Page 102 of Happy After All

“Yes, I’m the auctioneer, and I handled the sign-ups for all the entries.” I look around and start laughing. “I almost do have a Christmas tree farm.”

“What?”

“Oh, I just keep thinking, parts of this feel like one of those Christmas movies, but often someone owns a Christmas tree farm. Here’s mine, I guess.”

I take his hand, and we start to walk slowly through the trees. Lit-up Christmas trees, reindeer, and cacti are mounted on posts that provide scaffolding for a net of white lights that are overhead, like stars that have been brought down lower just for the occasion. The lights are so bright in the grove, it blots out everything beyond them.

It’s like we’re the only people in this bright, glittery world, and I want to believe it.

Just for now.

“There’s the one Elise made for Ben’s mechanic shop. This one,” I say, pointing to one with mermaids all over it. “This one is from Bob Riker at the antique store.”

There’s a tree with coffee-themed decorations from the local coffee place, and there’s one with woodland animals, which I quite like.

“One thing I don’t understand about your story,” he says. “How did you end up here?”

I stop and look around, at the lights, the trees. I draw strength from them. “I moved out of our house as soon as I caught him cheating. I was in a hotel; it was sotemporary.” I take a breath. “Three months after we lost her, I had a job opportunity out of town, and that was when my flight got canceled and I found out he was cheating. Just three months after. Her nursery was still set up. So I ... I couldn’t deal with it; I left that night. I didn’t even really have a fight with him—it just felt like ... my whole life was already ash, and he was making sure that was all it was. That there was nothing good or redeemable left there. So I was in a hotel, with one suitcase of stuff, and I was dreaming about another life. A new one, where I could just leave. Where I didn’t go and tear down her nursery piece by piece, but I could start over. I saw a real estate listing for this motel.” I laugh. “I put an offer in that day. I used my savings. When we sold the house, I put it into renovations. It was basically just a facelift, so they only took a couple of months. The Hemingway Suite ... I’d just gotten all that posted not long before Sarah would have passed.”

I realize that it’s chance that we ever met. That I saw the ad. That he’d gone on his honeymoon here, so this was where his wife looked. That she saw the room I designed and thought it would be perfect for him.

It makes me feel like somehow part of me did make it for him. It makes me feel like in some ways I got to meet Sarah, even though I never will.

Sarah is why he comes here. She wanted him to, and so he did. He does. Year after year to work on that book. I came here because of the listing in the paper. We would never have met if those things hadn’t happened.

We would never have met if our lives hadn’t crashed and burned. But it doesn’t feel like something that happened because of tragedy. It feels like a small miracle. An oasis in the middle of the desert, which in many ways is what Rancho Encanto is.

“I wanted something different than a city,” I say. “It was competitive. The pace was too fast. I liked it for a long time. I just couldn’t after we lost the baby.” I frown. “I couldn’t find myself there. Because everything around me was still trying to be the way it was before. I wasn’t the same, though. I couldn’t be. I think that’s what happened with Chris. He wanted things to go back to how they were before that happened. He wanted to pretend it didn’t. At least, that’s how I felt. So I thought since I couldn’t be the same in that place, where everything else was exactly like it had been before, I needed to go to a place that was totally different, where nobody would know I was different.”

“I think that Sarah didn’t want me to die in my office. I think she wanted me to have to make this drive. To get out. To see people, even if it was just because I had to stop to pump my gas.”

“She knew you really well,” I say. “That’s an amazing gift. I say that as somebody who was in a relationship with someone who didn’t really know them.” When I say that, I realize how true it is. I also realize how much of that is my own fault.

“Why didn’t he know you?”

I want to blame Chris. But that’s not real. It’s not even fair. It’s been three years, and the truth is, as much as I don’t really want him here, I can’t hate him anymore.

I’d rather be honest, because that might be the only thing that helps me.

“I don’t think I wanted him to.”

It was my slow-draining poison. The wound I already had by the time I got to him.

“Not on purpose,” I continue. “I wanted to blend in with everybody there. With that life. I didn’t want to be me. I’m realizing that more and more recently. I didn’t want to be this girl from a small town who hated driving in the traffic and felt sad and lonely whenever I thought about my childhood. I wanted to be ... interesting enough. Smart enough, cool enough, to be with him. I think ... The thing about grief is ... it makes you so tired. It makes you way too tired to put on a facade. I have always felt things deeply. I spent my life hiding that. Pretending I didn’t care whenever my mom was ... herself. Pretending it didn’t bother me when my dad couldn’t make it to things because he lived far away. Pretending that I didn’t feel second best to his family. I carried all that for so much of my life. But then Christopher and I lost the baby and I couldn’t do it anymore.”

I let out a long, slow breath, and I look up at the diamond-studded sky. “I think maybe neither could he. There were no masks. There was no bright, shiny veneer of anything. We just didn’t have it available to us. He needed someone to cater to him more than I could. He needed things to be okay on a surface level, and I needed to be devastated. We just couldn’t find each other. I think ... I don’t know. He didn’t know me. If it would’ve been like Sarah, if he were dying, he wouldn’t have known what road map to leave me behind. I’m very sorry that your wife had to do that. I just think that what she did was extraordinary. I can see that the way she loved you was extraordinary.”

It makes me feel crushed to say it. I’m happy for him. And at the same time, sad for myself. Not about my relationship with Chris. Notabout what we had or didn’t have. About the fact that I’ll never be able to love Nathan like that. Knowing him. Inside and out. His every breath. What he needs.

We wouldn’t have met if not for our tragedies. But it’s those tragedies that hold us separate now.

We’re meant to be, I’m convinced of that. We’re meant for this moment. It’s just that the moment is destined to be shorter than I want it to be.

Maybe it’s a happy ending of a kind.

Endings move on a continuum. One thing ends, something else begins. If I were writing this in a romance novel, readers would riot. They wouldn’t consider these few weeks a happy ending.

Time moves different in romance novels—we talked about that earlier.

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