Touching Stars (49 page)

He ushered her into the sunroom; then, without asking, he went into the kitchen and returned with two glasses of wine. He sat beside her and clinked his against hers.

“To moving on?” It was clearly a question. “At last? Or to regrets?”

She thought about it. “To moving on. To finally divorcing the man I divorced twelve years ago. To letting him be a real father for the next year.” She clinked again. “Maybe to figuring out who I am.”

“And figuring out what you want?”

She considered. “That too.”

They clinked one final time. But she really didn’t want to drink, and she really didn’t want to sit. She stood and walked to the windows looking over the backyard stretching down to the water below.

He joined her, but they didn’t touch. “You’re sure about all this? You’re okay?”

“I will be. This needs to happen. Every bit of it. I’ll miss the boys, but they’ll be where they need to be. And they’ll visit.”

“And Eric?”

“We’ll still be friends, I think. If nothing else, we share three great sons and good wishes for the future.”

“I see.” He sipped his wine, and they stood quietly looking out to the river.

Finally he spoke again. “It sounds to me like you’ll have a lot of free time.”

She turned to look at him. She had always liked his profile. In fact, there was really nothing she didn’t like about Travis Allen. The butterflies fluttered their fragile wings again, or maybe this time it was a showers of stars. She looked away.

Last week Travis had admitted he was in love with someone. She realized now, and would have known then if she had searched her heart, who that woman was.

For a moment she looked out over Travis’s unadorned acres again, at the green stretch of grass just aching to be interrupted by carefully designed gardens. She thought of Miranda Duncan, who had realized too late that a good man who adored her was the real love of her life.

Then she turned back to Travis. Once and for all.

“You know, it sounds like I’m finally going to have time to put in a perennial bed for you. Maybe even two.”

His eyes were warm, and so was his smile. “Why bother, when you have all that space at the inn?”

“Because when I stand here in the future, I want to see gardens stretching down to the river.”

“You expect to be standing here in the future?”

She smiled back at him. “I can’t imagine where else I’d rather stand.”