Both of her front teeth were missing, she was wearing ripped boys’ jeans and a T-shirt that were both at least two sizes too big, and she was hands down the prettiest thing he’d ever seen in his life as she leapt through the air, dancing in the middle of her crowded backyard. He could see the way, even at eight, that she’d blossom into such a striking beauty. He could also see that she was too determined, too stubborn, to ever allow anything or anyone to take away her joy, her love for life.
Grayson wanted to be worthy of sharing that life with her, but he wanted something else, too. He wanted, one day, to take pictures of his own little girl as she danced and laughed and loved just like her beautiful mother.
At the entrance was a flower stand and Grayson asked the driver to stop, tucking the picture into the pocket above his heart as he opened the door and stepped out of the car. He didn’t buy the biggest, flashiest bouquet. Instead, he bought a small bouquet of bright tulips, Leslie’s favorite flower.
“I’ll walk from here,” he said to the driver, who nodded and pulled over to the curb to wait.
The cemetery looked the same as it had three years ago during his wife’s funeral, the last time he’d ever been here. The grass was perfectly green and meticulously mowed. The sky was full of dark clouds that looked as if they would burst with rain at any moment, the gray, cold sky so different from the clear blue over his farm.
As he approached Leslie’s gravestone, he could see that it was polished clean and bright, with an enormous bouquet of flowers in a vase beside it that he knew had to be from her parents.
The last time he’d been here, he’d been stunned...and racked with guilt. The shock had eventually lessened as he accepted that she really was gone, but the guilt, the blame he’d placed on himself for not knowing his own wife better, had deepened. Every day, as he’d put on his suit and tie and gone in to work to field questions and sympathy from colleagues and friends and people he only knew from cocktail parties, the guilt and blame and disgust with everyone who said they loved her and missed her but who hadn’t done a damn thing to stop her self-destruction, grew to the point where he knew he couldn’t stay there another second. He’d needed to start over in a world that was as far from New York society as possible, so he’d gone west and, just like Lori in her rental car, had stumbled onto his farm. The real estate transaction had been completed by nightfall, and Grayson had never planned on looking—or coming—back.
“Leslie.” He knelt down and laid the flowers on her grave, putting his hand over the cold stone as if that would help them finally connect again. “I’m sorry I haven’t been back for so long.”
It was so awkward that he felt like they were having one of their surface conversations again, where both of them spoke, but neither of them said anything. Lori, he knew, would never have stood for that. Cemetery or not, she would have said exactly what was on her mind...and in her heart.
Suddenly, he could picture her there, egging him on: Come on and grow some balls, farmer. Why are you still so afraid of baring your soul? Unconsciously, his hand went to the picture of her in his shirt pocket. They’re all good parts, she’d told him. And I’d never let anyone hurt you. Even now, he could feel her protecting him, his fierce and beautiful dancing farm girl who had the biggest heart of anyone he’d ever known.
Grayson sat down on the grass beside Leslie’s gravestone and ran his fingers slowly over the engraving of her name. “I’m sorry I was a bad husband. And I’m sorry that I wasn’t much of a friend by the end, either. I knew you were unhappy. I was unhappy, too. But I didn’t know how to fix any of it, so I ignored it instead. I ignored you, Leslie, and I’m so, so sorry.”
He’d apologized more in the past two weeks than he had in his entire life. And yet, just as he had with Lori, he couldn’t see how his wife could ever forgive him for the mess their lives had become before she died. No amount of apologizing would change that.
But since his big mistake had been that he hadn’t talked to her—really and truly talked to her—when she was still alive, he figured, at the very least, he could change that now.
“After you died, I pretty much lost it. I turned away from every last person, every last piece of our life, and decided to start over. I’m in California now, on a farm. A big one, right by the ocean. Whenever the fog rolls in, I think of how much you loved to walk along the coast on stormy days. I wasn’t searching for happiness, just for an escape, but the amazing thing is that I found it after all. Not just in the land, and my animals, but with the last person on earth I would ever have expected.
“You would have liked Lori, Leslie, and I know she would have liked you, too. She never stops asking questions, and when I try to ignore them she just asks more, so I’ve told her all about you. About when we were in college, how we used to the Tree Lighting and Yule Log ceremonies, and that one year we were so excited about being the big winners of the bad poetry contest. I even told her all about the way I asked you to marry me and ended up dropping the ring into a storm drain because I was so nervous.”
He thought he heard something then, a rustling of the leaves above him that sounded like a question: Is she pretty?
Before he knew it, Grayson was laughing and crying at the same time. Of course it was what Leslie would want to know.
“Yes,” he said as he finally let his tears fall for the woman who had been such an important part of his life for so long. “She is.”
And during the next hour, as he sat and finally talked to his wife, the thick gray clouds blew away one by one until there was nothing but bright, blue sky above the two of them.
* * *
Lori stood backstage at the Joyce Theatre in New York City in a circle with her dancers, all of them holding hands as they got ready to go out on stage. It had been the craziest forty-eight hours of her life, but she’d loved every second of it.
Carter had brought her in to take over on choreography that had been set in stone for months. But the vision she’d had was so clear and pure that she’d choreographed a brand-new dance barely one step ahead of the dancers learning the movements.
“Thank you so much for going on this journey with me,” she told them now. “You’re all amazing and wonderful and I love you guys for trusting me with this dance and putting your hearts and souls into something that means so much to me.” She grinned at them. “Now let’s go make some magic happen.”