::FORTY ONE::
She said yes. I couldn’t breathe and I thought I would die if I kept kissing her. Swallowing hard, I pulled her tightly to my chest and buried my nose in her hair, just trying to breathe and not cry. I’m not doing a very good job of it though. She said yes.
Her breath hitches in a sob as her arms tighten around my neck, and I shush her, stroking her back in my need to comfort her too. She settles again and my breath settles with hers, until we are both calm enough to look at each other without crying. Her hands are rubbing at her eyes as she lets out a small laugh. “I’m sorry. You’ve asked me the most wonderful thing in the world and I’m crying.” I don’t know what to say and wouldn’t know where to begin, especially given my own tears. So I play with her hair, tucking it behind her ears and letting my thumbs brush across her damp eyelashes, before leaning in to kiss her rumpled up spot between her eyebrows.
There are so many things going through my mind that I don’t know what to start with first. When does she want to get married and does she want a big wedding or not? Children? Will my house be big enough for her? I’m doing it again, worrying too much. She looks up at me and breaks into a small grin as her thumb reaches up to rub the knotted up spot between my eyebrows. I rest into her hand, taking a deep breath, the weight of everything falling in on me. I haven’t slept and I’ve been a nervous wreck and right now all I want to do is put my head in her lap and thank everything, thank her, that she said yes. Her thumb eases against my rumpled skin, making us both giggle a little. “Thank you, ‘Nette.” That slight quizzical look again as she breaks into a grin. “For saying yes. Thank you.” I take her hand, the one soothing the knot between my eyes away, and kiss it, my lips brushing over the new ring there.
Her hand cups my jaw as she watches me, tracing patterns as she smiles softly, her eyes holding mine. “I love you, Sean.” She kisses me again, letting me know with a kiss that she thanks me too. A soft, gentle kiss that comes from her heart. The passion is there too but this is something else. As much as I treasure her, she feels the same for me, and her soft kiss let me know in a simple gesture how important I was to her. I have to blink, feeling tears again. The laughing was unexpected, although I guess it’s understandable considering what a nervous wreck I am. The tension rolls off us as we giggle like a pair of kids on the back porch. “Mrs. Angelino was right; you definitely are making me a very happy woman.” She lets out another giggle, trying hard to stifle it as if unsure where the giddiness is coming from.
“Mom said that?” Mom had whispered something to her while we were visiting that day. That she would say something like that about me had me grinning again, and my ears are starting to get warm.
“She said that you were the most decent man she had ever known, and that you would make me a very happy woman. She was right.” Jeanette holds my eyes with hers, the seriousness in her running deep. “She was right on both counts.”
If Mom was here I would kiss her. I would spend my life making Jeanette happy, I just have no idea what to start with, a thought that makes me laugh again. It’s contagious, and she’s giggling with me again. I take a deep sigh and sit down on my heels to look at her again, feeling really complete for the first time in a long time. Turning around I sit on the steps between her knees, with my back pressed against her chest, laughing a little at the turn of events. With a little adjustment and a lot more giggling I rest my head back against her shoulder, the way she does with me.
“My arms aren’t long enough to rub your belly, Sean.” She laughed softly as she said it, settling for caressing over the skin of my temple, which feels wonderful but it’s making me sleepy. Something she doesn’t miss. “You’re going to fall asleep if I keep doing this, do you want me to stop?”
I nod, reluctantly, after another minute. I really could fall asleep with her touching me like that. “I couldn’t sleep last night, beautiful. I was too nervous.” I let out a deep sigh that turns into a yawn halfway through. The weight of the day, the night, the whole vacation, everything, comes crashing down on me at once. She said yes. She would be my wife. I pinch the bridge of my nose and shut my eyes tight as I feel my breath hitch and a lump form in my throat. Her hand traces over my temple again, her other arm around my chest, pulling me tighter to her.
She kisses a spot over my ear, leaving her lips against my skin, as if she wants to hold me with everything. “Did you want to sleep for a little bit?” She would let me too. I tilt my head up to look at her, picturing myself falling asleep in her arms. It’s a nice thought, for a moment, and then I’m laughing again, as I picture her with her legs and her rear asleep as I sprawl on her lap out here on the porch. Snoring and drooling probably. Not a good way to start off our lives together.
