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“Can you believe it?” Eve stood in the center of the room and turned her head, slowly scanning the room from left to right.
Spencer walked behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, then leaned over and gave her a small kiss at the base of her neck. “You did it.”
Eve shook her head. “No. We did it. This was a team project. There’s no way that Eve Inspirations Gallery comes together without you. You encouraged me to do it. You called your friend at the bank to help me with the financing. And you’ve been here every single day for the last two months, writing the contracts for the other artists on display—and doing a little painting of your own. That back wall looks great, Spence.”
Spencer couldn’t help but chuckle. “You’ve seen the heights of my artistic talent here. I prefer to work in the exclusive medium of semi-gloss and paint roller.”
“A man of discerning tastes,” Eve said, turning her head toward him with a wink and a wide smile.
He spun her in his arms. “I picked you, didn’t I?”
“I think we picked each other.” The smile didn’t leave her face as she spoke. It was like liquid sunshine for his soul. Spencer had been an arm’s-length guy when it came to relationships. He never wanted to be all-in. But New Year’s Eve had changed all that.
“Then we both have discerning tastes,” he clarified.
“We do.”
All he wanted to taste was her kiss. Spencer leaned in and took his time. He breathed in the scent of her, a light gardenia floral that suited her perfectly.
And he could have missed it all. If Mark hadn’t been such a total jerk. If Spencer had quit one day sooner and not taken the letter. If any one of a hundred small things had gone a different way, this year would have been completely different for him and for Eve.
Gratitude overtook Spencer as he drew the kiss to a close.
“Thank you,” he whispered, before realizing his thoughts had formed out loud.
Eve stepped back and sized him up with a quirk of her eyebrow. “For what?”
Spencer gave a short laugh. “Not you.”
“Wait. You just kissed me. Now you’re thanking someone else? Spencer...is there something I need to know about?”
He pulled her toward him again. This time, he just held her tightly, enjoying the feel of her close to him. “I told you way back at New Year’s that I didn’t believe in coincidences.”
“Right.” Eve craned her neck backward so she could keep his face in view.
“I still don’t. I believe my car died in your driveway for a reason. I believe we’re meant to be here together right now. And I’m thankful. God crossed our paths. I needed a new direction in my life, but I never knew the road would lead me to you. I knew this year needed to be different, but love was not a resolution I ever planned on making.”
“Me neither. I thought I was done with all that.”
“Aren’t you glad you’re not?”
Her smile was sincere. The glow around her face melted his soul. “Absolutely. We stood right here when Stella talked about a hope and a future. I didn’t know this was the future I was meant to have. But here I am, with my own business—and a partner in everything.”
“Your mom would be so proud of you, Eve,” Spencer said, threading a finger underneath the pendant lying just at the top of her breastbone.
Eve touched the Kiss of Kiev diamond. “She would. Thank you for making it possible.”
“You’re the artist, Eve. You made your dream come true. Now, let’s get ready for your grand opening.”
Tonight, artists and collectors from the island and the mainland would come in here and see everything Eve had poured her spirit and her creativity into—works of art that would be destined for homes and boardrooms and the parlors of B&Bs.
But while everyone else’s eyes would be on the canvases hanging on the wall, Spencer knew the most beautiful work of art in here tonight was Eve. And he couldn’t wait to watch her shine.
The whole evening seemed magical. Maybe it was because today was leap year—a rare event on the calendar. But Eve didn’t think so. She could feel her mother’s spirit in the room, and she could feel the warmth of Spencer’s love.
Eve stopped herself short. They’d never said anything like that to each other, but Eve knew one thing for certain. She’d fallen in love with Spencer. In just a few short months, he’d become her best friend, her sounding board, her business mentor. He’d challenged her to think about things as far reaching on the spectrum as finances and faith.
She’d never put much stock in either before. As an artist, she always declared herself to be “not a math person.” And faith...well, it hadn’t been a part of her life growing up. Once her mother got sick, she’d lost what little she may have had.
But Spencer had changed that. And two weeks ago, he’d even talked her into coming with him to a Sunday service at First Provident Church.
Her knees knocked under her skirt as they walked through the oversized ivory-painted doors. But from the minute they’d sat in one of the long pews in the center section of the church, a peace came over her. It was the same peace she’d had when Stella had spoken of hope and it was the same peace she’d had on the deck at New Year’s when Spencer kissed her and made her think of a bright future ahead.
She turned back toward the far corner of the room, where Spencer had been talking with an elderly couple he knew from Houston.
But one look at Spencer told her something was off.
He leaned up against the yellow-painted plaster wall with a faraway look in his eyes.
