off right away and laid it over the side of his tube. I had that red swimsuit on, the one with the ruffles, and I knew I looked good.”
“Oh, I loved that swimsuit,” said Eliana.
“We talked the entire three hours. He kept calling out the names of the different species of trees as we passed them—bald cypress, walnuts, cottonwoods. He knew all about trees from working with his dad. I learned a lot of tree names that day, and I’ve never forgotten them. When we reached the rapids, my tube flipped, and I went under. I got caught in an eddy between some big rocks with another tube over me and couldn’t get free. Javi shoved the tube away and pulled me up. The water wasn’t very deep there, but the rocks were slippery, and I sort of stumbled against him. He asked if I was okay. I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t breathe. He said, ‘You poor thing. Your heart is racing.’ He fished my bag out of the water, flipped my tube right side up and helped me in, and we went on our way.”
She took a deep drink of mead. “After that he got more serious. He talked about how hard it was when his dad lost the business back when we were kids. And when we reached the end of the tubing route, he handed me his shirt and said, ‘Hold on to this for me,’ so I tucked it into my bag. He carried both our tubes to the shuttle, and we rode back to the parking lot together.”
A log broke into pieces, sending a fresh shower of sparks into the sky.
“The rest of us were going out to eat in New Braunfels, but Javi had to go help his dad clear some land. He was always working. He had so little time to himself. So he walked me to my car, and when we got there he looked down at me with those beautiful green eyes, really looked at me, and I thought, This is it. He’s going to do it. He’s finally going to ask me out.”
Durango must have sensed how Annalisa was feeling, because he sat on his haunches, laid his head in her lap and gazed up at her with his ice-blue eyes. Annalisa stroked his silky-soft head and swallowed hard.
“But he didn’t,” she went on. “He just gave me a quick, light hug and said, ‘Take care of yourself, Annalisa.’ Then he walked away without even asking for his shirt back. And that was it.”
She shook her head. “I held out hope for weeks. I’d been so sure, and I didn’t see how I could have read him wrong. I told myself he must have lost his nerve at the last minute for some reason, and that any day now he’d call or text. But that was stupid. When has Javi’s courage ever failed him? It must have been something else. The thing is, I know I didn’t imagine the way he looked at me that day. I know he felt it, too, at least for a little while. So why didn’t he act on it? I was old enough for him by then. I think—I think he must have taken another look at me and decided that, on second thought, I wasn’t enough.”
Eliana took another drink of sparkling grape juice and pointed at Annalisa while staring hard at her over the rim of her glass. “See, that’s exactly why you have to give him up. You are enough, Annalisa. You’re a beautiful, intelligent, accomplished woman. You could have been on a date with a man tonight instead of here with me burning old rodeo programs.”
“I know.”
“You’ve got to get over him. You’ve got to move on.”
“I know!”
“All right, then. Act on it. Burn the shirt.”
Annalisa’s fingers tightened on the soft, sun-faded cotton. A thousand memories washed over her, swirling around her, pushing her under, like the eddy at the rapids in the Comal River. Javi smiling at her across a crowded room. Teaching her to dance at Gruene Hall. Holding her close after pulling her out of the water. Gazing down at her in that parking lot.
Then she saw herself, alone, all those miserable weeks while she’d waited to hear from him.
She drained her glass, set it down on the little table and threw Javi’s shirt in the flames. The fragrance of coconut and pineapple rose up for half a moment and was gone. And in a few minutes, so was the shirt itself.
Annalisa leaned back in her chair with a sigh. “Well, that’s it. That’s the end of it.”
Eliana tilted the box toward her. “Mmm, not quite. There’s one more scrap of paper, or an old envelope or something, in here. Might just be a piece of trash that got in by mistake.”
She handed it to Annalisa. It was an old envelope, all right, covered with Javi’s big, loose, untidy scrawl. The words were clearly legible in the firelight’s warm glow.
Wait for me.
A sob tore loose from her throat. “Seriously? This isn’t fair.”
“What?” asked Eliana. “What is it?”
Annalisa pulled herself together and held up the envelope.
“Item Number Eighteen. My senior year of high school. Yet another time when Javi and I went somewhere with a big group of people. We didn’t have a clear plan, and part of the group got separated from the rest. Javi’s phone died, so he couldn’t text. He had to leave a physical note taped to my front door.”
She traced the words with a fingertip. “It’s funny. He and I have texted so much over the years, but this is the only handwritten note I have from him.”
“Burn it,” said Eliana.
Annalisa steeled herself, then tossed the envelope onto the fire. Eliana picked up the box, turned it upside down and shook it.
“That’s it,” she said. “Do you want to burn the box, too?”
