shower, aching for distraction.
As she let the hot water rain down on her, she hated herself for being jealous. Hated that she could be remotely upset by Noelle’s writings about the man she loved, when Noelle was gone now. Of course she’d written about the man who’d asked her to marry him. Why wouldn’t she? Rachel had known Cale would be in the pages, but she’d managed to put it out of her mind as she’d relived the years through Noelle’s eyes. By the time Rachel had reached the words Cale Jackson is the most amazing man ever, her guard had been down.
It occurred to her, as the hot water ran out due to her cowardly record-long shower, that she needed to read to the end.
Maybe experiencing Noelle’s love for Cale by reading her innermost thoughts and feelings about him would help Rachel to let go of him. It could serve to further cement it in her head that, no matter how much she loved Cale and missed him, he’d been her sister’s guy. She needed all the help she could get, because some nights, lying alone in her bed, the loneliness made it almost impossible not to call him or track him down just to say hi. Maybe reading Noelle’s entries about him would help Rachel make peace with her decision not to give in to the temptation to take what he’d offered her.
It would hurt like hell, but then, so did her lingering thoughts of him, her periodic musings about what could have been.
With renewed determination, she dried herself off, dressed and went back to the journal.
Feeling less cozy and more guarded, she opted to sit on her desk chair to tackle the rest of the pages instead of lounging in bed.
She found herself nodding in agreement, her heart in her throat, as she read the first four entries about Cale. About his patience, his gentlemanly ways, her awe at what he did for a living, his tenderness. How he went out of his way for others, how he supported her no matter what.
And then she got to the fifth entry about Cale, which started with I called Rachel tonight to tell her Cale asked me to marry him.
Rachel lifted her feet to the desk chair and wrapped one arm around her legs as she held the journal with the other. She closed her eyes for a moment, bracing herself to read all about the life-changing evening her sister had told her about back then. The entry, she gradually realized, though, was about Rachel, not Cale.
I love that girl so much. I wish she was here in person. Of course, I always wish that. When I told her Cale proposed, she was so happy for me it just made the best moment in my life all the more special. Not that I expected anything different from Rach. She’s the most supportive sister a girl could ever ask for.
She said something along the lines of “every girl should be lucky enough to find her own Cale” and those words have stuck with me. I told her at the time my greatest wish was exactly that: that she find and fall in love with a man as wonderful as Cale. She deserves it so much. Crap, I’m tearing up just writing this. My only sadness in life right now is that my sister hasn’t yet found her soul mate, the man who makes her get out of bed with a smile every morning in anticipation of seeing him. The man who gets her through the hard times and makes the good times ten times happier. The man who treats her like the amazing woman she is. And I hope she can set aside work and her ambitions and everything else she regularly lets get in the way of her most basic needs so that she can embrace love with the right man completely. That right there is my wish for my sis.
Rachel read the page five times, then skimmed the rest of the book through tear-blurred eyes, finding only two more entries came after it, neither of which mentioned her or Cale. She shut the book hard and dried her eyes.
She went back to the shelf and picked up the framed picture of her and Noelle—a photo they had taken of themselves on the beach the last time her sister had convinced her to make the trek with her so Noelle could do her night-swimming thing. It was one of