She stared at him, her breath coming in short, quick heaves. The happiness she thought had been torn from her hands reformed like mists. If she stared too hard at it, would it vanish?
He lowered his head to breathe a kiss on her knuckles. “Please. For Aidan’s sake, for your sake, and for mine, give us all a chance.”
“Yes, Sean,” she murmured. The weight against her chest suddenly lightened. With a smile, she leaned in to kiss him. Yes. A thousand times, yes.
Epilogue
A month later, on a glorious morning in May, Debra glanced up as the doorbell of the café tinkled, signaling a new customer. She flashed the familiar young man a smile. “Passing through again, right on schedule. I promise, there’s no gunman this time.”
He smiled. “I’ll take the usual; actually, make it a large. It may be a while before I come this way again.”
Debra reached for a cup to fill with his black Americano. “It’s graduation weekend for your girlfriend, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.” He smiled, but the gleam did not reach his eyes. “The years kind of sneak up on you, and before you know it, you’ve practically spent a lifetime with one person.”
“I spent what felt like a lifetime alone, but not any more.” Debra glanced out the window at the town square where Sean and Aidan hung out in the wide green space. Jewel romped between them in search of an elusive tennis ball.
In the past month since the shooting, since the second chance Debra had granted all of them, life had been normal—blissfully, delightfully normal. There was no other word to use to describe the simple routine of each day, of breakfast and dinners together, of laughter and conversation over home-cooked meals, of long walks each evening with a half-grown dog who was larger than a baby elephant. Life was normal—beautifully normal—and it was everything Aidan, Sean, and she needed.
Yet life moved forward. The specific topic of marriage had not resurfaced, but increasingly, Sean referred to plans with the words “when we…” He had not bothered to renew his short-term apartment lease; there was no purpose in doing so, not when he had moved everything he owned over to Debra’s home. In the evenings, they chatted about furniture upgrades and house improvement projects. Last weekend had been spent repainting Aidan’s room and landscaping the garden.
Together, they were building a home and a future.
From outside the building, Sean caught her eye, then waved and grinned.
Debra smiled. She still did not believe in happy endings, because life wasn’t about happy endings. Sometimes it was about slow starts or even bad starts, but life was also about always moving forward and never losing sight of “expecting more.”
Her hand went to her neck, and she ran her fingers over the rose-shaped pendant she wore on a necklace. A similarly ornate bracelet encircled her wrist. Both were gifts from Sean, who promised that a matching ring would someday complete the set. “Soon,” was all he had said.
Soon.
Whenever he was ready to take that step, she would be waiting for him.
THE END
Turn the page and continue Love Letters with this excerpt from JILTED!
Jilted
Can love ever measure up to perfection?
Jon Seifer is almost everything to me. He’s the security that anchors me and the love that raises me up.
However, I was, at birth, promised in marriage to an even more amazing man who holds a medical degree from Harvard Medical School, works as a cardiac surgeon at Mayo Clinic, and hails from the lofty Brahmin caste.
Like me.
And he is a good man. A man I could love given half a chance. Everyone agrees he’s perfect for me.
And everyone knows that I—an overachiever from birth—would never settle for anything less than perfection.
So where does it leave Jon…?
CHAPTER ONE
A loud crash of shattering plates and glasses jolted through Blue Moon Café. A handful of customers looked around—the newbies and out-of-town folks, Anjali Bhanot thought with a smile. The café’s regular customers—practically fixtures—did not seem to notice the racket, probably because they were borderline deaf from too many late nights at the café. Indeed, she could hardly hear anything above the low-decibel buzz of conversations and the music blasting from the ancient jukebox.
“That better not be my Captain Crunch French Toast,” Jonathan Seifer said. “The service here isn’t any better than I remember.”
“It’s peak dinner hours on graduation weekend. What did you expect?” Anjali placed her hands over her boyfriend’s. Their eyes met across the table, and his mouth tugged into a grin that made her insides swirl with anticipation. “Thank you for coming down for my graduation.”
“Graduating from medical school’s a huge deal, Dr. Bhanot.”
“Not yet.”
“In two days, you will be.” He raised his bottle of beer to her. “Congratulations.” He did not need to tell her he was proud of her. She could see it in the crinkle at the corners of his eyes and the expanse of his smile. He grasped her fingers and squeezed them gently. The brilliance of his smile faded, glazed by a layer of wistfulness. “I’ve missed you.”
“I know.” Their daily phone calls and frequent video conversations did not compensate for separation required by the business he ran in Westchester, New York, while she attended the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. Fortunately, because of their overlapping years in college at the Johns Hopkins University—he was younger than she was—they had only been apart for two years.
Two years too long. Did he count down every day between his visits the
