Dothan 2013
Rowan stood next to her as she sat at her laptop. Ella opened her laptop to Expedia. The prices were all horrible at this short notice but Ella knew Maddie had enough money to pay her back. That wasn’t an issue. Explaining it to her six-foot four mass of furious fiancé, on the other hand, was.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Rowan said. He was clenching his fists as he spoke. Ella got the distinct impression he wanted to hit something.
“I have to,” she said. “Maddie is in trouble. She needs me.”
“That is a crock of shit. She can go to the police if she needs help.”
“I told you, Rowan. She’s afraid to.”
“You told me you’re blowing off our wedding so you can go to effing Egypt,” he said.
“You think I want to go? You think I want to miss our wedding?”
“It’s not a matter of miss, Ella.” Rowan cracked his knuckles and then flexed his fingers in agitation. “It’s not like the wedding is going to go on without you. My parents are coming in. Your parents are coming in.”
“I know. The timing sucks.” Ella squinted at the screen.
“That’s all you can say?”
“Rowan, it’s not like this is a big wedding. We can easily reschedule for later in the month.”
“I don’t believe this. What the hell is my mother going to say?”
Ella didn’t answer. She kept her focus on the computer screen. On the one hand, she knew the image of the flights and their astronomical prices was serving to further enrage Rowan every time he glanced down at the screen. But on the other hand, it gave her something to do besides directly confronting him.
“She needs me, Rowan,” Ella said softly. “Two phone calls can rearrange everything. Your folks aren’t even taking a flight to get here. You just need to stop them from leaving their driveway in two days.”
“What am I gonna say is the reason we’re not getting married this weekend?”
Ella stood up and willed herself to monitor her voice level. She could feel the adrenalin pumping through her, urging her to use the fuel to present her case. She took a long breath and tried to resist the temptation.
“This is only an inconvenience,” she said. “We don’t have relatives flying in, we don’t have a million dollars in flowers that’ll wilt and go to waste, and we don’t even have a caterer to pay. We just need to push it back a few weeks.”
“This will be the last straw for my mother,” Rowan said, raking his fingers through his thick brown hair.
“Don’t kid yourself. She’ll be delighted.”
“She won’t,” he shook his head. “Don’t you see? She’ll see this as just another example of why you’re not right for me. Putting someone else ahead of our wedding, for Chrissake.”
Ella sat back down and typed in her Visa card number on the registration page.
“It doesn’t really matter what your mom thinks,” she said, looking up at him and wishing it were true. “I have to go.”
“What am I gonna tell the guys at work? My fiancé had to go out of town?”
Ella typed in the time for her return flight. Hopefully, she could get Maddie on the same one coming home.
“It’s the truth,” she said, hitting the Buy button and then sank back in her chair as if she had finished a massive project and was now spent.
“I just can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“And I can’t believe you’re not a hundred percent behind my doing this. The Rowan I knew in Heidelberg, the Rowan I knew in 1620—”
“Don’t give me that shit! That was a different world.”
“It wasn’t a different you! Are you saying it was? The Rowan who went through hell and torture and threat of death to save his friends? That’s the Rowan I love! That’s the Rowan I’ve been trying to find ever since we…” She turned away.
“Really? You think I’m not the man you fell in love with?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Sounds like exactly what you meant.”
“It’s just that ever since we’ve been back everything has been so easy and so…”
“Dull?”
She looked at him to see if he was being sarcastic. She couldn’t tell but she didn’t think so. He sat down hard in the chair next to her at the computer.
“You know I love you, Rowan,” she said. “I love every piece and part of you.”
“I love you, too, Ella.”
“But these last three months have been really hard, you know? Trying to live together and keep alive the thing that made us love each other? I mean, we get back here in the States—in our own time—and I start to see how different we are.”
He looked up at her and his eyes narrowed but he didn’t speak.
“You can’t say you haven’t seen it, too,” she said. “We don’t have any of the same interests. You like to watch TV, I don’t. You like to go out with the guys for beer. I’d prefer to stay home and read or work. Even before your mom put her two cents in, we weren’t on the same page.”