Eve smiled at the members of the group she’d been chatting with and tried to disengage herself. She needed to get back to Spencer.
As soon as she reached the back corner, she touched him lightly on the arm. His smile of acknowledgement seemed frustrated. The right edge of his mouth curled up slightly.
“Something’s wrong,” she said in a raised whisper after being introduced to the couple from Houston, who quickly turned back to studying a detailed watercolor of a seagull.
Spencer shook his head, but Eve didn’t believe the wordless denial. “Just my A-Fib.”
Eve felt her eyes go completely round. “Where are your meds?”
He’d only had one mild atrial fibrillation attack since moving to Port Provident, but just the idea of his heart acting up made Eve’s blood turn to ice water.
“They’re back at my condo. I’m fine.”
Eve positioned herself between Spencer and the crowd. “You’re not. Go back to the office and sit down for a minute. I’ve got this out here. Everyone’s fine.”
“So am I.” Spencer tried to make his words sound strong, but Eve heard his breathing begin to quicken.
Eve opened her mouth to argue, but a familiar voice raised above the din of the conversation criss-crossing the groups of guests in the gallery.
“Eve Larson, this is for you.”
Eve spun around and saw Mark Canley cutting through the crowd.
Spencer started to move, then fell back against the wall.
Mark handed an envelope to Eve and one to Spencer. “And this one is for you, Brother.”
“Mark, what are you doing here?” Eve desperately wanted eyes in the back of her head to check on Spencer.
He hadn’t said a word to Mark.
His silence terrified her.
“Serving you with papers. I knew you’d be here. My father mentioned Spencer’s big night with his new little business.”
Eve felt the coolness of the Kiss of Kiev in the necklace. It rested lightly on her chest. “Papers...for what?”
“My diamond. I’m taking you to court.” He turned on his heel and addressed the gathering of gallery patrons. “She’s a thief and a liar, folks. She’s stolen my property. Who knows what she’ll steal from you.”
With that, Mark walked out, the sound of the heels of his dress shoes echoing loudly as they tapped the sealed concrete floor.
A bolt of lightning ran from Eve’s forehead to the pit of her stomach. The entire room fell into silence. They’d all heard.
Mark had ruined her brand-new business with a handful of sentences.
Tightness squeezed Eve’s throat from her jaw to her collarbone. She couldn’t breathe.
A sound like sandpaper came from behind her.
Spencer slid down the wall and collapsed in a heap in the corner.
Everything inside of her screamed for someone to call 911.
But she had no words.
She had no hope.
She had no future.
Eve’s year—the year that was supposed to be different—slipped away like the sand at the shoreline. And all she could do was watch as all her dreams faded into a palette of unending shades of gray like the sky before a coastal storm.
A constant beeping kept playing next to his head, but it didn’t sound a darned thing like his alarm clock. Spencer tried to reach back to turn it off but couldn’t stretch his arm very far. Rolling his head to the side, he saw tape covering the back of his hand where it held in an IV catheter. The catheter connected to clear tubing that snaked along the curve of his forearm.
Slowly, it dawned on him. The beeping was a cardiac monitor.
He wasn’t at the gallery anymore.
The sign on the wall listed the core values of Provident Medical Center.
He’d been brought to the hospital.
“Spencer?”
His brother stood up from the chair in the corner and walked to the bed.
“Dave?” Spencer’s voice cracked as the syllable struggled to come out. They must have needed to intubate him. “Was it bad?”
“Eve said you hit your head on a display shelf when you slid to the floor. It knocked you out cold, on top of fainting from the A-fib. They brought you back—you’re lucky this place is two blocks from the gallery—but you’re heading in for surgery tomorrow morning.”
Surgery and what was to come didn’t matter.
“Where’s Eve?”
Dave’s shadow angled across the stark white hospital sheets. “I sent her home.”
A sudden surge of adrenaline made the cardiac monitor do double-time. “Why?”
Spencer felt dizzy all over again.
“She asked me to give you this.”
Dave held out a small, ivory envelope. Spencer reached out to grab it, but a stabbing pain poked through the center of his hand. “Open it? Read it to me?”
He wished he could talk in complete sentences, but aside from the sandpaper in his throat, more syllables would only mean a longer delay to hear what Eve wanted him to know.
Dave laid the envelope on the bed, then opened the seal and pulled out the contents. Spencer tried to scan the brief note as the only brother he trusted unfolded the paper.
