To Have and to Hold (18 page)

When all the chocolate was gone, they headed back toward the gate. They’d only taken a few steps, though, before Phoebe reached for Trina’s wrist.

“We have a few minutes before boarding,” Trina reassured her.

They were a couple hundred feet from the gate when Phoebe asked, “Should you check your phone?”

“For flight alerts? We’ll be at the gate in a few seconds. Look—you can see people starting to line up. I bet they just called the back rows.”

“Just in case. Before we get on the flight. Shouldn’t you check it?”

“I would have felt it buzzing if anyone had called or texted.” But she obligingly pulled it out. “Nope,” she said. “Nothing.”

Phoebe’s face darkened.

“Who were you expecting?” Trina inquired carefully.

“No one.”

The squirrelly look on Phoebe’s face said just the opposite, though.

“Phoebs.”

“Now boarding passengers in rows fifteen through twenty-eight.”

“That’s us,” Trina said. “Phoebe, what’s going on?”

They joined the amoeba swell of passengers toward the gate door.

“Are you
sure
Hunter didn’t call? Or text?”

“To say what?”

“Nothing.”

“Phoebe Marie Levine.”

Phoebe burst into tears just as they handed their boarding passes to the flight attendant working the gate door.

“Oh, Phoebe,” said Trina, awkwardly wrapping one arm around her daughter and maneuvering them up the Jetway side by side. When they stopped, prevented from going any farther by the line in front of them, she wrapped her daughter up, and Phoebe’s body shook with sobs.

“She didn’t
do
it,” Phoebe sobbed.

“Who didn’t do what, baby?”

“Clara was going to go
missing
,” Phoebe sobbed. “And Hunter was going to have to call you and make you come home to look for her.”

“What?”

“We thought—”

“No, no, I get it,” Trina said. “I get it. Oh, sweetheart. Did you really think that would change everything?”

“You told Clara if she needed you, you’d come,” Phoebe wept.

“And I meant it,” Trina said, her heart squeezing painfully.

“So I thought—”

“But did you really think Hunter would call me?”

“Grandma said he
would
,” Phoebe blurted out.

Ohhhhh.

“Grandma, huh?” Trina said wryly. When had Phoebe started calling Hunter’s mom Grandma? “How did she get in on this?”

“She said you guys still loved each other,” Phoebe said. “She said she could tell. She said we just had to remind you guys of it, and it would work out.”

Half of Trina wanted to tear Linda limb from limb for stringing the girls along and preying on their emotions like this. And the other half of her wanted to laugh out loud. Good old Linda, the Warrior Princess. You could count on her not to give up the fight.

The line in front of them moved forward, and they stepped into the airplane, greeted the first mate and the flight attendant who hovered in the front section, and found their seats. Aisle and center. Trina took the center seat and stowed her carry-on under the seat in front of her.

“Make sure you take your water bottle out of your backpack and put it in your seat-back pocket,” she instructed Phoebe. “It’ll leak if it’s lying down.”

She still hadn’t addressed what Phoebe had said about how Linda had told the girls that Trina and Hunter still loved each other. She wanted to chicken out, but if the last few weeks had taught her anything, it was the need to do the right thing by her daughter.

She took a deep breath. “I still love Hunter,” she said. “He just doesn’t love me.”

She’d spoken too soon; Phoebe was still hunched over, wedging her water bottle out of her pack. Phoebe surfaced from between her knees and gave her mother a suspicious, squinty-eyed look.

“Or, well, he doesn’t
think
he loves me.”

And suddenly Trina was
mad
. At herself.

“Because he’s terrified,” she said aloud.

“Mom?”

“He’s always
losing
people,” she said. “He’s terrified of losing people. Of course he pushed us away. And I’m so used to being pushed away, I just said, ‘Okay,
sure
, I’ll leave before anyone here gets hurt, just show me the door.’ ”

She would have smacked herself in the head, if gestures like that actually existed.

“Mom?”

Phoebe was clutching something in her hand.

“Someone left something in my seat-back pocket.”

She held it out to her mother.

“Oh, Jesus,” Trina said.

In the palm of Phoebe’s hand lay a small, black velvet box.

