Rescued By Marriage

Sam stepped into the living room, holding up the matches he’d found in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets. “You’re a stubborn woman, aren’t you?”

She smiled. “I prefer to call it optimistic. Although my husband always accused me of being too stubborn for my own good. I think, though, I was too stubborn for his good. He wanted something I was too stubborn to be.”

“Which was?”

She smiled at him. “Anything I wasn’t.”

“Divorced?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Widowed. Going on to four months now.”

That took him off his guard. “I’m…um…I’m sorry, Della,” he murmured, even though he didn’t see much sadness on her face. He looked for it, too, but her expression seemed more relieved than sorry. The sadness he would have expected wasn’t in her voice, either. Her pronouncement that she was a widow had come out as a rather flat statement, much the way he might make the same pronouncement of his divorce— sorry for the circumstance, but not totally consumed by it. So, had Della’s marriage been as bad as his? “Is that why you’re here, to get away from the memories?” Which was why he was there. That, and the fact that Massachusetts was almost as far away from California as you could get—California, where his ex-wife still roosted. That expanse of geography between them didn’t hurt matters, either.

“Trust me, you can get away from a great many things, but the memories are something that will always stay with you. I’m here because I need a new life. It’s as simple as that. Sometimes you have to go back to the beginning and start over to find the place you’re meant to be. That’s what I’m looking for—the place I’m meant to be.”

“And you think you’re meant to be here on Redcliffe?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. I’m here, I’ve bought this place and as of this afternoon my new life started. That’s where optimism will help me more than being stubborn. I have a lot to do, and I’m going to have to look on the bright side in order to do it.” She flicked off a piece of brittle wallpaper and watched it flutter to the bare wood floor. “Stubborn’s what’ll keep me going, though.”

Maybe befriending a new widow put a little more of a noble spin on his need to help her, but somehow Della didn’t seem like a typical widow in mourning. She was mourning something, though, and it should have been her husband, but to Sam it seemed like there was more to it. Was there something deeper than the loss of a husband? “I suppose there’s potential here,” he said as he crossed over to the fireplace to start a fire. “You’ve got a sound structure, and that’s always the best place to start. It’s worthy of some optimism, too, because without it you do start from the beginning. With it, the course of what’s to come is already outlined.” He was starting again without that structure. The course of what was to come with him wasn’t anywhere close to being plotted on an outline.

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