Four Years Later
When I started calling Tenley mo ghaol, I knew she wasn’t anywhere near ready to hear the meaning behind the endearment. Fuck, I wasn’t ready to admit the meaning to myself, let alone give the words an actual voice. I knew deep in my heart from the moment she snapped at me in Bookmark It! she was the one my grandmother continually talked to me about from a young age—my love.
She told me mo ghaol would complete me. No one has ever completed me more than Tenley.
We may have different interests and are opposites in many ways, but she’s my everything.
She’s truly the ying to my yang.
The air I breathe.
When I learned the sadness behind her eyes was from her husband passing on, it further cemented in my mind my need to be in her life. Even if it was only as a friend. I’d take whatever she could give me. And I prayed in time her heart would grow to love mine.
Call me insane or an utter fool.
Tell me I’m impractical.
Hell, you can call me ridiculous, but I’ve loved Tenley since the first day in the bookstore. Not once in all my years had I encountered a woman as snappy and put out as she was by my merely searching for a book. She says now she was fighting her attraction for me and dealing with the guilt eating her up inside. And maybe she was. But her snippy remarks and tossing in an extra signed book stole my heart.
I walked back to the tattoo shop in a Tenley induced haze.
Later the same afternoon, I devoured one of her novels when my appointment didn’t show and I stuck around the shop to take possible walk-ins. I didn’t give any tattoos that day, but I did gain insight into the way her romantic heart beats. It was the best birthday I recalled having in quite a few years.
The next day when I arrived at the beach, I found my spot and wrote a wish in the sand. To this day, I’ve never spoken a word out loud about what my wish was. But I had wished for my soul mate. Before taking my seat and getting comfy, I wrote the words I now feel have forever transformed my life…
I wish for the one my soul calls to.
Roughly twenty minutes later, as I was reading another book by her, she stumbled upon my path once again.
It had to be fate.
Before she came staggering along, I had marked her off, knowing my lonely didn’t need to get mixed up with her. She seemed too good to be true for me, and I didn’t want to bring her down. I had no clue she was as lonely as I was.
Learning her lonely came from a death—and my lonely having come from my travels, and no one to spend my life with—I still debated on leaving her be. Her lonely was on a higher level, mine stood no chance of competing with it. I didn’t know how to help her heal her shattered heart.
As luck would have it, we kept getting pulled together like two magnets. Or as I like to tease her, she’s my lobster—which she still doesn’t like to eat.
Fate kept tossing us together. Yes, we had to work on it to be together after our wonderful long weekend that first July, but I wouldn’t change a single moment we’ve shared.
Life has a way of working out.
And sometimes, if you write your wishes in the sand, they come true.
TENLEY
As I’m holding baby Michael, I can’t help but think back on my precious years spent with his namesake. Granted, his full name is Michael Dylan Ballantyne, but his first name came from my first husband whom I lost to cancer and suicide. After three years of trying, we were finally able to adopt a newborn baby. Once the call came in, we were on a plane to Cambodia the next morning. Little Michael has been with us now for six months. He joins his sister, Elizabeth Rose, who came to us as a foster child at the age of six, and we fully adopted by the time she celebrated her seventh birthday.
For two years I lived life in an internal endless winter, never breaking free of the ice encasing my heart or running through my veins. Not until a tattooed stranger waltzed into Bookmark It! and pissed me off for no apparent reason.
My ice started melting the day Case came swaggering into my life. He chased away the winter by bringing the sunshine back.
Skip ahead four years and we’re living our fairy tale here in Austin. I’m happy again. Utterly and truly happy. I have my husband, a new baby, my little girl, and my Mabel June. Life behind this white picket fence is damn near as perfect as one could wish for. The only thing it’s missing is my novels. Written in the Sand became the last novel I’ll ever write.
Why?
Because I’m going to let life finish the story.
THE END