Chapter Thirteen

Veronica

I couldn't breathe. I struggled to draw in air, to expand my lungs even enough to take away the deep, throbbing ache in my chest. I felt like it had cracked open so that Jude could reach inside and hollow it out. Around me, I could smell the remnants of what I had tried to create for him burning. I could feel the lick of the flames on my skin. But I didn't move. I couldn't. I was locked in place, trying to process what had happened, trying to reconcile the tingling, almost giddy hope I had felt as I hung the lights with the utter devastation at the sound of his boots crushing the bulbs into the ground.

A splash of cold water against my ankle snapped me back into reality and I looked to the side to see that the tablecloth and greenery were no longer burning. The man who had met me in the driveway stood beside them, a hose in his hand.

"Are you just going to stand there and turn to ash with the rest of this mess?" he asked sharply.

In that moment, I hoped that I would.

"I'm sorry."

It was all I could manage to choke out past the tightness in my throat.

"I never should have let you in," he said. "Your lie wasn't good enough for me to even pretend that I believed it."

I wanted to laugh but I felt like the sound had died within me.

"You probably shouldn't have," I said, wiping away tears that I didn't realize were there until I tasted them on my lips. "I never should have come here."

"Not for this," he said.

He gestured around at the destroyed scene. Something about the way that he said it struck me and I took a slight step toward him.

"Why?" I asked. "Why not for this?"

He glanced up at me from where he had leaned over to shake the sodden tablecloth, pausing for a moment before straightening. His already somber face now looked etched from stone.

"Mr. Ford doesn't celebrate Christmas," he said. "He hasn't since the last year that he celebrated with his wife."

The statement crashed over me and for a moment I felt like I had left my feet. Everything seemed to fade in around me and I remembered nothing else until I was standing outside the door to my apartment, staring through my tears at the lock and not knowing what to do next.

Javi opened the door and in the next instant I was in his arms. I felt like I couldn't hold myself up, but he gathered me close, doing physically what he had always done emotionally as he held me and brought me into the apartment. I felt myself drop onto the couch and I drew in a breath that became a sob. It racked my body, hurting so deeply inside me that I didn't think I could take in another.

"What happened?" Javi demanded. "What's going on?"

I turned to him, seeing him through my tears, and saw hard planes and rough angles in his face that I hadn't seen in years. It was a face that rarely emerged, but one that I knew too well. That was the face that had seen me through the worst of my night terrors. It was the face that had forced me through the doors of the courthouse. It was the face that had been streaked with tears of its own when he sat beside me at a funeral that I pretended with everything I had inside me wasn't happening. Now it stared at me again, breaking me down even further, and there was nothing that I could keep from him anymore.

I poured everything out to Javi, turning our living room into my confessional. He listened silently, his expression not revealing anything until I was finished and had drawn in a breath. The air entering my lungs felt like the first in hours and I felt it stream through me, calming me. I had cried out everything and was empty now. All I could do was listen.

"How did you possibly go from turning him on with your Halloween costume to trying to burn the man's house down?" he asked.

"I didn't try to burn his house down," I protested. "I tried to plan a romantic Christmas celebration that would…"

"That would what?" Javi asked when my voice trailed off and all words failed me. "That would tell him how you feel about him? Do you even know how you feel about him?"

It was exactly what I had feared when I thought about talking to Javi about this. He had taken the same question that I had asked myself countless times before and somehow made it cut deeper than I ever could have. When I asked myself, I could hesitate, I could stop myself just short of really wanting to evaluate it or even really know. But when Javi asked, he didn't stop and I couldn't lie. I knew myself well enough to know when to hide. He knew me well enough to force me out.

"I have to admit when we first started, I really liked the mystery. I liked the excitement and feeling like we had a secret that no one else knew. It was an adrenaline rush. It made me feel beautiful and desired, but now I don't know."

"What don't you know?"

"If it's enough anymore."

