Hearts Divided (Cedar Cove #5.5)(60)
I’m Elizabeth’s…hero, he would’ve said through chattering teeth. Remember me? I’ve been waiting on a run-down porch on Center Street for my mom and her boyfriend to get home from work. It’s been hours since they should’ve returned, and when I looked through the windows I didn’t see any furniture inside. I’m pretty cold. And sort of hungry. Could I…could I come in?
But Nicholas Lawton did leave Sarah’s Orchard that December night.
It would be twenty-four years before he made his way back. Found his way home.
One
San Francisco, California
Friday, July 7, 12:30 p.m.
Present day
Elizabeth Charlotte Winslow was smiling. She’d just picked up her wedding invitations and was delighted with the result. She’d designed them herself. And although her concept hadn’t been a huge departure—a different font, a more interesting format—from what Atherton heiresses had mailed to their wedding guests for as long as anyone could recall, her mother, Abigail MacKenzie Winslow, had been wary.
It would be fine, Elizabeth had insisted. The gilt edging hadn’t been forsaken, and the parchment itself was more expensive than paper had any right to be.
It was fine, as her mother would acknowledge when she saw the invitations…in forty minutes or so. Elizabeth wanted to make a brief stop before heading south to Atherton and her parents’ Lilac Lane home.
She was in the second week of the nine she’d spend living with her parents until her September wedding to Matthew Blaine. It was also the second week of her first carefree summer since she’d graduated from Atherton High.
She’d taken courses that summer. Advanced-placement courses that had helped her get her undergraduate degree from Stanford—and be admitted to Stanford Law—in three years, not four. She’d also taken classes each undergraduate summer and clerked during law school vacations and had spent the summer after graduation studying for the California bar.
Then it was off to L.A., where, as a prosecutor, she’d tried cases, and won cases, year round. There hadn’t been any carefree summers in eleven years. No carefree autumns, winters or springs, either.
Two weeks ago, the jury had returned its guilty verdict on her swan-song case in L.A. She’d flown home the next day, and despite the occasional feeling that she was playing hooky, she was adapting well to her newfound freedom.
In fact, she was enjoying it so much, she hadn’t yet made the offer to her new boss, the San Francisco D.A., that she’d intended to make. Even though her official start date was October 1, she’d tell him she was available to do preliminary work on the cases she’d be handling. So far the delights of a lazy summer had overcome that urge.
There were people—her mother, Matthew’s mother and the wedding coordinator—who were unhappy with Elizabeth’s notion of a carefree summer leading up to the Winslow-Blaine nuptials. There were myriad decisions to make, all of which they regarded as critical. Elizabeth’s plan had been to be peripherally—but cheerfully—involved. Whatever the mothers wanted. She hadn’t imagined there’d be issues, like the invitations, on which she’d felt strongly enough to voice a preference.
There were other choices she would’ve made differently. Fewer bridal showers. A less grand dress. And, as it became clear that her wedding—and the festivities leading up to it—was the event of the season, a nice middle-of-the-night elopement to Lake Tahoe sounded more and more appealing. But Elizabeth was picking her battles.
And Matthew, smartly, was remaining out of the fray. It wouldn’t be a carefree summer for him. As an investment banker, her fiancé had several major deals in the works. He hoped to bring them all to lucrative conclusions before the wedding. It would require long hours and frequent travel, but he believed it could be done.
He’d been in New York for the past three days. He’d be coming home late tonight—too late, he’d said, for her to meet him at the airport, or at his Pacific Heights home, which would become theirs in September.
Matthew’s house was Elizabeth’s brief stop before driving to Atherton. Matthew wouldn’t be seeing her tonight, but he’d be able to see their invitations. If he wanted to. Matthew wasn’t any more desperate to see the engraved proof of their impending wedding than Elizabeth would’ve been if she hadn’t insisted on the changes.
As Elizabeth made the short drive from Shreve & Company on Union Square, she confronted the real reason for her detour to Matthew’s empty house before returning home. Once her mother acknowledged that the invitations were at least as elegant as the traditional ones, the logical next step would be for Elizabeth to begin addressing them.
There’d been a minor skirmish on that point. The mothers had wanted to hire a calligrapher. Elizabeth didn’t do calligraphy, but her handwriting was legible. Presentable. Even if it wasn’t, so what? This was her wedding. She wanted to address the invitations herself. She was a little surprised, she told the dismayed faces, that all brides didn’t feel the same way.
The idea of spending the afternoon addressing invitations should have been a happy one. It would’ve been, had the recipient of the first invitation she was going to address been excited about receiving it—about the wedding itself.
But unless she’d magically changed her opinion of her granddaughter’s groom-to-be, Clara MacKenzie wouldn’t be excited at all. Elizabeth’s detour to Matthew’s was, therefore, a stalling tactic.