She reached for the flight attendant call button, because whoever had lost whatever piece of jewelry was nestled in that box was going to be pretty damn sad about it.

Someone caught her raised wrist from behind.

“Wait,” the someone said.

The someone’s voice was familiar. Deep, warm, a little husky.

The hand on her wrist was familiar, too. Would be familiar to her in the darkest room in the darkest moment, if it reached for her.

“It’s for you,” another voice said, from lower down. A smaller, higher-pitched voice.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” Phoebe said, jumping up and down.

Trina turned slowly and found Hunter smiling at her, and she lost her footing and ended up half kneeling on her seat, the velvet box clutched in one hand, Hunter’s hand clutched in the other. He pulled her back upright and drew her as close as the seats would allow.

Kiss me
, she thought, but he didn’t. He just looked into her eyes, and his were dark and full of wishes.

“We’re going with you,” Clara said brightly.

“You’re—”

“I should never have let you leave,” Hunter said. “After—” He stopped. “Phoebe. Do you mind if I switch seats with you?”

Phoebe, who looked like she might burst from joy, just nodded, and he traded places with her and sat beside Trina. There was still no one in the window seat beside her.

“After Dee died,” he said quietly, “I pushed everything I felt down. I couldn’t—I couldn’t bear to think of what Dee had lost. Or what Clara had lost.”

“Or what you’d lost. You lost something, too,” Trina said, because she knew he wouldn’t say it, out of deference to her. But there was room between them for this piece of history, for all its complexity. There had to be, because he would never be at peace until he owned it. “Maybe you didn’t love her as much as anyone can love another person, but you did love her. If you didn’t, it wouldn’t have broken your heart so much that you couldn’t give her what you thought she needed.”

He closed his eyes and lifted his hand to his forehead, but she pushed his hand away and leaned close to kiss him where it hurt, instead. And then she made a very, very small sound of satisfaction as his mouth found hers. Just briefly.

He drew back. His eyes shone with affection and gratitude. And maybe—?

She didn’t dare hope again. Not quite yet.

“Yes. What I’d lost, too. I pushed it all down and it was back there in the bottom of my brain, and it ambushed me when I saw that other woman in the rubble. It ambushed me then, and the other night when it came back to me in that dream, and it was so much, too much, I couldn’t for a little bit see around it to you. But then—then Clara went missing. The girls—”

“Phoebe told me.”

“She scared me so bad, Trina. She shook something loose, and for the first time, I let myself—grieve, I guess. And I realized. There are so many things I can’t change. Can’t fix. But there are so many things I can, things I can make right. People I can treasure and protect—”

The way he was looking at her was making something ache in the very center of her chest, and tears brimmed.

“I promised you that I knew you, that my feelings wouldn’t change—”

She stared at him, astonished.

“You remember?”

“After I found Clara and—everything—”

Whatever he was trying to say, he couldn’t go any further. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and smiled at her almost sheepishly. “That’s it, though. That’s the only thing I remember.”

“That’s a
lot
,” she said.

“Yes. It is a lot. And, Trina—”

He took both her hands in his. “My feelings haven’t changed. They never really did. Only how hard I tried not to feel them.”

“Oh,” she said, because it was all she could manage without crying.

“I tried really damn hard,” he said. “But apparently that’s not one of the things I have control over. Luckily. Anyway, I’m done trying not to love you.”

“I appreciate that,” she said dryly, the humor making it possible for her not to begin bawling like a baby. She was über grateful that there was still no one in that third seat. She could concentrate only on him, his angled, beautiful face, his dark eyes, darker still with love and desire.

“Or—let me put that differently. I love you. I love you so much, Trina.”

Her lips parted, but before she could speak, he gestured at the small velvet box. “Open it.”

She opened it.

Nestled in the white satin lining lay a thick silver ring carved to look like intertwined branches, and settled into the middle, like a tree house cradled in the canopy, was a diamond.

“I found it. When I was looking for Clara. It was in my closet. I must have bought it before I deployed.”

Her breath caught, hard, in her throat.

“You know what that means. I was going to propose when I came home. I knew. Even then. But now—”

The expression on his face was so open it hurt, like looking into the sun.