I turn around again to kiss her; it’s difficult because we’re both still grinning. “I don’t want to sleep yet, but I’m going to need some coffee. I don’t know what we’ve got here….” Helping her up, we both walk back into the house. Jeanette pauses at the door to the kitchen, looking behind her again at the garden full of pink flowers. Her hand reaches down to squeeze mine, our fingers tangling for a moment, the look in her eyes giving me butterflies.
We don’t have any coffee, or much of anything else for that matter. Shopping isn’t exactly what I had in mind, and Jeanette smiled at me when I said so, saying that engaged or not, we still had to eat. Once she said engaged I would have agreed to anything; I loved the way that sounded. Engaged. To be married. She was my fiancée.
We had quickly dumped the bags out on the bed, sorting everything out. Presents for everyone piled up near her pillow. Our clothes on the floor. Jeanette let out a fake shudder, grinning, as I taunted her with the chocolate massage oil, before putting it out of sight. The KY disappeared and the candles were left by the bed. The red bedspread looks beautiful in our room. Maybe it’s just knowing that it’s really our room now.
We were going shopping, just a little grocery shopping, but it feels so different this time. Because of her and what she is to me now. When people assumed she was my wife before I loved to hear it, but could never really answer, because it wasn’t true, even if I wanted it so desperately to be true. Now she’s my fiancée. My wife to be, my betrothed.
We held hands as we walked up to the coffee shop, the same one we went to after our first date at the movies. My fingertip rests against her ring, making me smile when I move across its surface, tracing a line between the solitaire and back across the band. We stood in line, holding hands, looking over the board with coffee beans from all over the world, having a perfectly normal conversation about what kind of coffee we wanted. I think everything normal is going to feel like anything but normal for a while.
I started a couple of times, trying to think of things to say. We had sat beside each other on the benches outside, drinking our coffees. I still had so many things I wanted to say, that I wanted to ask, and I really had no idea where to begin, I just knew that if I didn’t ask, the not asking would kill me. Her hand squeezes mine and she flashes me a small grin before turning to straddle the bench we’re sitting on. Pressing herself to me and nudging my shoulder until I turn and do the same, pulling her against my chest. “Are you okay, Sean?”
There’s no concern in her voice. To describe her voice would be to describe quiet sunshine, making me feel warm and light, filling me up. “There are so many questions I want to ask, and I don’t know where to start, ‘Nette.” My nervousness about it fades as I say it, but I still don’t know where to start.
Jeanette giggles in my arms, reminding me of the girl at the coffee counter who had asked me what kind of milk I wanted in my coffee and I got so flustered because I couldn’t decide for a moment. She tilts her head and nuzzles my chin. “Do you still want me to move in?”
My jaw drops a little; of course I want her to move in. I want my house to be our home. I want…I nuzzle her back, grinning into her hair. She just gave me a shove is all; we’re playing dare again, sort of. “I want you to move in with me, Jeanette. My house is just a house without you. I could call the moving company today; you wouldn’t even have to pack if you didn’t want to.” My mind starts running a list of things to do. I bite my lip, thinking of what Alvarez would do with this, he’d have this organized down to the second.
“I kind of like the idea of not having to pack.” She laughing softly as she says it. “I really hate moving. I’ll need to pick up a few things before it happens though.”
“You’ll let me take care of it for you?” I was surprised by how much I wanted to do this for her, to make it easier for her. “We could pick some things up for you today, if you’d like?” I had the car, we could pick up boxes. She nods her head at me, smiling again. She’s just watching me, her fingertips tracing circles on my forearm.
We talked about some of the other things we both had to do, the people we had to call. She let out a small sigh as she mentions calling her parents, and she has a few friends to call. And there’s Dan, of course, but he’ll be right downstairs when we go to pick up her things. I have to call Alvarez, and Hicks, and Mom. She laughed a little when I mentioned Alvarez, wondering how long Alvarez knew that I was going to propose. She laughed a lot harder when I told her about Alvarez taking me to buy her ring and sitting on the edge of the chair, blocking my exit so I couldn’t run screaming from the store.
Her head rests on my shoulder, her head tilted up to watch me. She has that same small smile on her lips and that quiet peace in her eyes, that deep softness that I know is just for me. She’s waiting, and has been since I finally could open my mouth and start talking again. I lean in to lick a tiny drop of coffee off her top lip, talking a deep sigh, a deep breath, before beginning again. “Did you want a bigger house, Jeanette? Maybe live somewhere else?”
