Sweet Christmas Kisses (88 page)

But none of that mattered. In some ways it added to the melancholy of what might have been, but she preferred to deal in reality.

When they’d finished eating, Tom and Bill headed for the couch and recliner while Allie and Sofia helped Barb clean up. A very real Nick touched her arm when she came to grab more dirty glasses from the table. “Want to go look at Christmas lights?”

Holly was getting ready for bed. Allie and Tom were preparing to leave. That meant she’d be alone with Nick in the car. Her hesitation was silly. Like she was going to get her heart broken while driving to look at houses lit up for the season. “That sounds fun.”

Nick followed Sofia to her apartment to drop off her car, and they took his to see the lights. His car smelled of his cologne, in a subtle, inviting way. Nick chose a radio station that played Christmas carols and drove toward the more expensive, newer homes.

Tired of trying to find polite things to say, Sofia dove right in to what was on her mind. “I was surprised to hear you had a crush on me.”

“Were you? I guess I kept it pretty well hidden. I didn’t want to lose you as a friend if you didn’t like me.”

“We were so young.” And she’d been innocent, too, unlike some of the other girls. There was one thing she’d never understood that had driven them apart. “Can I ask you something?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“How did you end up with Morgan? I mean, I never noticed you were interested in her before her party.”

His right thumb tapped a rhythm on the steering wheel. “She was pretty enough. I hadn’t given her much thought before then, though.”

“Something changed at the party?” She could tell he didn’t really want to talk about it, but she needed to put this ghost to rest.

“It’s kind of embarrassing. She was flirting with me. Really coming on to me. I guess I didn’t resist hard enough.”

That was it? No declaration of how badly he wanted her before they had sex? She wanted to hate him for it, but he’d been eighteen. She probably could have been sweet-talked into bed just as easily at that age, if she hadn’t been so heartbroken over losing Nick to Morgan.

“It was really stupid.” Nick seemed to be opening up more. “
I
was really stupid. I believed her when she said she was on the pill. By the time I thought about a condom I was beyond sense.”

She almost reached out to put her hand on his coat sleeve, but held back. His admission made her like him even more, if it was possible. He took full responsibility for an action he was only half guilty of.

“I can’t bring myself to regret it though, because of Holly. She’s been such a blessing in my life.”

“You’re lucky. She’s such a delightful little girl.”

They went quiet as they drove past some conspicuously grand lighting displays. The mood in the car was no longer cheery and bright. Sofia felt guilty for throwing a wet blanket on their evening, but she could feel some of the distance between them had narrowed.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said.

“I haven’t talked about it to anyone. It’s been kind of bottled up in me for a long time.”

They turned down another street, following the slow-moving line of cars. When they reached a corner, Nick turned out of the neighborhood. “I’m not much in the mood for Christmas.”

Guilt tugged at her stomach. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“No, I’m glad you did.” At a stop sign, he gazed at her, his eyes hidden in the darkness so she couldn’t read his expression. “Would you mind if we go somewhere and talk?”

“Not at all. Why don’t we go to my place and I’ll make us some cocoa or coffee.”

Nick gave her a small smile as he turned the car around.

Nick looked around Sofia’s apartment and realized he’d never been to her home, even when they were kids. Her dad was usually sleeping during the day, so they played elsewhere. She had good taste, an eclectic mix of antique and vintage furniture with modern fabrics and colors. It really suited the girl he used to know.

He started to follow her into the kitchen when he noticed photos on the wall. He flipped on the hallway light to see them better. A few were of Sofia with her dad or mom, but the rest were of her with friends. He was in more than not, but so were Allie, Katie and Sofia’s friend Pauly.

The most recent one was of Sofia in her college cap and gown, her smile not reflecting the pride she must have felt at reaching her goal. He was curious what was going through her head at the time.

He called out to Sofia. “Great pictures. I remember when a lot of these took place.”

“Happy times,” she agreed from the kitchen.

“You don’t look very happy at your graduation.”

She shrugged as she brought him a mug and motioned to the small couch. “I broke up with my boyfriend the week before.”