“No. It’s just an Amazon box. There’s no special memory attached to it. And it’s a pretty good box. I’ll leave it here for Ignacio to play with.”
“All right. Now take out your phone and remove Javi as a contact.”
Annalisa slid her phone out of her sweater pocket, opened Contacts and tapped Javi’s name—and there was his face, fixing her with that brooding green-eyed stare of his. Her heart gave a sickening lurch. Delete Javi? How could she? It would be like carving her own heart out of her chest.
She hit Edit and scrolled all the way down to the words Delete Contact in red letters. Her finger hovered over the screen for several agonizing seconds before giving a quick tap.
And just like that, he was gone. No second chance, no warning from her phone urging her to think it over and not do anything drastic. Just a list of alphabetical contacts without so much as an empty space where Javi’s name should have been.
“I did it,” she said.
“Now delete your text thread,” said Eliana.
Annalisa groaned. Why was this such a long, hard, multistep process? Why did she have to keep burning and removing and deleting?
She opened the texting app. The thread was easy to locate, though it was now listed under Javi’s phone number instead of his name. It was long, covering years of sporadic back-and-forth messages. She didn’t open it. She didn’t dare. She just selected it and hit Delete. The thread vanished without warning or fanfare.
“That’s it,” she said. “It’s done.”
The finality of it left her feeling blank and numb. She’d been deleting him all evening, and now, at long last, she was finished. She’d removed every trace of Javier Mendoza from her life.
“Good,” said Eliana. “Now remember. If you’re ever tempted to get in touch with him again, call or text me right away, and I’ll help you get past it.”
“Okay.”
Annalisa got stiffly to her feet and stretched. They’d been sitting there for hours, and suddenly she wanted to go home and crawl into bed.
Eliana picked up the hose and started dousing the flames. Annalisa folded the blankets and put them inside the box, along with the mead jug and the sparkling grape juice bottle. She carried the box to the house with Durango following right behind her.
The house was quiet and dark except for a lamp in the living room and another light coming from the direction of the kitchen. Annalisa set the box on the floor next to the dining room table.
“All done?”
Annalisa gave a little jump as Dalia walked out of the kitchen.
“Sorry,” said Dalia. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“That’s okay. Yes, we’re all done. Thanks for letting us use your firepit.”
La Escarpa was a heritage ranch that had been in the Ramirez family since before the Texas Revolution, but it was Dalia’s home now. She and her husband, Tony, had been running the ranch together ever since Dalia’s mother had retired from ranch work and moved to town.
“No problem,” said Dalia. “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
It was nice of her to say so, but Annalisa wondered if Dalia secretly thought the whole bonfire thing was ridiculous. The two of them were around the same age, but somehow they’d never been close. Dalia had always been an intimidating person, quiet and capable and serious. It was Eliana, five years younger, who’d become Annalisa’s good friend in adulthood. They’d all played together as kids, whenever the Ramirez siblings would visit their grandparents in town. Eliana had been the cutest little girl, and Annalisa had loved taking care of her and dressing her up in her own outgrown princess gowns.
Now Eliana had an adoring husband and a pretty little house, while Annalisa was still renting and single. Which was fine. There was nothing wrong with that, no rule that said you had to be married and start a family by a certain age. But Annalisa wanted marriage and children, wanted them desperately. Wanted them with Javi.
These days, it seemed as if all Annalisa’s friends were either planning weddings or expecting new babies. Even Dalia was four months pregnant. Annalisa could see the slight fullness in her untucked flannel shirt just below the waist. Tony and Dalia already had a three-year-old son, Ignacio, who had Tony’s laughing eyes and springy black hair. Without meaning to, Annalisa imagined a toddler with Javi’s lowering eyebrows and intense green eyes.
Well, she couldn’t expect her feelings for him to vanish overnight. But they would fade, surely, now that she’d purged all physical reminders of him.
Eliana came inside. “You’ll be happy to know that the fire is well and truly out,” she told Dalia loftily.
“Good for you,” said Dalia.
“But you’re still going to go outside and check to make sure I did it right, aren’t you?” asked Eliana.
“Of course.”
“Oh, have you been waiting up for us, Dalia?” Annalisa asked. “I’m sorry.”
Dalia waved a hand. “It’s no problem. I’m a rancher. I’m tough. Anyway, it was for a good cause. I admire what you’re doing, Annalisa.”
Annalisa hadn’t expected this. “You do?”
“Sure. I know how hard it can be to let go. Sometimes you have to take charge and do something proactive. A grand gesture can help with that.” A faraway look came into her eyes. “You know, I actually did something similar myself, once upon a time.”
“You did? Seriously?”
“Yeah, in college, when I broke up with Tony. I boxed up all the stuff he’d ever given me, all his letters and things, and mailed them to him.”
