My Life as a Holiday Album (My Life as an Album #5) - L.J. Evans Page 0,117
/ Tedder
We were walking back to the dock on the Isle of McCarron when a phone rang. My stomach tightened in hope before I realized it was Mitchell’s. It couldn’t have been mine, not only because, somewhere between leaving the manor house this morning and arriving at the distillery on the island, I’d lost it, but because I had no one calling me.
The bitter truth ripped through me. My secretary would get me a new phone, and have it synced up with all my data restored, before Edie even realized I’d lost it. After all, she hadn’t answered one of my calls or texts since I’d left the States. Not even the one on Christmas.
It had torn my soul in half.
After that, I’d stopped calling.
My wounded pride joined my wounded heart. Both broken and battered.
Mitchell’s eyes widened, and then he handed the phone to me. “It’s your wife.”
My heart flipped. I took the phone. “Edie?”
She said something, but it was garbled, the signal poor in our location. The storm above us added to the difficulties of our modern age. “Say it again. I can barely hear you.”
“The baby is coming,” she said, and the world around me disappeared. My stomach fell. My heart stalled. I froze.
“What? It isn’t due for another week,” I finally responded.
A tortured moan ripped through the air waves. Edie. Fuck!
“Eds? Edie?!” I called.
Eventually, it was my mother-in-law’s voice that came back. “Are you still in Scotland?” she asked.
Was I? I looked around. Yes, fuck, I was even farther away. It was going to take me hours to get back to the manor. Even longer to get to an airport. I started jogging down the dock toward the boat we’d taken from the mainland. Mitchell was on my heels. I climbed aboard.
“I’m coming, Wynn. Tell her I’m coming.” But the signal had dropped completely, and I was unsure if she’d even heard me.
I hollered commands at the captain, and he took off.
By the time I walked into my office at the distillery, I’d already tried every single airline, public and private. No one was flying to Tennessee. An unexpected, once-in-a-hundred-years storm had taken over much of the U.S. from Missouri all the way to the Atlantic, blanketing the States with downpours and blizzards. Whiteout conditions. I could fly into New York, no problem, but that wouldn’t get me anywhere close to where I needed to be. Not in enough time.
The truth hit me like a barrel falling off a truck. I was missing the birth of my child. I wasn’t there for Edie at the most important time in our marriage. I’d failed her. I’d failed us.
Margery was on the phone at my desk. She’d been trying to pull any and all strings she could to get me to Tennessee. It had surprised me, the effort she was putting out to try to get me back to Edie when my being in the U.S. with her was what my grandmother hated most.
I sank down into the chair, head in my hands.
“I fucked up,” I told her.
She didn’t even object to my language. “We’ll figure it out, Garrett.”
Her voice was almost tender, not full of the professionalism I normally heard from her. I looked up, pain radiating from me.
“Isn’t this what you want?” I asked.
“What?” she asked, genuine surprise reflecting on her face.
“After this, Edie will never take me back. It’s what you want, right?”
She sank into the other wingback next to me. “Why on earth would you think that?”
“She’s the reason I’m in the States. If there’s no Edie and me, there’s no reason for me to be there.”
She put a hand to her heart. “Do you truly think I’m that heartless?”
I didn’t reply as memories invaded me. My grandmother pulling me into her arms while I cried, watching my mother disappear in a taxi down the lane. The hurt and anguish of knowing she wasn’t coming back for me anytime soon had been replaced with arms hugging me to her, almost desperately.
Memories of her sitting in the chair next to my bed, reading a story I knew she’d read a thousand times but loved to hear her read anyway. Memories of the pride in her voice when I handed her my report card full of A’s.
She wasn’t heartless. I’d chosen to remember her that way so I’d have a villain in my story that wasn’t me. Someone who was causing the problems in my marriage when, really, I was the issue. My divided love and loyalties.