“That would take some of the fun out of it. What happened?”

“I finally admitted the life we would share wasn’t enough for me. If I hadn’t ended it, we would have married by default eighteen months after he began his dental practice.”

He chewed the inside of his lip. “Sounds familiar.” Leaning back against the cushions, he closed his eyes and tipped his head back. If only he’d had that foresight when he’d first learned Morgan was pregnant.

A volcano rumbled inside him and he couldn’t blame it on dinner. He’d held his anger and frustration inside for too long, and he had the beginnings of an ulcer, according to his doctor. As hard as it was to bring himself to form the words that might release him from his anguish, he knew he had to get it out in the open at some point.

Opening his eyes again, he stared at the ceiling where shadows created by the artificial candles danced about. “I didn’t believe Morgan when she told me she was pregnant.”

This next part was the hardest to admit. “And then, I wondered if it was mine.”

“That’s not so surprising, really,” Sofia said softly.

The couch was small enough to lend the same sort of intimacy, privacy, as his car had, which helped a lot. “I knew the right thing to do, the only thing to do, was to marry Morgan.”

“It was the responsible move.”

He sat forward, leaning his elbows on his legs as heat washed over him and his heart pounded. “It was a stupid decision. We were classmates who’d slept together once. You can’t build a life off that. Even if there’s a baby involved.”

Sofia put her hand on his back and stroked softly, but said nothing.

“I worked so much, I didn’t spend a lot of time with Morgan. We were more like roommates than husband and wife.” He hadn’t even been infatuated with her, so he didn’t put out any effort to change their relationship.

God knows what their lives would have been like if she’d lived.

“Late in the pregnancy Morgan had problems with swelling and high blood pressure—preeclampsia, I think they called it—and her doctor put her on bed rest. Her mom and mine brought meals for us. Allie was home from college on winter break so she set up the nursery.” He’d used money as an excuse to work, to stay away from home. There was a lot of truth in that, though. Insurance took care of the biggest part of the medical bills, but there were so many things they had to buy. His parents helped, but he hated taking money from them.

“She went into labor a couple of weeks early, but Holly was healthy, and big enough to come home the next day. Morgan seemed fine, too. She was really happy taking care of Holly.”

He reached for his drink and took a sip, but the coffee only added to the acid in his stomach. The mug was almost too hot to cup in his hand, but the sting in his fingers was a minor penance for the things he’d done.

Mom and Dad knew most of what happened just a few weeks later, and they’d surely let Morgan’s parents know, but Nick had never revealed the full picture to anyone. It was a solid lump in his gut now, a tumor of emotions that continued to grow the longer he held it in.

Sofia was the only person he could trust the whole truth with, but that didn’t make it any easier to tell.

“I came home from work at sixty-thirty that morning. I could hear Holly screaming as I unlocked the door.” His throat tightened as he slipped back to that day and told Sofia what had happened.

The wavering cries told him the baby had been crying for a long time. She was beyond hysterical. He went straight to her crib, talking softly to her while changing her diaper and putting her in a dry sleeper. Where the hell was Morgan?

Putting Holly on his shoulder, he’d gone to the kitchen and made a bottle. Holly whimpered as she sucked voraciously, and those gut-wrenching little hiccup breaths finally calmed. When she finished the bottle, he rubbed her back the way Mom had shown him.

Morgan still hadn’t gotten up, and she was usually making his breakfast by then. Anger simmered in him, and he clenched his jaw to keep from letting the baby feel his tension. With Holly in one arm, he changed the sheet on her crib and lay the sleeping baby back down.

Then he stormed the few steps to the bedroom he shared with Morgan. What had she been up to last night to make her sleep so late? Why hadn’t she heard the baby’s cries?

She lay with her back to him on the far side of the bed. “Morgan, wake up,” he called.

She didn’t move. He rounded the bed and reached for her shoulder. As she rolled back from his touch, he saw the darkened, bruised skin on her face. She lay limp, her eyes closed as if she slept. He recoiled in shock, an odd sound escaping his lips, and stood staring at his dead wife.

