“This came in the mail,” she said.
She handed him a piece of paper, and he unfolded it, frowned at it. So much easier to study it than to look at her.
It was their certificate of marriage.
“Yeah,” he said gruffly, handing her back the piece of paper without looking at her, “about that. What do you want to do? Annul it?”
“Hmm, I think you can only annul an unconsummated marriage,” she said mildly.
She was going to bring that up? He dared a look at her. Memories of being with her in that way stormed him.
“Well, what do you want to do, then?” he managed to ask her.
“I want to give it a try,” she said.
He stared at her.
“If you want to.”
Want to? He wanted to throw himself at her feet and scream yes. He wanted to pick her up and swing her in circles until they were both dizzy from it.
But what if it didn’t work out? What if all those scenarios he had played out in his mind over the last few days came to fruition? He would be a destroyed man.
Though, truth to tell, he was nearly a destroyed man now.
“Why?” he asked her.
Her words were so simple.
“Because I love you. Madly. Unreasonably. It feels like the air is gone from my world. The color. The reason.”
But that was how he was feeling.
“I know you’re scared, Jonas.”
He wanted to deny he was scared, but when he looked at her, she was the one who would always know all of him.
And who would accept it. Maybe even cherish that which he tried to hide from the rest of the world.
“I am, too,” she said. “Terrified. Both of us have been so wounded by love. In very different ways, but it still makes it hard to say yes to it. I think that’s why I was so quick to reach the wrong conclusion when I overheard you talking to Mike on Sunday morning.”
“What?”
“He was congratulating you on the lengths you’d gone to to get your car back.”
“It stopped being about the car a long, long time ago.”
“I know that,” she said softly. “I needed it to be about the car. Because I had to run. I was so afraid, Jonas.”
“Of me?” he asked, appalled.
“No, Jonas. Of repeating history. I’m going to have a baby. Our baby.”
He could feel something rising within him, phoenixlike, out of the ashes of his destruction.
He stepped toward her, and then closer.
“A baby?” he said. “Our baby?”
She nodded, and it was all there. Her terror. Her uncertainty.
He put his hands on her shoulders and rested his forehead against hers. The moment he touched her, his strength began to flow back into him. She was Samson’s hair and Arthur’s sword.
“I was born for this,” he told her softly.
“To be a daddy?” she asked.
“Maybe that, too, but no. I was born to take that fear from you, and that uncertainty. I was born to show you a world that can be trusted. I was born to show you what love can do, and what it can make and how incredible the world can be because of it.”
She was crying now. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight.
“Jonas?”
“Yes, my love?”
“You really stink.”
And just like that, they were laughing. And the dog was barking, and the world and the future stretched out in front of them, illuminated.
Illuminated by the one light that had illuminated the world forever. Sometimes it flickered, sometimes it was hard to see. Sometimes tumult and the unexpected and uncertainty threatened it.
And yet it always fluttered back to life, it always gained strength, it always proved itself more powerful than any darkness.
There it was, shining.
A beacon for all to follow.
Love.
EPILOGUE
“ARE YOU SURE?” Jonas asked Krissy.
“About?”
“Leaving her with the boys.”
“Jonas! We are not leaving Jane with the boys. We’re leaving her with your sister. I think she can be trusted with a baby.”
Jane-Paulette was named after Krissy’s aunt Jane, of course, and after Jonas’s mother. She was nearly four months old.
And so tiny. And so perfect. Jonas had never felt anything like what he felt the first time he had held that baby. Protective. Besotted. Enchanted. And you would think that feeling would go away—the newness would rub off the awe—but no, it deepened.
“You told me you were going to take away my fear and uncertainty,” Krissy reminded him. “You told me you were going to teach me the world can be trusted.”
“And haven’t I?” he demanded.
“Oh, yeah, you have. But honestly, Jonas, when it comes to the baby, I have to teach you all those things.”
“She’s little! Simon and Gar are rambunctious. You can’t be too careful.”
“You can, actually, be too careful. If she’s survived Chance, the probability of her surviving our nephews is pretty good.”
The reunion was starting tomorrow. But Jonas and Krissy and Jane and the dog had all arrived early. Because Krissy had announced to him, her eyes shining, that she finally had figured out where to spread her aunt’s ashes.
When she had told him, he’d had his doubts.
“But you said she wanted them spread in the place she loved most. She’s never even been to Boy’s Den.”
Krissy smiled at him tenderly, that smile that could still melt his heart, even as they approached their one-year anniversary.
“What she loved most was love,” she told him. “That’s where she would want to be.”
So Jonas reluctantly surrendered the baby to his sister and followed Krissy down to the rowboat. She had the urn of ashes on her lap.
“Where to?” he asked, gathering up the oars.
“You know,” she said.
And then he did.
They had honeymooned here, last year, after all the vacationers had gone home. And they had taken out the rowboat and found the most beautiful private cove overlooking the lake. It had its own beach and was only visible from the water.
And it had a For Sale sign on it.
They had wandered that piece of property most of the day, deciding where to put the road and where their cabin would go, where