Dear Spencer,
I’m on my way to Mark’s office now. I’m giving him the Kiss of Kiev. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want the trouble attached to it. I should have chased him down the street on New Year’s Eve and given it to him then—but you’d stood up for me and I didn’t want that to be in vain. But now, because I didn’t do what I needed to do when I had the chance, I caused you to almost lose your life. I know your atrial fibrillation is made worse by stress—and although we’ve done good work for a good cause, the last few weeks getting the gallery ready have been stressful for us both. And then to have Mark walk in like that—it was just too much. And it was all my fault. All of it. I’m going to fix this with Mark and pray that he leaves you alone once he gets what he wants from me. And then I’m going to stay away for a while. I can’t cause you any more stress.
Thank you for everything. I’m sorry I caused this.
Love,
Eve
Of all that, Spencer only heard one thing. She’d signed it with “love.” They’d never talked about it before, but Spencer knew he’d loved her from the moment she’d bravely handed over the necklace on that rainy day before New Year’s Eve.
“What do you think?” Dave folded the note in half and handed it to Spencer.
Spencer waved it away. He didn’t want to think about it. She obviously was using “love” in a standard greeting-card kind of way. If she truly loved him, she wouldn’t be bowing out.
“I think she’s gone,” he said, letting out a breath and listening to the steady beep of the monitor behind him, realizing that no matter what the doctors did to him tomorrow morning, his heart would never be the same.
Not long after the calendar turned to March, signs of spring began to show on the island. Eve adjusted her easel in the corner window at the front of her store. Tourists seemed to love to stop and watch her paint. It brought a lot of traffic into the store and had turned into a few sales. All in all, Eve felt a deep sense of satisfaction at how the gallery was running.
But she couldn’t escape the parallel deep sense of loss every time she thought of how the gallery was running. Spencer had set up all the operational logistics for the gallery. He was the reason the cash register connected to the bank account and the reason the ads were placed in local lifestyle magazines and the reason that she couldn’t look at anything in this building and not think of him.
She had to force herself not to let her thoughts carry her away like a rip current, though. Leaving that note for Spencer had been the right decision—even if it was the toughest decision. Mark would always be a thorn in Spencer’s side as long as she was a part of his life. She may have returned the Kiss of Kiev, but Mark wouldn’t let it end there. He’d continue to jab at Spencer whenever he could that Spencer had picked up Mark’s cast-off.
And Eve knew Spencer would always defend her. She loved him for that.
But it would just cause him stress. And stress would just lead to a continued life of heart problems. Eve knew in her own heart that she couldn’t be the cause of anything that would negatively impact Spencer’s health.
The bell over the door jingled and the face that walked in the gallery caused her to do a double-take. She knew those broad shoulders and the slight tilt of the head. She dreamed about the sound of that footfall.
Spencer?
Not Spencer.
David. The third Canley brother.
“Eve?” David walked toward her purposefully.
“Come in, David.” Eve stood up from her stool in front of the easel. “I don’t guess you’re here to buy a coastal watercolor?”
David shook his head. “I’m here about Spencer.”
A lump hopscotched into Eve’s throat. It stuck there like an errant cactus. It was impossible to deny the prickly sense of awareness of the flood of dread that rushed through her body.
“Oh...no...” she fell heavily onto the stool as her legs buckled out from underneath her. Suddenly, she regretted that note. She should have told him in person. It would have been the hardest conversation she would ever undertake, but at least...at least she could have told him goodbye. “He’s not...David, don’t tell me he’s...”
David crossed the floor in three steps and he braced Eve’s arm with his palm. “No, not that. He’s at his condo, resting. They discharged him yesterday. He doesn’t know I’m here.”
She slumped a little on the tiny stool.
“So why are you here?”
“Because I need to know. Why’d you leave him that letter?” His tone blended together equal parts of anger and questioning.
“I had to, David.” She began to straighten brushes on the table next to her. She could barely explain what she felt inside to herself. How could she explain it to Spencer’s best friend, the one brother with whom he still had an unbreakable bond?
“He barely eats. He says maybe ten sentences a day, Eve.”
She tried to explain David’s concern away logically. “He’s just had heart surgery, David.”
“He has a broken heart, Eve.”
Eve swiveled on the stool. “We weren’t really together that long, David.”
“Long enough.”
David had her there. It had been long enough for her to fall hard and dream of forever. Maybe it had been long enough for Spencer, too.
“I’m just trouble for him. Mark will never leave him alone as long as I’m around. He served him with a lawsuit for breach of contract.”
“He’s got a good lawyer, Eve. He’s not in any danger there.”
“Who?” Eve knew she had no business asking, but she couldn’t deny her curiosity.
David shrugged, then smiled. “My dad. Mark’s wrong. We all know it.”
Eve nodded in agreement. “I gave him back the necklace. He just took it out of my hand without even talking to me.”
“He’s moving to Russia.”
“He’s what?” Eve dropped the paintbrush she’d been holding.