She turns around to face me, cupping my face in her hands, as we had done once before on this very bench, the day after our movie date. “I love your house, because it has you in it; you’re everywhere in it. I don’t want to be anywhere else. I want to be where you are, Sean.”
Sometimes she says little things that silence everything in me. Things that make it hard to breathe and hard to think. It’s not just something she says; I’ve never heard anyone say the kinds of things that she says. It’s in her eyes, something so deep and so quiet. It’s truth. “And a big wedding, ‘Nette?” She shakes her head, no. My fingertips trace over the skin of her cheekbones and across her jaw, as I run through the list of questions that I hadn’t been able to ask earlier. “Children?”
That question is a little harder for her. Her lips part slightly and her lashes flutter closed as she takes in a short breath. My nose brushes against hers and I watch her eyes flick open again. “In time, Sean.”
“In time then.” We hug again, holding, and caressing. Far gentler than anything before, as I bury my nose in her hair. “That’s all the biggies, isn’t it.”
She cups my jaw and pulls back a little to look at me; everything around us disappears. Our eyes mirror each other in their depth, their softness, holding a seriousness that we could never put voice to, there are no words. The corner of her lip turns up. “We still have to talk about this fear of yoghurt in the fridge that you have; that could be hard to deal with.”
Our foreheads rest together as we both laugh like loons sitting out there on that bench. I still feel light, like I could breathe in until my lungs burst with the joy of it. I held her hand while we shopped, and I teased her about mayonnaise, which she dreaded, and she teased me about yoghurt, which I’ve secretly come to like. I don’t think I’ll tell her that though. “That’s not yoghurt!” she scoffed, when I picked out some weird thing amidst all the yoghurt containers. Jeanette had picked out something perfectly healthy. I chose cherry cheesecake flavor. She was probably right, about it not being really yoghurt, but she smiled at me, dropping her head, when I stuck with it anyway.
We had put everything away when we got home, and were getting ready to go pack some more things for her, until the move could be arranged. Jeanette was wrapping Dan’s present in the paper she had bought. It must be a gift that women have; I’m all thumbs when it comes to that sort of thing. My fingers traced over the edges of the photo we had taken while we were at the Space Needle. She had smiled at me softly, and leaned across the bed to kiss me, when I had asked if she was okay with me carrying it in my wallet.
Dan grinned from ear to ear when Jeanette told him I had proposed to her, hugging her and kissing her cheek. He held out his hand to me before pulling me in for a hug which seemed to take him by surprise as much as it did me. She told him about moving, and had wanted to pay up until the end of her lease, which would have been two months, but he wasn’t having any of it. Dan and I went downstairs to the storage room to get boxes, so that Jeanette could pack a few things. “You’re good for her, I’ve never seen her so happy. Things have been so difficult, since John and Emily…” He didn’t want to finish, to say that they had died. “There are times when I thought she would never survive what happened to her. Jeanette’s a friend too.” She wasn’t just an employee to him, he really cared about her.
“I’ll never hurt her, Dan. I love her with everything in me.” It was a little strange, talking to this young kid, telling him that my intentions with Jeanette were honorable. When I first saw Dan, I figured he was teenager, with purple hair, and here I was having a conversation with him that I should have been having with Jeanette’s father. We have a strange family, I think. Alvarez and Hicks as brothers. Candice as a sister. Mrs. Angelino for a mother, and Dan, as Jeanette’s father. It didn’t mean a thing that I had met her biological father, because Dan is the one that cared to tell me this; to ask me this. We are a strange family.
I had kissed her gently when we got upstairs, and offered to help her if she needed it, but this was another one of those things that only another woman would understand. So I had kissed her, and sat on the edge of her bed to call Alvarez, watching her quickly sort through some clothes, and wrapping things she couldn’t do without, before putting them in the boxes.
Alvarez picked up before the first ring was complete, his first words upon answering, “Did she say yes, Vetter?”
“What if it wasn’t me that called, Alvarez?” I’m trying to keep from laughing out loud but I’m not doing a very good job of it. Jeanette grins at me, as she walks into the bathroom with a box.