“Now I know in all the ways it’s possible to know. In my head, but also in my heart. And with every cell in my body. You’re funny and strong and smart and you’re an amazing mother and you’re sexy, not just in an in-bed way, but the whole way you are. No-nonsense and all-in. And you move into a room or a house or a life and make it beautiful, until it’s the best place to be in the world.”

During that speech, the ache in her chest had turned to warmth and spread to her belly, into her core, radiating out like sun rays even to her fingers and toes.

“And if I forgot a million times and had to start over and over again, I know those are the things I would love about you every time.”

In the center of her chest, something blossomed, not a slow unfurling but something brighter and harder. She understood why so many writers, so many literary traditions, located love in the heart. It was hard not to believe it lived there, in the ache and bloom behind her ribs.

“I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. And if it has to be in L.A. for Phoebe’s sake, or because of your job, I totally get it. I don’t want to take either of you away from what you need. But just in case it doesn’t
have
to be L.A., I did buy us four return-trip tickets.”

He pulled a folded envelope from his back pocket and handed it to her.

She was crying, because the ring was so beautiful and he was sliding it onto her finger and the tickets lay on the seat between them, which meant she could go
home
to where she belonged. In his house, in his bed, with her
family
.

“Yes,” she said.

His face lit. His eyes, his smile, and something behind it all, a peace she hadn’t seen since
before
.

“It doesn’t have to be L.A.,” she said. “Stefan Spencer has survived twelve years of rarely seeing his daughter. He will learn to live with having a long-distance relationship with her. And the job—” She shrugged. “Sometimes you cling to the past because you can’t see the future clearly. I can find a way to do design here just as well as there. Once upon a time it seemed like I needed the glamour of television, but—” She smiled at him. “That feels like a different person, now.”

He grinned.

“Whew,” he said. “Because I don’t think there’s much of a market for tree houses in L.A.”

He had never seen anything quite as beautiful as the bright glow in Trina’s face as she looked from the ring to him and back again. Or felt such a deep sense of certainty.

“Do you like it?”

“I love it.”

An announcement cut through her words. “If you would please give your attention to the flight attendants—”

“Couldn’t have cut it any closer, really, could you?” she asked.

“I could have done a dramatic show-up-in-L.A.-and-beg thing.”

“That would have been cool.”

“But honestly, I am totally opposed to not having you in my bed tonight.”

He settled a kiss against her cheek, near her ear, his breath brushing softly over her skin.

“Mmm.” She cast a look over her shoulder. “We don’t have a seat mate.”

As if on cue, a skinny middle-aged woman with a pinched face made her way up the aisle, maneuvering around the flight attendants doing the safety demonstration. Hunter’s blood flow, which had been working its way south in response to the coy look Trina had given him a moment earlier, had to divert back to his brain.

“Spoke too soon.” Trina sighed.

They made way for their third seat mate, who was giving off the vibes of the profoundly overwound, muttering about the chain of complicated events that had made her so late. She’d barely gotten her seatbelt fastened when the plane lurched and pulled back from the gate.

“Hey,” Trina murmured. “This isn’t all on you, you know. What happened. You said you should never have let me leave, but I should never have left. I didn’t realize that there was this little voice in my head saying, ‘Fine, you don’t want us? We don’t want you, either.’ I guess it’s been saying that ever since—ever since Stefan told me he didn’t want to help raise Phoebe. And it’s made me more defensive on my own and Phoebe’s account than I needed to be. You did an awesome job getting by those defenses the first time around, and I just didn’t see that you didn’t have the resources this time to put up the big fight. Which is
fine
. You don’t have to fight anymore, Hunter. You can be done. You can rest. I’ll fight for us for a while, until you get your energy back. Okay?”

He felt a swift, glorious sense of relief, as if something infinitely heavy had been lifted off his shoulders. He hadn’t realized how
tired
he was. Ever since he’d come to with his head and chest hurting, he’d been exhausted, and even though all along she’d been telling him with her body that he was safe, that he could sleep, he could dream in peace, it meant so much to hear the words coming out of her mouth.