there’s also the kind where two friends decide to make a life together. That’s a marriage built on kindness and respect. On history and . . . and, yes, love. Real love. Just not the sort of true love that they maybe write about in fairy tales or those books at the grocery st—”
“Gin-ger . . .,” whispered her grandmother.
Ginger looked up.
“I w-wanted . . . that k-kind of . . . l-love for . . . you. T-true . . . l-love.”
Sudden tears pricked the back of her eyes.
In the weeks following her disastrous conversation with Cain and her sudden decision to sleep with Woodman, she’d been in a sort of daze. A haze, really, that Woodman must have believed was a mirror image of his own joy manifested like awe in Ginger. But really she’d felt like a character in a movie. Or like she was watching a movie of her life, her own part almost unrecognizable. Her heart had been broken beyond repair, and no airlift to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital could fix it this time. And Woodman’s love was the only oasis from her heartbreak.
They hadn’t actually slept together again for a while after that first night, choosing to backtrack in their relationship and start dating properly in the months leading up to Christmas. And during those long, lonesome nights after Woodman dropped her off at home, when the shards of her broken heart dug into the softest places inside her, she read poetry and songs and stories about lost love, and felt the almost unbearable cruelty of Cain’s rejection.
Unbearable because she knew—beyond any shadow of doubt—that the kind of true love Gran spoke of was the kind of love she could only find with Cain. On this earth, in this lifetime, Cain, and no one else, was the split-apart half of her soul. It was clear in the way her heart leaped in recognition of his whenever he had been near. In the way she longed for him like a ceaseless ache, dreamed of him nightly, desperately fought to forget him in her waking hours. Her body, her heart, her very soul would always yearn for Cain. But deprived of that soul-based, forever sort of love, she gratefully accepted what she had: Woodman.
Her tears receded, and she sniffled softly, mustering a smile for her grandmother.
“What I have is exactly what I need. I want Woodman, Gran. I choose him.”
“B-but you . . . l-love . . . Ca—”
“Woodman,” she said firmly, forbidding her grandmother to say his name. “I love Woodman.”
Her grandmother took a shaky breath and sighed, looking grieved but defeated. Unable to fight her fatigue any longer, her eyes drifted closed while Ginger stood up and kissed her grandmother on the forehead before leaving.
***
As she hurried down the sidewalk, with the early October sun beating down on her back, Ginger reviewed the rest of this week’s appointments in her head: today’s cake tasting at Southern Belle Confections, check. This evening’s dance lesson at the Winston Schultz School of Dance, check. Tomorrow she and her mother were meeting with the caterer again, and on Friday she was meeting Woodman and his groomsmen at Tanner’s Tuxedos to finalize their rentals before the monthly firehouse dinner, at which she and Woodman always lent a helping hand.
They were a pair now, she and Woodman—the de facto prince and princess of Apple Valley: junior members at the country club, volunteers at every firehouse social function, and regulars at the Valley View Presbyterian Church every Wednesday for bingo and every Sunday for services. It was the life that Ginger had always imagined for herself, and yet, inexplicably, Apple Valley had started to feel increasingly small to her since her engagement, and as her wedding approached rapidly, the town she’d always loved felt downright confining.
“Cold feet,” she muttered, checking her watch and scrunching up her nose when she realized she was running late.
After her heart surgery, her mother had hired a tutor who’d taught Ginger at home for the ensuing ten years, but from the time she was twelve, she’d begged and pleaded to attend public school. Her mother had always refused her wishes, reminding her that she was safest at home. Finally, a few weeks before her sixteenth birthday, Ginger had walked from the farm to Apple Valley High School, gotten the forms for enrollment, filled them out, and presented them to her parents. Only then had they relented, and she’d enrolled in tenth grade. Sadly it was too late.