I can hear the sound of his hand slapping on his desk as he breaks out in a belly laugh; I’m not the only giddy one. “Some guy called earlier. I think I scared the hell out of him, he stuttered the rest of the way through the conversation, and I don’t think he’ll call back.” Jeanette is having this effect on us all. He lets out a deeper sigh, and ruffles papers on his desk. I can almost see him there; all his papers spread out in front of him as he sorts something out in his head. I wait, knowing he’ll tell me. “We had an interesting development, can I come see you?” He doesn’t want to talk about it at the office, and he doesn’t want to ask me either. He knows what this day is for me.
I tell him to hang on a moment, and go into the bathroom to talk to Jeanette. She turns and smiles at me; the smile faltering slightly as she watches my face. I don’t want to ask her, but in my own way, I love Alvarez too. “Jeanette, I…”
“Need to go see Alvarez.” She’s grinning at me as she finishes the thought. I take the bottles of whatever it is she’s holding in her hands and sit down on the edge of the tub with her.
“I don’t want to go, but I promise I won’t be long. He can’t really talk at work, and…” I’m talking too much; I don’t want to leave her, not for a second, but I have to go back to work soon, and so does she. Tomorrow, in fact. It’s all too soon.
Her hand rests against my thigh. “I still have some packing to do. I hate packing, and the only thing that I can think of that could be worse is WATCHING someone pack.” I take her hand in mine and raise it to my lips, kissing it, before taking my car keys off my key chain and giving them to her.
“I’ll get Alvarez to pick me up and drop me off. That way you don’t have to wait or anything. You’ll get Dan to help you with the boxes?” She takes her own key out of her pocket, and clips my car keys to it, next to her own pink house key.
“I don’t have too much more.” She’s making mental notes in her head, looking at the box she has at her feet, and looking at cupboards in the bathroom. “I’ll probably just meet you at home?”
“At home.” Just saying that to her has me pulling her tight to me again. Knowing that she’ll be waiting for me at home doesn’t make it any easier to leave though, and I kissed her at the bottom of the stairs for what felt like forever when Alvarez came to pick me up. Alvarez hugged her again, before we left, offering his congratulations.
“I won’t keep you long, Vetter.” He’s leering at me; trying to leer at me anyway, but he has to turn his head to look out the window as his face breaks into a huge smile. “She said yes.” Now we’re both grinning, and I can’t speak but just nod at him, feeling foolish and not really caring. At the next stoplight he reaches across the seat to me and pulls me into a tight hug. “I’m so fucking happy for you, Vetter, you have no idea.” He pats my cheek as he sits back, casually flipping the bird to a car full of teenagers in the car next to us that were gawking and pointing at a couple of guys hugging each other. “Have you two kids thought about a date yet?”
He isn’t quite as excited as I am, but its close. I stammer and stutter a couple of times, unsure of what to say. That had been one of the questions that was hard to get out this morning. “I didn’t ask; I don’t want to wait long though.” If I could marry her tomorrow, today, I would. My heart hurts, and the car is silent for a moment, before I can talk past the lump. “She’s moving in with me; we’re, she’s…I have to call a moving company…”
“Adriana’s cousin runs…” I didn’t really hear anything else he said; I just sat and grinned at him. I’ve never had a friend quite like Alvarez before. Sure, Hicks and I have been friends since we were kids, but somehow, when you’re kids, that’s expected. It’s not really obligation, it’s something else, because Hicks is my family, because of the things we’ve been through. Alvarez is my friend, pure and simple. “I’m sorry, Vetter. I kinda ran with that.”
We’re sitting in the small patch of grass outside the DEA office, where we have a lot of these conversations. “You’re better at it than me.” I take a sip of my coffee, looking out across the grass. In my heart I’m still sitting with Jeanette, watching her pack. “I wouldn’t have managed to do a lot of the things I’ve needed to do in the past little while if you hadn’t been there for me.” He fidgets with his own cup, wanting to tell me that that wasn’t true, wanting to protest. Knowing that it was true, and that I would never let him deny it. “When we do get married, I want you to be my best man Alvarez.”
His voice is quiet and his face serious when he answers. “I’d be honored, Vetter.” We’re both looking down at the grass in front of us, so that we won’t look up. My heart is a lump in my throat, there’s just been so much in the past little while. We drink our coffee in silence for a while, until we’re both ready to talk again without embarrassing ourselves. “This case has taken an interesting turn, one I never would have suspected.” I’ve been calling him every day while we were away, but I haven’t been ‘on the ground’ with it, as Alvarez would say. He likes to get right in there and see things as they unfold. “Do you remember Jennifer Allerton?”