A quiet sniffle from beside him was the only sign he’d spoken all of that out loud. The truth was finally out there for someone else to know what an ass he’d been when he found Morgan. His cheeks were wet. Sofia sniffed again beside him and got up to get a box of tissues off the counter, which she set in front of him.

Nick cleared his throat. “Sorry.” His voice was raw, about like his nerves felt at the moment.

“It’s okay. That must have been hard on you, to find her like that.”

“I guess. It’s all kind of hazy from that point. The EMTs coming and going, our parents arriving. Mom taking care of Holly while our dads tried to calm Mrs. Winslow. It was all so surreal. Who has a stroke at nineteen? It had something to do with the preeclampsia, they said, but I never really understood.”

He hadn’t tried very hard to understand. He was too busy dealing with not letting anyone see that he wasn’t sad she was dead, not really. “What kind of person am I? I should have been mourning my wife, but I was no sadder than I would have been over the death of anyone we went to school with.”

Sofia scooted closer and draped her arm around his shoulder. “You’ve been beating yourself up for something you couldn’t control.”

“I should have felt something.”

“Why? Did you love her?”

“That was part of why I felt so guilty. Why I eventually left White Oak. Everywhere I go here, I see things that make me think of Morgan. And when I think of her, I think about what a lousy husband I was.”

For a while, he’d wondered if he was incapable of loving someone, but Holly quickly proved that to be wrong. He knew now there were so many ways to fall in love, but an accidental pregnancy and a hurried marriage weren’t among them. At least for him.

“So you drop Holly off with either set of grandparents and leave before you have to confront those feelings.”

He drew in a deep breath and glanced over his shoulder at Sofia. “Jeez, did you major in psychology? You sound like a shrink.”

“My roomie in the dorm did. Sorry.”

Nick smiled, feeling the release of a ton of contrition. He wished he could have talked to someone, even Mom, years ago. He leaned into the pressure of Sofia at his side. “I’ve missed having you to talk to.”

She squeezed his shoulders. “Me, too.”

With all the emotion he’d just gone through, he suddenly felt like an overcooked noodle. He forced himself to stand. “I should get home. Holly wakes up early, running at full tilt.”

Sofia followed him to where he’d left his coat. “I’m glad you came over.”

“Yeah. I think I can face Christmas a little more easily, now.” He pulled Sofia into a hug, then turned and left.

The moon shone down from a star-filled sky. His breath clouded with each exhale. The sting of the freezing air on his cheeks as he walked to his car was a sharp reminder that he was alive.

He whispered a prayer of thanks for life and good friends.

“Don’t you dare!” Sofia snatched a paintbrush from the hand of young Tommy McCallum before he could give Holly a green makeover, and sent him to help Pauly with chair setup.

Smoothing her hair away from her face, Sofia looked at the activity around her. There was no way they would finish on time. So much needed to be done. This was her first attempt at running the production of the children’s play, and she didn’t understand how Mrs. Brown had done it year after year.

She and Barb had finished the costumes that morning. The sets still needed touchup paint where they’d either faded or gotten scratched up in storage since last year. The kids would arrive in a few hours expecting to run through dress rehearsals, and Sofia was afraid the props and sets wouldn’t be finished—meaning the paint was dry so no one would go home with stained clothing—in time.

Nick and Mike, Tommy’s dad, were repairing the pulley system that was supposed to lower the backdrop for their city scene. Without it, they only had interiors.

Katie walked up with the green paint can in one hand and reached for Tommy’s brush, which Sofia still held. “That boy is a delinquent.”

“Only half the time,” Sofia said.

Mike snuck up behind them. “Yeah, the other half he’s asleep.”

Sofia cringed at the thought he’d overheard them bad-mouthing his son. She looked over her shoulder. “He isn’t always bad.”

Glaring at her for the longest moment with his expression unchanged, Mike finally smirked and said, “Yes, he is. He’s a challenge, to be sure. I keep hoping those rebellious parts of him are the qualities that will help him in adult life.”

Nick joined their circle and took on a gruff demeanor. “Just keep him away from my daughter.” He chuckled.