how lying to himself had become just as natural as lying to everyone else. Or maybe repeating those words to himself had become more of a mantra. Life’s just fine without her. God knew he’d relied on that mantra during Mandi’s short and infrequent visits from up north to see Nana over the past couple of years. Most of the time, she had convinced her grandma to go visit her instead—a blatant avoidance of him.
He was guilty of steering clear of her too, though, down to not grabbing coffee at the local bakery whenever she was in town for a couple of days. He told himself he was avoiding gossip and proving to everyone in town that he’d moved on, but the fact was that one look at her and every stitch he’d tightened around the wound she’d left would unravel. He was strong and resilient, but there was only so much a man could take.
He glanced at the clock. Sheesh. Ten already? He scrubbed his hand across his face. So much for dropping by the office to make sure everything was under control. He needed to shower and change in time for the funeral. She’ll be there. You can’t avoid each other this time. Yeah. He knew that. A fact that had been gnawing at him for two days now.
As if having his life turned upside down when he’d been placed in the witness protection program, and again when Mandi had gone runaway bride on him, wasn’t enough. Now Nana was gone. Nana...the one person who’d accepted him unconditionally...who’d treated him like a son and who’d taught him about rescuing endangered sea turtles by tending to their nesting grounds along her private stretch of beach and the sands that extended beyond the town limits. Nana was gone and the one person who understood and felt the depth of that loss the way he did was Mandi. But it didn’t matter that a part of him wanted to reach out and console her or that he desperately needed to talk about Nana and share memories about her with Mandi. No way would he open his heart, even a crack, and let Mandi in. He was a survivor. Burned once and all that. Others would be at the funeral, including Mandi’s father, John Rivers, Nana’s only child. They could console her and give her support. She didn’t need Gray in her life. She’d made that clear long ago.
And he certainly didn’t need her.
* * *
MANDI RIVERS EXAMINED herself in the tarnished silver mirror that hung in Nana’s entryway above a rustic console table. Her eyes weren’t any less puffy than they had been the five previous times she’d checked during the past thirty minutes. Why did it matter? No doubt, others in town had cried, too, when they heard of Nana’s unexpected passing.
She scurried to the kitchen and chucked the cucumber slices that had proved useless into the trash bin. The fact was that she hadn’t noticed what the nine-hour drive from New York yesterday—and the dam of tears that finally let loose once she’d stepped into Nana’s home last night—had done to her face...until she had spotted Grayson down on the beach this morning. She wasn’t sure if he noticed her peering past the sheer curtains. She had ducked back the second he glanced up toward the house, but the way he took off at a run seconds later made her wonder. Maybe he had seen her.
He had looked serious and irritated and so, so good. It was criminal to look that good with his dark brown hair all messed up by the ocean breeze and his favorite old T-shirt looking more worn than she’d remembered. Even from a distance, she knew which one by the faded blue color and tear at the bottom hem. It was the one that said “Save the Sharks” on the front. Heaven help her, she had a better chance of surviving a shark attack than surviving being around Gray this afternoon.
She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her throbbing temples. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she cared enough to spy on him. She had wasted too much of her life trying to get him to open up and share things about his history. She’d gone from having a crush on him when she was twenty, right about when he had first moved to town, to dating him and even saying yes when he had finally proposed on her twenty-third birthday. She thought that day would never happen, given how withdrawn and serious he’d sometimes get. As much as she had loved him and confided in him, he had been hard to crack. He was skilled at evading questions and switching subjects so smoothly that most people didn’t notice. But she did. And it hurt that he didn’t trust her enough to open up. She had thought being engaged and eventually married would make a difference, but boy had she been naive. She’d come so close to throwing away a chance at a master’s degree and an incredible career for someone she’d never be enough for.
The last straw had been wedding jitters mixed with her father warning her that marrying Gray would be the biggest mistake of her life. The look on her dad’s face when she stood at the altar had left her hyperventilating and sweating in her wedding dress. Her controlling father had been the one person she’d rebelled against and the last man she wanted to listen to, yet when push came to shove, his disapproval had carried weight. The need for parental approval was one of those convoluted psychological things that latched itself to a person’s mind even when logic shunned it. He’d made her second-guess herself. He’d made her second-guess Gray’s love for her.
Wasn’t it Freud who had written something to the effect that girls tended to fall for guys who were much like their fathers? God help her. Her father was a hovering, micromanaging, money-driven, controlling man who valued appearances and reputation above all else. He had made her teenage years unbearable. And then there was Gray, who had a compassionate side she couldn’t resist, yet he had to maintain control of every conversation, and his explanations for mundane things, like why he never had visitors or why he didn’t keep old baby or family photos, had frustrated her to no end. The thought of marrying someone remotely controlling like her father still made her nauseous. And there had been a part of Gray she couldn’t figure out...a part he kept locked away with the key in his pocket. Control. That fact had kept her up every night the week before the wedding. It had driven her to choose control of her own life...and to abandon a love that was just too risky.
On one hand, she often wondered if her father’s air of superiority and always having the final say in decisions had been the reason her mother had abandoned them when Mandi was still in grade school. Nana used to tell her that her parents had loved each other, but perhaps loving John Rivers had been too risky. Maybe the women in Mandi’s family were simply doomed when it came to love.
But Nana also used to say that there were two sides to every relationship and every story, so a part of Mandi also wondered if her mother had had commitment issues and Mandi had somehow inherited that curse. Perhaps her mom had suffered from the same suffocating urge to leave Turtleback and travel or experience big-city life that Mandi had. What if Mandi was just like her mother? And what if maybe, just maybe, Gray wasn’t at all like her father and Mandi had been fishing for excuses to run away. That would mean that she had thrown away the kind of love she couldn’t ever imagine feeling again.
Just stop it. She groaned and clenched her fists as she headed for the kitchen. She was doing it again—overanalyzing and spiraling through pointless reasons for what had happened to her and Gray. She hated it when she slid into this pattern. It had taken months for her to regain her focus after leaving him and starting graduate school. She was not going to let seeing him weaken her resolve. She steeled herself against the slurry of anger and sadness that pooled in her stomach. She took a glass from the cabinet by the fridge, filled it with cool water and drank half before setting it down.
No regrets. Nana’s voice swept through her mind with haunting clarity. The same words she would command Mandi to repeat like a mantra, whenever she was feeling down or torn about a decision. Regrets are like steel anchors. They’ll weigh you down and keep you from moving forward in life. Own every choice you make, and make it work for you.
Oh, she’d made her choice work for her alright. She would never regret earning her undergraduate college degree on her own terms. Studying online may not have been the same as getting a degree from a university her father could brag about, but