I had to think for a moment before it hit me. “The girl that was in Jeremy Brubaker’s car when he was killed. Her parents had wanted it hushed up; didn’t want it known that their daughter might have been a junkie.” Alvarez is pulling out a slim tabloid sized newspaper, ‘The Clarion’. Our University reporter.
“Seems that’s changed. When our reporter…” I still don’t know his name yet, Torres is good, if Alvarez doesn’t know it either. “..Contacted the Allertons about the story he was going to print in this morning’s edition, it seems he got a hold of the girl’s mother. Whose ideas on keeping quiet about her daughter’s death were at odds with what Mr Allerton wanted. She let the reporter print the story, and added that she was going to sue Brubaker, for her daughter’s death. She said she would file for divorce if her husband tried to stop her. I don’t know how successful she’ll be, but if spit and venom were currency, I’d say she’s going to do it.” He’s got the paper spread out in between us, and is pointing to a few passages he had circled for me earlier.
The woman was beyond angry. Having seen Jeanette hold a little girl, I can see how that could be. A man could be furious enough to kill someone for harming something that’s his. But a woman? A mother? Even just reading her words quoted on the page, words she had probably watered down with the aid of a lawyer and doubtless the aid of a journalist that didn’t wish her harm, I knew that this went beyond just anger. Brubaker had killed this woman’s daughter, as well as killing his own son. This went beyond killing in anger for her, and she would never be sated for it. There could be no way she could kill him enough, or harm him enough, or sue him enough, once she knew what he had done. Her quoted words were clipped and precise, like frozen steel, but there was no mistaking the rage in them. This went beyond the need to merely kill Brubaker, or destroy him in a court of law. Jeanette, holding her little girl high in the air, her whole world. Mrs. Allerton meant murder, and I didn’t think she’d be happy having a bunch of hired stooges do it either. She would rip Brubaker apart with her bare hands if she could get a hold of him. “Is this woman going to be safe, Alvarez?”
I honestly don’t know if that thought had occurred to him; he looked puzzled for a moment. “You think maybe Brubaker would go after her too?”
“I’m more worried about her going after Brubaker.” We both sit quietly, looking at the small black and white picture on the sidebar of the article. Jennifer Allerton and her mother, at some fair the year before. The daughter had that pretty, generic look that so many teenage girls have, but there was a strength and clarity in her face and one look at her mother showed where she got it. To look at her picture, you would never imagine her doing something like killing someone. Mrs. Vivian Allerton seems to have taken to her role as society wife and mother well, but now her daughter was gone. I don’t know how long she would have stayed quiet for, or even why she did for as long as she did, but as soon as she had a target for that rage, all bets were off.
“I’ll let Holloway in on it; it wouldn’t be right if that bastard Brubaker got to walk and she had to go to prison for it.” We both looked at each other, and solemnly nodded. There wasn’t much more to say about it. Mrs. Allerton was someone else that would be put under what little protection we could offer in this case that wasn’t a case.
“Vega seems pleased to let Brubaker be destroyed this way; what do you think Brubaker’s next move will be?” In the end it comes down to the guessing game we have played in the past, holding onto what little evidence we could find, looking for the next rock to hop to.
Alvarez takes a deep breath, playing with the rim of his now empty coffee cup. “Everything Brubaker has done so far has been to not only avoid being in the spotlight, but also to enjoy the fruits of his theft.” We look at each other, smirking, but he just points his finger at me to warn me not to say it. Fruits of his theft, indeed. “Right now,” he waves the newspaper, “he’s about to be completely exposed, by name. Not only for the theft in 1993, but for the killing of his own backup to do it. So that means that the DEA is now involved, and more. And then, you have Allerton. Something that happened in Colombia years ago to people no one knows, is one thing. Allerton was a society woman. She has the clout to really pull him apart. A woman like her standing up in court talking about her dead daughter?” We share a look; we don’t need to say. “When everyone gets through with him, the courts, all the different federal agencies.” He breaks into a cruel laugh at this point; if Vega had any idea what he’s done, I’d have to say the man is wreaking a nearly poetic justice on the man. “Hell, the IRS, Vetter, can you imagine what the IRS would do to him? There’ll be nothing left; going to prison, for anyone else, would seem like a relief.”
“Except for guys like Brubaker, it never is. He’ll be looking to take out whoever he thinks is responsible.” Knowing its true, we both sit in silence, wondering where Brubaker will turn when that moment comes.
