Is It Any Wonder (Nantucket Love Story #2) - Courtney Walsh Page 0,106
“Forgive yourself the same way you forgave Louisa. What happened was nobody’s fault. Not hers. Not yours. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can get on with your life.”
He hadn’t come here for this. Still, he mulled over her words for several seconds, unsure how to move on, how to get past this when he was still so sorry for all the pain he’d caused.
Had this shame been keeping him from moving forward? Was that the real reason he never got close to anyone—was he afraid of losing them, or was he afraid of being the reason they were lost?
The door opened and Louisa rushed in. “Sorry I’m late. I have dinner.” She stopped in the doorway, and her face fell. “What’s going on? Are you guys okay?”
Cody glanced at Maggie. “Yeah, we’re good.”
Maggie winked at him, then leaned back in her chair. “We’re starving. What took you so long?”
Louisa glanced from Maggie to Cody and back again. “Sorry; I got held up with the Tacione family.” She opened the brown paper bag and pulled out Centre Street Bistro to-go containers as she talked. “Mrs. Tacione brought her five sisters to the island for the first time, and you know they aren’t super wealthy, but I promised her we would make them feel like they were.” Louisa was beaming now. “You should’ve seen their faces when they walked into their rental cottage. I got them an amazing deal with my friend Leo and—” She stopped and met Cody’s eyes. “What’s wrong?”
He smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “Just admiring how good you are at what you do.”
Her mouth spread into a slow smile, her lips soft pink and utterly kissable. He tossed Maggie a glance and saw that the old woman had dozed off again, so he stood, wrapped his arms around Louisa, and kissed her right there in the middle of Maggie’s living room.
Kissing her had become his favorite thing to do, but there was something different about it now, as if something inside him had shifted in the moments before she arrived.
A single word kept running through his mind—a word that carried more weight to it than he’d expected, a word that filled him up like an overflowing pool. A word that summed up everything he’d been searching for since the day his family left Nantucket all those years ago.
Forgiven.
He wanted that. He’d given it to Louisa—it was time to give it to himself. And to accept the forgiveness of a God who offered grace for mistakes like his.
As the kiss melted into a deep embrace, he prayed for the strength to follow through.
It’s what his father would’ve wanted.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
SOMEHOW, AFTER THAT NIGHT IN MAGGIE’S HOUSE, Louisa felt like she and Cody grew even closer, as if every barrier that had been keeping them apart had suddenly fallen away.
She’d spent her life wishing for his forgiveness, but she had no idea how freeing it would actually be to have it.
They spent less time talking about the memorial and their parents and everything that had been broken between them before and more time focusing on what was in front of them now. How much better it was to have something to look forward to, instead of always being focused on what had come before.
Some nights, he showed up just as she was finishing her work and stood in the doorway of her office, watching her. It made working impossible. He’d never been much of a talker, but he was an observer, and being the object of that observation turned her insides wobbly.
If he had the day off, she adjusted her schedule so she could spend it with him. They ate picnics at the beach and went hiking and swimming and strolling on the cobblestone streets of the island they had both grown to love.
Today, only two days before Maggie’s party, she’d cleared the morning so they would have some time together before his next shift the following day. They ate breakfast on the patio at Island Kitchen and were now strolling hand in hand down Main Street, looking in shops and smiling at the tourists taking in the island, maybe for the first time. Louisa was almost jealous of them—to still have so much of Nantucket to explore and discover would be such a gift—and yet, knowing that she knew all the island’s secrets quickly erased any feelings of envy. She vacillated between wanting to share everything she knew about the island and wanting to keep it to herself.