“Moving. Going to be closer to Svetlana’s father. And his billions—and all those lucrative contracts.” David stuck his hand in his pockets.
“So...are you running the company from here?”
David shook his head. “No. My last day with Canley Communications was February twenty-ninth.”
“The night Spencer collapsed.”
“It was the last straw.”
“So, Mark’s gone.”
“And so, it seems, are you.”
Eve didn’t know what to say. But she knew there was something she needed to do.
Spencer’s head jerked at the sound of the three knocks on the door. “Use your key, Dave.”
A few seconds later, three more raps sounded.
“Just a minute,” Spencer said as he pushed himself off the couch. He stepped on a fortune cookie wrapper as he slowly moved toward the door. The cellophane crackled under his feet, but he didn’t stop to pick up the white scrap of paper with the pithy proclamation.
He knew what his fortune was now.
And he’d rather not think about it. A world without Eve was nothing but mis-fortune. But Eve had made her wishes clear. And no matter what it took, he’d respect them.
Mark hadn’t respected her. Spencer promised he’d be the Canley brother who wouldn’t let her down. He told her he was different. He couldn’t go back on that.
He wouldn’t.
Spencer flipped the lock and pulled the door open a crack.
A pair of toffee-glass eyes looked back at him and his heart began to rev like a race car at the starting line.
Spencer lifted his arm and pressed his hand to his chest, trying to feel for the sinus rhythm. “Eve?”
“Can I come in?”
He swung the door open. “Always.”
“Thanks.” Eve walked past him, and the scent of gardenias trailed gracefully into his condo.
Spencer pointed a hand toward the couch. The gesture seemed so awkward. They’d watched movies together on this couch. They’d shared take-out. They’d cuddled and talked about dreams and the future.
But now, the couch seemed to be reduced to a piece of furniture requiring a formal invitation for use.
Eve sat on the right-hand cushion of the couch. Spencer lowered himself to the left. One cushion held the space in between. It felt as wide as the Gulf of Mexico which stretched just past his balcony to the horizon beyond.
“The surgery went well?” Eve sounded unsure of herself.
Spencer knew exactly how she felt. He’d never been less sure of any conversation, including the one where he quit his role at Canley Communications.
He raised his hand back to his chest, quietly counting the thumps. “It did. I was in there about twice as long as they thought it would take, but my doctor thinks he got the right spot. The ablation kills the abnormal cells so they don’t beat out of rhythm anymore.”
“No episodes since then?”
“Not unless I have one right now.” He decided to bite the bullet. Small talk wasn’t going to suit his recovery. “Why are you here, Eve?”
She bit her lip and the shine in her eyes went dull. “Because I was wrong.”
Spencer didn’t know what to say, so he kept quiet and let Eve keep talking.
“I was so scared. I held your hand and waited for the paramedics. I thought I was going to lose you. Actually, I didn’t think. I knew it. And it would have been my fault. I was the reason Mark was there. I would have been the reason you died. As I waited for the sirens and the paramedics, I tried to tell you goodbye, but I couldn’t. So I started to pray. And I told God that if He’d just let you live, I’d go away. We’d talked so much about the future, but I wasn’t the future you needed. A future with me would just bring stress and strife into your life. You’d find love again, but with someone who didn’t have all the Mark-baggage. I was just babbling in my head to God, but it made sense to me at the time. And then you lived, so I had to honor all those promises I’d made and words I’d said.”
“Evie, that isn’t how it works. God’s got the hope and the future. Not us. We don’t know where it will take us. We go on the journey with Him. And we trust and grow in faith. People are always coming in and out of our lives. You came into mine. Mark went out. He’s not my future. You are. Would I like to reconcile with my brother some day? Sure. I’ll be praying for him until the day I die. But I pray for you, too. For us.”
A single tear rolled down her cheek. He wanted to reach out and smooth it away.
Spencer figured he didn’t have anything to lose. He scooted to the middle cushion and raised his arm, touching his thumb to the curve just below her eyes. He wiped the liquid away and wished he could just as easily wipe the recent past away.
“For us?”
Another tear began to roll. This time, Spencer smoothed it without hesitation.
“For us.”
She reached out a tentative hand. Spencer clasped her palm between both of his own.
“I love you, Spencer. I used to have so many plans, so many dreams of what I needed to do with my life to be at peace with myself and where I’d been. But the only future I want now is one with you in it.”
Spencer pulled Eve close. He felt his heart begin to beat faster, staying in a clear, perfect rhythm.
Just before he leaned down to claim a kiss to lay to rest all the scares and misunderstandings that had come between him, he paused. “I love you, Evie. Loving you was the best New Year’s resolution I ever made.”