“Right now, Brubaker has some mystery reporter at the university, Vega, and Douglas. Whether he knows the name of the agent Douglas put on him is in doubt. Right now, I don’t think he has the pull to find out a damned thing at the DEA. Brubaker is done, Vetter. No one will touch him now, no matter what he might have been in the past.”
While Brubaker was out of sight, and willing to remember his ‘friends’, sure, he had some influence. Now he was a dirty DEA agent; a man who murdered his own men; a man who had murdered his own son. A man who had murdered the daughter of a society mother, just to cover up his own crimes. No one would touch him. “Will he run, do you think?”
There was doubt in my question, even as I asked it. No, Brubaker wouldn’t run. “I don’t see that happening, Vetter. He’s going to fight it, he’s going to deny it and use what money he has to try to buy his way out of it. Brubaker might have been keeping quiet for years, but he won’t tolerate his name being dragged through the mud. Everything this man has done has been in the name of his ego, every move. He won’t tolerate having to run.”
It was just a matter of waiting then, as it has been all along, to let the man destroy himself. All we were doing, all of us, even Vega, were doing, was handing the man enough rope to hang himself. We’re both nodding quietly, there’s no need to spell it out; it’s been this way since the beginning. “Do you think Vega will make a move?”
Alvarez grins at me, reminding me in an instant why I like the man. “Vega. I’m starting to like that fucker Vega.” We’re both nodding in agreement; I’m starting to have a healthy respect for the man too, and that’s something that still shakes me, even now. “You know, I’ll call Holloway, and tell him to have someone protect Allerton, but I have the feeling…”
“That Vega’s already got someone watching over her.” We’ve been thinking the same things for so long that finishing the thought isn’t difficult. There is something honorable about Vega, and I believe he would watch out for a woman like Mrs. Allerton. Just as he had his man watch out for Jeanette when Brubakers gunmen killed Anderson in front of the bookstore.
We’ve said everything about the case that can be said, and I have Alvarez drop me off. We drove by the bookstore but my car was gone, so Jeanette was already at home. At home. She would be waiting at home for me. “Did you want to come in for a minute, Alvarez?”
He just smiles at me, shaking his head. “I’ll bring Adriana and the kids over for a short visit after work. You two need some time to yourselves.” We had just spent a vacation with nothing but each other, and yes, we needed time for ourselves, in our house. “I’ll give Adriana’s cousin a call, about getting Jeanette moved.” He takes a deep breath before pulling up in front of the house; he doesn’t look at me for a moment, but looks out the window straight ahead. “It took a lot of guts for you to love her, Vetter. A lot of people would have closed their hearts up and never let another person in. I’m happier for the both of you than you’ll ever know.” I couldn’t say anything, this whole day has been too much, just rest my hand on his shoulder before I get out of the car.
The house is still and quiet and empty boxes are neatly folded by the front door. She’s home, and unpacked what little she brought with her. She has one box beside the couch, as if she wasn’t sure what to do with it; it’s been opened and closed a few times. My fingertip runs along the side of the frame, after moving some of the paper away.
Her head peeks around the corner of her book; her face breaking into a radiant grin at seeing me there. She’s curled up in the corner of the porch glider, slowly rocking it with her toe as she read. I could have watched her all day. I could have curled up on the seat with her, and played with her toes, and tortured her as she read.
Instead, I took the book from her, marking her place with the slip pf paper that I had written short love notes on, and, taking her hand, led her into the house. Passing the bedroom, and back into the living room. I kiss her ring, and her hand, and finally trace a gentle kiss across her lips, watching her eyes the entire time. My fingertips settle on her lips before she can speak.
I take the frame out of the box; the one I know that she had packed lovingly, as something she couldn’t bear to leave behind, and couldn’t bear to have movers break or lose. A picture that she had probably taken out of it’s box, to look at, and put away, feeling she could never really bring it out here, but not being willing to part with it either. Her hand still in mine I walk over to the bookshelf, and make a space. I don’t have many pictures there; so many were with Stacy, and I left them behind.
I can be jealous of him somewhere in my heart, because he loved her first, but the picture will stay, as long as she wants it to stay. I love Jeanette, and I know I love Emily, so I will love John too, because he loved her. She’s crying silent tears as I put the picture there. Jeanette, John, and a little tiny newborn Emily.
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