The Noel Letters (The Noel Collection #4) - Richard Paul Evans Page 0,48
not fear to love because of the chance of loss. This life consists of loss. It must be. We can bemoan what we have lost, or we can be grateful to have been blessed with something to mourn. The choice is yours. To avoid love because of the possibility of losing it is like poisoning ourselves to avoid being murdered.
Tabula Rasa
CHAPTER thirty–five
Good prose is like a windowpane.
—George Orwell
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3
Dylan had two employees out with the flu, leaving him working extra shifts. I missed him, but, as he said, “I’m lucky to be miserably overworked.”
I was surprised when I got a call from him Thursday night after work.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to decide what to eat for dinner,” I said.
“Want to go ice skating?”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Just us?”
“And Alex.”
“That’s spontaneous.”
“I was feeling spontaneous. And I was missing you.”
“When?”
“I was thinking of leaving in ten minutes.”
“Have you had dinner?”
“Just mac and cheese. I told Alex we’d get a treat after.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Then we’ll be right over. Dress warm.”
“Darn, I was going to wear a bikini.”
“Don’t let me dissuade you.”
“Bye.”
I made myself some coffee and English crumpets, which I spread with butter and some homemade apricot jam I found in one of the cupboards. Dylan pulled up about twenty minutes later. Before he could get out, I ran out to his truck and hopped in. I leaned over and we kissed.
“Hi, Miss Noel,” Alexis said. She was buckled in the back seat.
“Hi, Alex.”
“We’re going ice-skating.”
“I know. Have you been skating before?”
“Yes. I take classes. I’m pretty good.”
“I’m not.” I turned to Dylan. “What prompted this little outing?”
“I told you, Alex and I were missing you.” He turned to me. “Mostly me.”
I kissed him on the cheek. “I was missing you too.”
We drove downtown to the Gallivan Center. The Gallivan ice-skating rink was outdoors and seasonal, opening shortly before Thanksgiving and staying open until February. It reminded me a little of the Rockefeller Center ice rink, sans the gilded statue of Prometheus and the massive Christmas tree. That’s not to say it wasn’t decorated for the season. The rink was surrounded by a small forest of bedecked evergreen trees with more than a quarter million Christmas lights.
When we arrived the rink was surrounded by displaced skaters while the Zamboni resurfaced the ice, but by the time we had rented and donned our skates, the rink was open again. The ice was flooded by a changing array of colors from spotlights hanging above it.
Dylan and I were at about the same skating skill level—somewhere between dangerous and embarrassing—and we clumsily skated counterclockwise around the perimeter of the rink with Alex between us, each of us holding one of her mittened hands.
We didn’t last long. It was a cold night, the temperature falling into the upper twenties. We skated for less than an hour, then turned in our skates.
“I have a surprise,” Dylan said as we walked to his truck.
“Yes?”
“You’ll see.” We drove up the Avenues and pulled into the parking lot of a small brown-bricked building near the hospital.
“Have you ever been here?” he asked, turning off his truck.
“I have no idea where ‘here’ is,” I said.
“Hatch Family Chocolates. About six years ago they had a TV series on TLC. It was called Little Chocolatiers.”
“Wait, they’re little people. Did I say that right?”
Dylan nodded. “Steve and Kate.”
“I watched a few episodes of that. How did I not know that was in Utah?”
The chocolate shop had at least a dozen tables inside, and almost all of them were taken, crowded with families and groups of young people. A line wrapped around the long glass display cases of handmade chocolates, truffles, caramels, fudge, and ice cream.
“Dad, can I have an ice cream cone?”
“Do you want a cone or a hot chocolate?” Dylan asked.
“Yes.”
Dylan laughed. “All right, for Christmas’s sake.”
Dylan ordered three cups of their famous hot cocoa with melted bars of milk chocolate. He also bought me a small box of chocolate mint truffles to take home.
“You know the way to a woman’s heart,” I said.
“At least yours,” he said. “I hope.”
As we walked back to the truck Alexis looked up at me. “Noel?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Will you be my mommy?”
The question hung in the frozen air. Dylan said, “Alex, Noel’s our good friend.”
All I could think to say was “Thank you for asking.”
I thought about her question all the way home. I wondered if Dylan was doing the same, because neither of us talked as Alex fell asleep in the back seat. We stopped at my house, and Dylan walked