“So what’s the answer? You move out and we start dating each other again? I think we’ve come too far for that.”
“No, Rowan. I love you. I want to be your wife. I do. But I want us to figure this out.” She waved to the air between them.
He nodded and ran his hand over his eyes in a gesture of exhaustion.
“How was work today?” she asked quietly.
“Not great.”
“What’s going on there, Rowan?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
“How long will you be gone?” he asked, finally.
“I’ll fly out tomorrow, grab Maddie and fly back out the day after that. We’ll just push the wedding back a week.”
“Are you sure you want to?” His eyes drilled into hers, searching for the most honest answer she had in her to give.
She looked away. “Yes, I’m sure I want to,” she said. She looked up to see what the effect of her words on him were. His face never changed expression.
“My mother will flip,” he said finally.
“You need to care less about what she thinks.”
He looked at her and then something in his face seemed to relax. “Probably.”
“So you’ll tell them to come next week instead of this week?”
Rowan sighed and reached out to take her hand. “Why don’t we just play it by ear?” he said.
Great, she thought with her heart pounding in her ears. The wedding’s off. She couldn’t help the tears that filled her eyes. For them to have come so far from the point where their love had them risking everything to be together to this place where their future together went on indefinite hold just made her want to cry.
And breathe out a monumental sigh of relief.
The drive to the airport with Rowan had been a chilly one.
“I’ll text as soon as I land,” Ella said as they stood together in front of the Birmingham International Airport security line.
“Don’t. Without a data plan in Egypt, it’ll cost more than your flight to send a text. If I don’t hear in the headlines about a major airliner going down in the Mediterranean I’ll assume you made it okay.”
“I guess since Maddie won’t be marrying this tool that our trip there in September is off,” she said as she shuffled through her boarding pass and passport.
“Guess so.”
“Maybe we can go some place else just to get away.”
“Maybe.”
Boy, he sure wasn’t giving her anything to work with. She didn’t dare ask how the phone call with his folks had gone. She had a long flight and she didn’t want to be rerunning the tapes on what was probably a seriously unpleasant exchange. Just looking at Rowan’s face this morning told her that.
“Did you call your Dad?” he asked, his eyes looking everywhere in the airport but at her.
“Earlier this morning. He was cool.”
“That’s good.”
“Are you working the rest of the week?”
He gave her a patient look and then sighed. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“No reason. I better go, Rowan. I’ll feel more comfortable waiting at my gate.” And away from the glowering and crippling guilt trip I’m starting to develop.
“Okay, Safe trip.” He took her into his arms but she felt none of the usual warmth and protection those arms usually gave her. He broke the embrace before she did and she realized that that was a first too.
“Yeah, thanks,” she said. “So you’ll be back here in three days to collect me?”
“That’s the plan.”
She strained up on tiptoe to deliver a kiss but, without his participation, only made it as far as his chin.
“Love you, Rowan,” she said softly.
“You, too, Ella,” he said gruffly.
She turned and hurried off through the final stage of security screening. When she looked back, just the once, to wave, he had already disappeared into the crowd.
Nine hours later, as she wove her way through the thick crowds at the Cairo International Airport, she was struck with the sheer excitement of being some place new and different. While she had spent a good deal of her flight obsessing about her relationship with Rowan and his obvious unhappiness with her, not to mention her worry that she might have difficulty extricating Maddie from Gupta’s clutches, she hadn’t given a thought to how it felt to be heading toward what many would argue was the most exotic locale on the face of the earth. Now, caught up in the noise and movement of the crowd, Ella was overcome with how incredibly different this world was from the one she had just left.
Suddenly a thought came to her. Whether it had been percolating all along underneath all the worry and exhaustion or whether it sprang fresh born into her brain, as soon as she became physically a part of the mesmerizing color and vibrancy of this unique culture, she found herself thinking, after I’ve rescued Maddie, am I really going to rush back to Dothan, Alabama?