Bellevue Cemetery
December 15
It was an unusually cold and blustery day. Nicole shivered as she laid a small bouquet of snowdrops and baby’s breath on her father’s grave, then stood back.
Sam put his arm around her and she leaned gratefully into his strength and warmth. She’d dressed much too lightly. The morning had seemed almost warm when they’d set out from Coronado Shores an hour ago.
The icy wind whipping off the Pacific felt like it came straight from the North Pole. She didn’t even have gloves with her. She hadn’t been able to wear gloves for six months now. There wasn’t a glove in the world that would fit over the diamond ring as big as a pigeon’s egg Sam had insisted on buying her. It was beautiful but enormous, a source almost of embarrassment in the beginning, though she was starting to become quite fond of it.
Nicole reached out to touch the headstone. “Happy birthday, Pops,” she whispered. It would have been his sixty-second birthday.
She and Sam had been married by a justice of the peace in her father’s sickroom the day after he returned from the hospital, with Harry and Mike and Manuela in attendance.
Before the wedding, Sam had gone into her father’s room and closed the door. They’d talked for more than an hour. She couldn’t pry what had been said out of her father. He’d only clasped her hand between his cold ones and told her she was marrying a good man.
When the short, simple ceremony was over, instead of giving her a passionate kiss, as she’d expected, Sam held her in his arms and whispered into her ear, voice raw with emotion, “I’m going to make you a good husband, I swear.”
He had, too. He’d made her a better husband, actually, than she’d made him a wife, particularly in the first two months of their marriage—the last two months of her father’s life.
Sam had bought the small apartment next to his, opened up the door between the two apartments, and turned it into a hospital suite for her father. For the first two months of their marriage, Nicole basically let everything drop as her father began his painful slide into death.
Sam had let her know in no uncertain terms that her only responsibility was her father, she was to worry about nothing else. Bills were paid, food appeared and was cleared away, doctors and nurses came and went. Nicole barely noticed. Sam took care of everything.
When, after she spent three straight nights awake at his bedside, her father took his last breath, Sam had been there to hold her in her grief. As she moved in a stupor of mourning and exhaustion, it didn’t occur to her until later that he had arranged the funeral and had bought the plot and ordered the headstone.
Time had brought a healing. After the funeral, Sam had taken her to Maui for a belated honeymoon and made sure all she did was eat, sleep and make love with him. At their return, she dedicated herself to Wordsmith. Every day, Nicole rode with Sam to the office building and up to the ninth floor, where they worked across the hall from each other. Wordsmith was finally taking off. Mike had quit the force and joined Sam and Harry in the company, which was now officially RBK Security.
Their nights were filled with a passion that showed no signs of slowing down.
Sam was an incredibly loving, though at times annoyingly overprotective, husband. Wordsmith was growing by the day and she tended it the way a mother tended her child.
Well, she thought, rubbing a hand over her belly, almost.
The wind suddenly died down and the clouds parted. The grass turned a bright green in the sunshine, a gentle carpet edging down to the shore.
Her father would have loved it here. He’d spent much of his career in dry, arid places. Somehow, Sam had chosen the perfect cemetery, and the perfect spot, on a round knoll with a spectacular view over the ocean.
As the sun broke out, the temperature turned warm, almost balmy. Nicole lifted a smiling face to the warmth.
A benevolent presence hovered in the air, a whisper of love. Somewhere her father’s spirit lingered and she could almost feel his gentle hand passing over her hair.
Somewhere, she knew, he was smiling. And holding her mother’s hand. She’d wanted to wait, but now was the perfect moment. It felt like she had her family’s loving blessing from on high.
Nicole jabbed an elbow into Sam’s side. “I have a Christmas present for you.”
“Yeah?” He smiled down at her, hugging her closer to him. “Isn’t it a little early? Christmas won’t be here for another ten days.”
She leaned against him, rubbing her head against his shoulder. “Well, it’s a present that will take nine months to get to you, so I’m starting early.”
A cemetery is a sad, bleak place, a place of grief, watered by the tears of those who have lost loved ones.
But that morning, the cemetery rang with the deep sound of a man’s delighted laughter.