Always on My Mind Page 0,90

been stunned...and racked with guilt. The shock had eventually lessened as he accepted that she really was gone, but the guilt, the blame he'd placed on himself for not knowing his own wife better, had deepened. Every day, as he'd put on his suit and tie and gone in to work to field questions and sympathy from colleagues and friends and people he only knew from cocktail parties, the guilt and blame and disgust with everyone who said they loved her and missed her but who hadn't done a damn thing to stop her self-destruction, grew to the point where he knew he couldn't stay there another second. He'd needed to start over in a world that was as far from New York society as possible, so he'd gone west and, just like Lori in her rental car, had stumbled onto his farm. The real estate transaction had been completed by nightfall, and Grayson had never planned on looking - or coming - back.

"Leslie." He knelt down and laid the flowers on her grave, putting his hand over the cold stone as if that would help them finally connect again. "I'm sorry I haven't been back for so long."

It was so awkward that he felt like they were having one of their surface conversations again, where both of them spoke, but neither of them said anything. Lori, he knew, would never have stood for that. Cemetery or not, she would have said exactly what was on her mind...and in her heart.

Suddenly, he could picture her there, egging him on: Come on and grow some balls, farmer. Why are you still so afraid of baring your soul? Unconsciously, his hand went to the picture of her in his shirt pocket. They're all good parts, she'd told him. And I'd never let anyone hurt you. Even now, he could feel her protecting him, his fierce and beautiful dancing farm girl who had the biggest heart of anyone he'd ever known.

Grayson sat down on the grass beside Leslie's gravestone and ran his fingers slowly over the engraving of her name. "I'm sorry I was a bad husband. And I'm sorry that I wasn't much of a friend by the end, either. I knew you were unhappy. I was unhappy, too. But I didn't know how to fix any of it, so I ignored it instead. I ignored you, Leslie, and I'm so, so sorry."

He'd apologized more in the past two weeks than he had in his entire life. And yet, just as he had with Lori, he couldn't see how his wife could ever forgive him for the mess their lives had become before she died. No amount of apologizing would change that.

But since his big mistake had been that he hadn't talked to her - really and truly talked to her - when she was still alive, he figured, at the very least, he could change that now.

"After you died, I pretty much lost it. I turned away from every last person, every last piece of our life, and decided to start over. I'm in California now, on a farm. A big one, right by the ocean. Whenever the fog rolls in, I think of how much you loved to walk along the coast on stormy days. I wasn't searching for happiness, just for an escape, but the amazing thing is that I found it after all. Not just in the land, and my animals, but with the last person on earth I would ever have expected.

"You would have liked Lori, Leslie, and I know she would have liked you, too. She never stops asking questions, and when I try to ignore them she just asks more, so I've told her all about you. About when we were in college, how we used to the Tree Lighting and Yule Log ceremonies, and that one year we were so excited about being the big winners of the bad poetry contest. I even told her all about the way I asked you to marry me and ended up dropping the ring into a storm drain because I was so nervous."

He thought he heard something then, a rustling of the leaves above him that sounded like a question: Is she pretty?

Before he knew it, Grayson was laughing and crying at the same time. Of course it was what Leslie would want to know.

"Yes," he said as he finally let his tears fall for the woman who had been such an important part of his life