“I’m okay with you talking to Ian about it.”
“Good. I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you.”
Sam sat the ornament on the table and said, “Let’s look at it this way—we have our first ornament. Now we just need to get the tree.”
“Sunday?”
“Definitely.”
Hobbit barked her approval. We scratched behind her ears and then went to the barn to bake about ten dozen strawberry preserve–filled cookies.
Even solving a murder couldn’t put off parade commitments.
Seven
Nothing’s ever quite as perfect as we want it to be, no matter what it seems like from the outside looking in. Though I might have given the impression that my relationship with Sam was shiny and close to perfect, it’s probably only fair to mention that there is a glitch—not a big one and not one that has me second-guessing our future, but a glitch nonetheless.
Sam moved to Monson from Chicago a few years ago. He’d been a police officer there, too, and though we’ve seen way too many murders in Monson recently, Chicago was worse, much worse. And more personal to Sam.
As I mentioned before, there’d been a fiancée. This is what I knew so far: her name was Clarissa and she was pretty, funny, and smart; that’s all he’ll tell me about her specifically—except for the really bad part, and I don’t have all of those details, either. But what I do know is that Clarissa was killed—tragically, brutally, and because Sam was a police officer. Those are the goriest details he’ll share and they’re pretty awful on their own. I can only imagine how truly heartbreaking the entire truth is. I’m sure that I’ll learn it someday. I could research it myself; we’re all connected to the world by keyboard, and terrible stories are usually the highest ranked on any search engine.
But there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to know the details until Sam wants to tell me. So, those nights when he’s restless, or those nights when I wake up and find he’s not beside me but usually somewhere outside, somewhere sitting and thinking and hopefully working through the pain, are nights that I sometimes either learn another small kernel of the truth or just remain silently supportive because there’s just not much anyone can say.
“Hey,” I said as I found him with Hobbit on the back patio. The night was cold, the clear sky bright with what I called a country quilt—you couldn’t see that many stars from a well-lit city or town.
“Aw, sorry. We tried to stay quiet,” Sam said, the light from the moon glimmering and making his eyes seem happy and jovial even though I knew they weren’t.
“No problem.” I sat in a chair next to him. “Nightmares?”
Sam huffed a small, non-funny laugh. “No, not this time. I just woke up. Nothing but my eyes opening.”
“I guess that’s good.”
He was silent for a long beat, but then said, “It was as if I woke up because there were no nightmares this time.”
I paused a moment, too. “Is that good?”
“I think it’s probably very good. I’ll never completely get over what happened, Becca, but moving on is the goal. I want it and I know Clarissa would have wanted it, too.”
“You might not believe this, but I’d love to know more about her. I’m okay if you want to talk about her. I’m okay even if you cared for her more than you could ever care for anyone else.”
“Brooding me isn’t the best me, but I still don’t have much faith in my ability to tell the whole story. Someday. Maybe.”
“You don’t brood.”
“You and she would have gotten along really well.”
It was my turn to laugh. “Really? The two of us wouldn’t have battled it out for you?”
“You would have been friends.”
“I don’t know. Did she like to can things? I mean, there’s this whole group of people who think that canning preserves, jellies, jams, and whatever else is old-fashioned and silly. If she’d have thought that, I don’t know.” I wasn’t sure I was handling this correctly, but it was the only way I knew how to handle it.
“I doubt Clarissa ever canned anything in her life. She was a city girl through and through. I actually wanted to move out to the suburbs, but she’d have none of that. She didn’t like the idea of lawns or gardens, but I think she thought flowers were pretty. I also think she thought they only came from florists.”
“I bet we could have taught each other a thing or two.”
I heard Sam take a deep breath, and for a second I was concerned that I’d said something that caused him more pain.