34. STORM

“Is everything okay?”

The sun bakes down on us as we wander along the edge of the cliffs with Samson and Delilah. It’s become such a routine that they make a beeline for the door whenever they see Nick and me together anywhere near the foyer.

It’s taken me some time to work up the nerve to ask him about it, but I feel like this is where Nick feels most like himself, or at least the person he was before I showed up. If I’m going to ask, there’s no better time than here and now.

“Of course,” he says as he tosses the tennis ball for the dogs. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know.”

It’s true – I don’t know what the problem is, or if there even is a problem. For all I know, it’s in my head. But this is all new for me, and I don’t want to screw it up.

But what if I’m screwing it up by asking? Don’t rock the boat. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’ve got a good thing going; why risk it for something you’re not even sure exists? So many questions.

“You must have a reason,” he says, taking my hand. “Tell me.”

“It just seems like ever since you showed me how to use the pistol, you’ve been – distracted. Not totally, but enough that it makes me wonder what you’re thinking about.”

He looks at the ground for a moment, which makes me nervous that he’s trying to work up a lie. I don’t have anything to base that on other than instinct, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.

“You’re right,” he says finally. “I have had a lot on my mind lately. And I’m sorry that it worried you. It should be the exact opposite.”

I blink at him. What’s that supposed to mean?

Suddenly the dogs race past us, Samson chasing a triumphant Delilah, who has the tennis ball in her jaws. We both grin at them, then at each other. Then Nick surprises me by taking my hand.

“Sometimes I think my life before I met you was a dream,” he says. “Or a nightmare. The isolation, day after day, year after year. It became a habit for me, an easy blanket that I could pull up over my head so that I didn’t have to face the world outside. Or deal with the hole in myself.”

My eyes go wide. I had no idea my grunting caveman could talk like that.

“I didn’t realize until you came that I was taking the easy way out,” he continues. “Loneliness and grief are easy; anybody can do it. It’s living that’s hard.”

I reach out and cup his cheek because I can’t think of anything else to do.

“Living was so hard for me before I met you,” I hear myself say. “Now it’s so easy, I can’t wait to wake up every morning, even when we spent the whole night in each other’s arms.”

He nods. “I feel the same way. Before, whole seasons would go by and I wouldn’t even know it. Now every second of every day matters.”

A lump in my throat keeps me from saying anything.

“It wasn’t just Katrina’s death that did this to me,” he says. “I was devastated – of course I was, she was my world – but I used it as an excuse to punish myself for the life I’d led before I met her. I didn’t deserve to be happy, because of the things I’d done.”

Hot tears sting my eyes. “Oh, baby,” I whisper, stroking his cheek. “You’re so wrong.”

“I know that now. But I didn’t know it then. My parents were gone, my wife was gone. And I realized that the people I’d thought of as my family for so long weren’t good people. Neither was I.”

“Nick – ”

He holds up a hand to stop me. “It’s true,” he says. “God help me, it’s true. Maybe I wasn’t a terrible person, but I wasn’t a good person. Not by a long shot. I tried to make up for it by giving away money – it never mattered to me anyway, it was just a way of keeping score – but that never filled the void.

“People like Ellie tried to reach out over the years, but whenever I felt anyone getting close, I’d push them away, as if I was a rattlesnake or something that would poison them if they touched me the wrong way.”

My heart is aching for him. I knew he was withdrawn, but I never understood the depth of his pain until now.

“I never had a chance to be happy,” he says. “Life under the Soviets, then moving here – it was more survival than anything else. Eventually I learned that I was good at surviving. And at hurting people. Those became my two defining traits.”

I feel a warm wetness on my hand and look down to see Delilah licking me. She’s seen the tears in my eyes and wants to comfort me. It’s Nick who needs them now, not me, but the dogs see him the way he sees himself – the one in control, always.

“And then you came,” he says with a smile. “Something I never expected, and something I didn’t even realize I desperately needed.”

I sit down cross-legged on the grass and pull him down with me. Now Delilah is at my face, licking away my tears, and I can’t help but giggle.

“I needed you,” I say. “My whole life was out of my control, like being in a storm all day, every day, until you. You made me strong. You made me understand who I am.”

Nick smiles and kisses the back of my hand. “You’re the strongest person I know. And the smartest. And the kindest.”

I choke back a laugh. “Strong? Me?”

“You lived through hell,” he says. “Through chaos. You never let it eat you the way I let it eat me. That’s real strength. Anyone can beat up someone. It takes real strength not to buckle under the weight of life.”

We gaze into each other’s eyes in silence for a while. I was so worried that Nick has lost interest in me, or that there was something I was doing that was making him unhappy. To hear him talk like this makes my heart swell.

I can dare to hope. I can believe that we have a future together. With Nick, anything is possible. I believe that now, with all my heart.

“You say I’m kind,” I say. “But you’re the one who dove into the Atlantic to rescue me. The one who took a complete stranger into your home and cared for me, and didn’t ask any questions. Before I met you, no one had ever just accepted me for me. Everyone always wanted something.

“But not you. You didn’t take, you only gave, never asking anything in return. You say you’re not a good person? Bullshit. You’re the best person I know.”

“Only because you make me that way.”

His eyes mist over as he squeezes my hand, and I want more than anything to take him into my arms and rock him like a child, and sing to him and hold him through the night.

The dogs’ barking pulls me out of my thoughts, and I look up to see that we’re on the edge of the cliffs. To them, that’s the signal that we’re going to throw the ball down to the rocky shore below and they’re going to chase it. They’re nothing if not creatures of habit.

Nick grins and pitches the ball as far as he can throw while the dogs bolt down the embankment.

“Now that we’ve got a moment to ourselves, I have to tell you something,” Nick says.

“What’s that?”

“The other day, when I went shopping for the Corvette?”

“Yeah?”

“That wasn’t all I was doing.”

I knew it!

“Oh, really? What else were you up to?”

“I went shopping for something else.”

I stare at him stupidly for a few moments as he drops to one knee on the grass and reaches into the pocket of his jeans.

Oh, my God. OH, MY GOD.

My heart is racing like a jackrabbit, my hands trembling uncontrollably. This can’t be happening. This is it, I’m finally going to wake up on that shitty sofa bed in that shitty apartment in Newark and my shitty old life…

The sun glints off an enormous square cut diamond set in a platinum band, surrounded by a dozen or more tiny, brilliant blue Tanzanites.

My knees almost buckle under my weight as he takes my hand and gazes up into my eyes.

“Storm,” he says, using the only name that matters to me anymore. Jessica Armstrong is gone. I will forever and always be his Storm.

“Nick,” I whisper, my voice trembling.

“Will you make me the happiest man in the world and be my wife?”

The world becomes a surreal dreamscape for a moment as I try to grasp what it all means. Nick and I, together forever. Sharing our lives, till death do us part. Him and me against the world. The missing piece I’ve searched for my entire life, finally making me whole.

“Yes,” I say with a papery voice.

He slides the ring into place on the shaking third of my left hand.

A moment later, I see a streak of red erupt from Nick’s forehead, and a split-second after that, a deafening crack. I watch with sick horror as he collapses to his right and disappears over the edge of the cliff.

A familiar shock of green hair appears in the distance, sprinting towards me, but time feels as if it’s covered in molasses. I hear something high pitched, but I can’t figure out what it is. Suddenly the woman with green hair is filling my field of vision and I feel strong arms clamp around my torso.

Finally, as I register the woman’s insane smile, I recognize what the high-pitched sound is.

It’s me, screaming.