“Without a word of explanation,” added Eliana. “It was very dramatic.”
Dalia shrugged. “I wasn’t trying to be dramatic. I just wanted it done.”
Annalisa admired her fortitude and matter-of-fact approach. But it wasn’t really the same thing. Dalia and Tony had actually dated, so Dalia’s mementos had real significance for both of them. If Javi received a package in the mail of all the items Annalisa had burned, it would just leave him confused, and maybe a little sad for her. And mailing them wasn’t like casting them into the flames. Dalia had probably gotten all her mementos returned to her, years later when she and Tony got back together.
Still, it was nice of Dalia to tell her about it, and to say she admired her. Dalia wouldn’t have said that if she hadn’t meant it.
“All right, let’s get you home,” said Eliana. “Tomorrow’s a big day for you. The first day of your new life.”
The gravel driveway crunched beneath their shoes as they walked out to Eliana’s car. Away from the cozy fire, there was a sharp chill in the night air. Annalisa pulled her sweater tightly around herself and folded her arms over her chest, the half-empty mead jug hanging from her fingers.
Once they were both in the car, Annalisa turned to face her friend.
“Thank you for doing this, Eliana,” she said. “For listening to me rant about Javi, not just tonight, but day in and day out for the past I don’t know how many years. And for helping me see what I needed to do, and for pushing me to do it. But most of all, thank you for drinking sparkling grape juice so you could drive me home tonight.”
Eliana smiled. “No trouble at all. That juice was actually pretty good.”
“Even so, I’m going to give you a bottle of that red wine you like for you and Luke to enjoy together. The two of you can toast my new Javi-free life.”
Eliana’s smile froze. “Um...actually...”
It was all she needed to say. “Oh, my gosh,” said Annalisa. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Eliana, sounding happy and apologetic at the same time. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to tell you tonight.”
Just for a moment, a wave of envy rose hot and choking in Annalisa’s throat. With heroic effort, she pushed it down, leaned over and gave Eliana a hug. “Sorry? You don’t have anything to be sorry for. Congratulations! You’re going to make a wonderful mother. Oh, and Dalia’s pregnant, too! You’re going to have same-age cousins!”
“I know! Dalia’s just a couple of months ahead of me.”
Annalisa managed to ask all the right questions about due dates and baby names, and keep up her end of a lighthearted stream of pregnancy-related small talk, just as a good friend should. If Eliana suspected her enthusiasm was less than perfectly sincere, she didn’t let on.
When they reached Annalisa’s downtown apartment, Eliana gave her a big hug.
“I’m proud of you, Annalisa. Stay strong, and call or text me if you need me. I mean it. I’m here for you.”
Annalisa blinked back tears. “I will. Thanks, Eliana.”
She let herself in through the ground-level entrance of her building, climbed the staircase to the second floor and unlocked her front door. Stepping into the loft apartment was like wrapping herself in a favorite old quilt. She loved her little home, with its high ceilings, gorgeous old millwork and fantastic views of downtown Limestone Springs. She’d been living here for four years now. It was within easy walking distance of the law office where she worked, and just the right size for a single woman.
She moved briskly around the kitchen, putting the mead jug away and loading the coffee maker for tomorrow morning, leaving herself no time to stand around and think. Then she went to her desk, an oversize antique with beautifully turned legs and a leather top edged in gold scrollwork. She’d already arranged her notes and research materials in meticulous order. Everything was ready for her to start work on her new book.
Her old book, Ghost Stories of the Texas Hill Country, was lying on the corner of the desk, ostensibly because she might need it for reference, but really to remind herself that she’d actually done it, she’d already written a book once before, and she could do it again. Ghost Stories had been released seven years earlier. The publisher was a small press, and the book had gotten only local distribution, but Annalisa didn’t care. She’d written it out of love for the subject matter and a desire to share the stories—and in the course of doing the research, she’d grown fascinated with Texas history. Now she wanted to explore deeper. The new book was tentatively titled Seguin County in the Texas Revolution.
She straightened some papers that didn’t need straightening and laid a hand fondly on the front cover of her book. Then she headed to her room. She could barely keep her eyes open as she brushed her teeth and got dressed for bed.
She was just climbing under the covers when her phone dinged.
Ordinarily she turned off her phone sounds after eight, but this hadn’t been an ordinary evening and she was off her routine. She picked up the phone and saw a text message from an unknown number.
Only he wasn’t unknown. She may have deleted him as a contact, but that didn’t mean she’d forgotten his number. Her heart gave a sudden painful throb in her chest as she saw those familiar digits, and the message below them.
Three words. The same three words she’d been waiting for him to say for the past two years.
I’m coming home.