"As deftly as you are trying to avoid answering my question, I haven't forgotten it. How do you feel about him?"

I looked at Javi beseechingly.

"I am so scared that I made the wrong choice."

"Because you had sex with your professor?"

"Because I lost my virginity to my professor on the desk in his office. Because he has since kept me tucked in his pocket refusing to acknowledge us to me, much less to anyone else."

"Darling, I bid farewell to my virginity so long ago I don't even send it Christmas cards. I don't even remember her name."

I looked up at Javi sharply, the shock startling me the rest of the way out of my fog.

"Excuse me?" I asked.

"Oh, don't act so surprised. You know I have danced the forbidden dance of womanly love," Javi said, giving a dismissive wave of his hand.

"I know, I just didn't realize you admitted it anymore."

"Well, when emergency strikes I have to take desperate measures."

I nodded.

"Go ahead."

"As a person who has chosen a somewhat more 'welcoming committee' approach to sex than you have, I can honestly say I admire you. Not that I regret my choices or think yours made a hell of a lot of sense, but I think it is really sweet you decided your Virginity – with the big V – mattered enough to hang on to it this long looking for the right person. You believed there is someone out there who was worth that much. That is amazing."

"The problem is that I don't know if Jude was that person."

"I have not seen you look like this ever. You obviously feel something for him."

"Something? Is feeling something enough?"

"Answer this for me. What did you always think that you needed in order to know you had found the right one? Did you want me to walk you down the aisle, everyone's eyes on the breathtaking, extravagant gown -- you wearing something nice, too -- the vows, the rings?"

I shook my head, the heavy feeling returning to my chest.

"It's not about marriage. That is never what it was about. I just thought that there would be something more when I found the right person, not just passion."

"What more is there than passion? Do you love him?"

I shrugged helplessly.

"Even if I do have feelings for him, even if I am falling in love with him, does that mean anything? He has never admitted to having any feelings for me, and he's actively avoided letting anyone know that there is anything more between us than grading papers and wrangling cheating students. Then I try to do something to show him how I thought I was feeling." I hesitated, feeling the rush of pain and embarrassment that I had felt when I was standing outside of Jude's house hit me again. I shook my head. "I didn't even know that he was married before."

"Have you stopped to consider that might have something to do with all of this?"

"What do you mean?"

"Not telling you that he was married before isn't an oversight. That obviously had something to do with the way that he acted when he realized that he had walked onto the set of a Hallmark Countdown to Christmas special. Don't you think that it might with the rest of his behavior?"

Thank God for Javi. Thank God for every heart he had broken and every time his heart had been broken. Thank God mine was always the one that he was willing to try to fix.

"She was beautiful."

The words streamed out of me with my exhalation, as if the breath had caught the thought as it formed in my mind and carried it out of my mouth without me realizing it.

"She was."

Javi touched his finger to the screen of my computer, moving the article up so that we could continue to read. The movement nearly concealed the black and white image of Jude's wife, but then revealed the top of another. I moved the screen the rest of the way to look at it. This picture was in color, revealing a stunning woman with pale blond hair and deep green eyes. She was locked in a laugh, the image capturing her forever in a moment of happiness as she hung on the shoulders of a much younger Jude. There was no gray in his hair in the picture. No lines around his eyes. There was more color in his cheeks and more life in his gaze.

"'Ellery was always smiling, a friend remembered,'" Javi read. "'The world is darker without that smile.'"

"She was 23," I whispered. I felt like I couldn't get my voice any louder. "What could have happened to her?"

Javi shook his head.

"It doesn't say anything about an illness or an accident," he said. "It just says that she died unexpectedly after a recent tragedy. It doesn't explain what the tragedy was, though, or what it had to do with her death."

Left this life. Those were the words that the first line of the article had used. Ellery Ford, wife of Jude Ford, left this life Tuesday. I felt in the pit of my stomach that I knew what those words meant, but I didn't want to think it. I didn't want to imagine Jude in that kind of pain.