Touched by Angels (Angels Everywhere #3)(26)

“Sure we could.” Jenny’s nod was eager. Her spirits lifted just thinking about the celebration. She needed this, needed something to take her mind off how much she would miss Montana. “We can make the invitations ourselves.”

“Let’s hand them out. That way we could save on postage,” Michelle said, offering another money-saving idea.

“Who should we invite?”

“Bill and Susan,” Michelle suggested.

The couple had met in drama school and had married that summer. Jenny and Michelle had been bridesmaids. Jenny had joked about how the two of them always seemed to end up as bridesmaids.

“What about Cliff?” Jenny asked.

“Abby, too.”

The list continued until they were afraid they’d forget, so they decided to write them all down.

Michelle sat at the table and reached for a pen. “Good grief, what happened here? It looks like a paper massacre.”

The tightness gripped Jenny’s throat. “I finally wrote my parents and told them I wouldn’t be home.” Just saying the words aloud increased the ache.

“Next year you’ll be with your family,” Michelle said with confidence.

“You’re right,” Jenny said, forcing herself to think positive thoughts. Surely living in the same city in which Norman Vincent Peale had preached his philosophy of positive thinking should teach her something. Yet here she was doing it again: stinking thinking.

“Bill and Susan,” Michelle mumbled as she repeated the names of their mutual friends. “Abby. Cliff. John.”

The phone pealed and they froze.

Michelle looked to Jenny.

Jenny to Michelle.

“You answer it,” her roommate instructed.

“You,” Jenny insisted, shaking her head. It had been like this all week. The instant the phone jingled they hoped, prayed, it was Irene, their agent. If it wasn’t Irene, then perhaps it was the casting director and maybe even the great and mighty John Peterman himself. It wasn’t likely, but they could dream.

“It’s probably some schmuck wanting to sell us aluminum siding,” Michelle joked.

“Or someone doing a survey on cat food.”

But Jenny noticed that neither one of them took their eyes away from the kitchen telephone.

Michelle edged herself from the chair on the third ring and reached the phone. “Hello, this is Jenny and Michelle’s place,” she said cheerfully in a perfect rendition of the efficient secretary.

Jenny studied her friend. Afraid to hope. Afraid to care.

“It’s for you,” Michelle stated, and handed her the receiver. Then she mouthed, “It’s a man.”

Jenny pointed her finger at her heart, wondering if she’d misunderstood. “For me?”

Michelle nodded.

She took the phone and said in a friendly but professional-sounding voice, “This is Jenny Lancaster.”

“Hello, Jenny.”

Trey.

Jenny couldn’t have been more shocked if it’d been Andrew Lloyd Webber himself, wanting her to star in his next musical.

“Trey!” she said, barely managing to hide her shock.

“I got your note,” he announced.

“It was a surprise to get your Thanksgiving card,” she said, holding the receiver with both hands. She felt lightheaded and wasn’t sure if it was the shock of Trey’s call or the fact that she hadn’t eaten all day.

“You aren’t coming home for the holidays.”

Trey, her family. Everyone seemed to be pressuring her. It felt as if the walls were closing in around her. “I can’t come,” she told him, unable to disguise her own bitter disappointment. “I want to be there. More than anything, but I can’t.”

“That’s what your note said. So the bright lights of the city have blinded you?”

“No.” She longed to tell him how she hungered for the peace and solitude of Montana. New York City held its own excitement, its own energy. So often she’d walked down the crowded avenues and felt a rhythm, a cadence, that all but sang up from the asphalt. For three years she’d marched to that beat and hummed its special brand of music.

Yet the lone cry in the barren hills of home played longingly to her soul, its melody haunting her.

“Your family misses you,” Trey said, tightening the screws of her regrets.

Jenny bit into her lower lip.

“I miss you,” Trey added.

Jenny’s eyes flew open. Trey, the man who’d invaded her dreams for weeks, admitted to missing her. He’d as much as said he wanted her home.

Regrets clamored against her chest, their fists sharp and pain-filled. “I can’t come,” she whispered miserably.

Her words were met with silence.

“Can’t or won’t?” he asked starkly.

Brynn Cassidy crossed the street in front of Manhattan High and St. Philip’s Cathedral. She found Father Grady, the gray-haired priest who’d become her friend, in the vestibule.

“Hello, Father,” she said.

“Brynn, it’s good to see you, my girl.” His green Irish eyes lit up with warm delight.

“I got your message. You wanted to see me?”

“Yes. Come over to the rectory and I’ll have Mrs. Houghton brew us a pot of tea.”