B000FC1MHI EBOK (43 page)

“Is that a problem?” Noah asked gently, when she expressed her qualms.

“I do lobstering,” she reasoned because this other project was large and intimidating. “I don’t do potato farming, or innkeeping, or blueberry growing.”

“You do spinning, and weaving, and rabbitries. You do skiing in the Canadian Rockies and sailing in the Caribbean. You just bought a second camera—”

“A small one for my pocket.”

“It packs four megapixels, and the test shots you made with it were fabulous. You also bought a Telephoto lens for the bigger camera. Seems to me you’re perfectly set up to do the job.”

“You think so?” she asked, still dubious.

He smiled his answer, then added, “Unless you don’t want it.”

“I
want
it,” Julia said with more than a glimmer of excitement. She loved taking pictures. But she wasn’t a professional photographer. She was a daughter and a mother. She was a significant other, sometimes a sternman to Noah. She was the first one to pitch in when a friend was sick, and she made a mean batch of cookies.

But she was also a survivor. She never quite forgot that. There were no longer middle-of-the-night jolts from the burst of a purple boat in her dreams, but she rarely awoke in the morning without thinking,
Here’s a new day
. Life was fragile. Happiness and fulfillment, even success, weren’t things to postpone.

Allowing that glimmer of excitement to grow, she took Noah’s hand and said, “Yes, I could do this.”

In June, with the first anniversary of the accident approaching, Noah turned the tables and took her hand. She kept saying that he had saved her life, but the opposite was true. For knowing Julia, he was more open and relaxed. He communicated better than he had. His relationship with Ian continued to solidify, and he was in love.

He waited until her divorce was final, but not a day longer. A whole year had shown him how perfectly Julia fit into his world. But he knew of the fragility of life, too.

So, the very first morning she was formally free, he forwent lobstering in favor of sleeping in with her at the hill house. Then he brought her breakfast on the bedroom deck, and, with sea, sky, and trees looking on, he put three stones in her hand. They were diamonds, set vertically in platinum, and they hung from a chain that was as elegant and as delicate as she was.

“The two small ones at the top are from earrings my father bought my mother. She didn’t live long enough to enjoy them, so I want you to do that in her stead. The big one, here, is from me. If you’d like all three put into a wedding band, I’d love that. But a simple gold band would work, too. Whatever you want. It has to be different this time. For both of us. Y’know?”

She did.