My inability to keep the promise I’d made to Edie about working in the U.S.
“No,” I said. “You’re not.”
“Is this what Edie thinks also? That I don’t want you two together?” she asked, sadness taking over.
I couldn’t look at her.
“Oh, Garrett. I’m so sorry. She’s the best thing that has ever come into your life,” she said softly.
She was right. Edie was. She’d stopped my carousing. She’d stopped my never-ending wandering. She’d put me together, filling up the voids my grandmother hadn’t been able to fill, regardless of the love and attention she’d given me. It hadn’t been enough because it wasn’t my mom. Edie had pushed those holes to the side and taken up residence in my heart.
“I have to get to her,” I said, the anguish filling my chest, squeezing it.
Margery nodded. “We can get close and then drive the rest of the way.”
“We?”
“I want to see my great-grandchild.”
She took my hand and squeezed it.
“Do you know anyone selling a plane?” I asked her. If I had my own crew, I could just take off.
“You want to buy a plane?”
The idea blossomed even bigger in my brain. “If we have our own jet, we can fly back and forth whenever we need to. I might be able to convince Edie that we can go see her family or I can come back here as often as we need to.”
She stared at me for a moment and then said, “If you’d done it sooner, we certainly wouldn’t be in this situation, would we?”
I had to laugh. Leave it to my grandmother to make it sound like I should have always known it. She reached for her phone, and I reached for the one on the desk. Somehow, someway, we were getting to Tennessee, come hell or high water.
♫ ♫ ♫
It was a lot easier in my head, getting on a plane and flying to the States. It was harder in reality. It had taken us most of the day on the twenty-ninth to purchase it and find a crew that was willing and able to miss New Year’s with their families to fly into a storm.
In the end, I’d had to agree to a landing in New Jersey—at least a nine-hour drive to Edie’s hometown. We’d arranged for a rental car to be dropped off for us at the private airport. I’d been sick to my stomach since losing Edie’s signal, unable to eat, barely able to drink unless it was the whiskey on the plane that had Margery frowning.
I hadn’t been able to get in contact with Edie or her family since the lost call on McCarron. In our rush to depart, Margery had left her phone on the charger. I picked up a disposable phone because my secretary was unreachable on some beach in Tahiti with her boyfriend. It had been my Christmas bonus to her, and I cursed myself every minute of the flight from Scotland that I’d given it to her.
I cursed myself for not knowing Edie’s phone number by heart. What the fuck kind of husband didn’t know his own wife’s number? I could try to convince myself that, in our modern age of phones and computers, I hadn’t had to know it. She’d put her number in my phone the first time we’d met at the library’s charity event, and I’d never even thought about the number again.
I’d failed her in so many ways this year since finding out she was pregnant, but I made a new promise to myself and to her: I wouldn’t fail her again.
As we drove, the sky turned dark, and the snow thundered down. We were used to snow in Scotland. I’d driven in it almost since I’d first gotten my license, but this storm…the flakes were coming down so fast and so hard that I couldn’t even read the freeway signs. It was impossible to find our way.
“If we don’t stop, we’re going to find ourselves in a ditch somewhere,” Margery warned me.
“I’m not stopping until she’s in my arms again. Until I see our baby,” I growled. And this time, she didn’t object to it.
She picked up my temporary phone and tried to get online to find out about the road conditions. Eventually, we lost that signal, too. We drove in silence, the snow and the darkness surrounding us like the pain of knowing I was so close, and yet so far away, surrounded my soul. Knowing she’d already had the baby was a knife cutting