from culinary school in a fog of shame and hurt. Seeing him now didn’t hurt anymore, but the shame was still there like a nightmare she couldn’t shake. She’d heard rumors that he was looking for a new restaurant venue, but she’d refused to believe he would have the nerve to come to Archangel. “Never mind,” she said, her voice tight. “I don’t care. Excuse me.”
He didn’t. He took a step closer, his gaze coasting down over her, then upward. “Archangel is everything you said it was.”
She couldn’t believe there had been a time when she’d imagined them together, here in her hometown. “I’m busy,” she said.
“You look good, Isabel.”
So did he, she noticed, his dark hair and chiseled features refined by the patina of success. His teeth were too white and too perfectly aligned, like a row of chewing gum tablets. She grabbed the cane from the back of the Jeep. “I don’t have time for this,” she stated quietly.
“We should catch up.”
Her stomach churned. She hated that, after all this time, he still wielded some kind of power over her. Why? Why did she let him?
A large shadow fell over Calvin. “Is there a problem here?” asked Cormac O’Neill. The red welts and swelling on his face made him look bigger and meaner than ever.
Calvin’s eyes narrowed, then he offered the signature smile that had endeared him to a huge TV audience. “Just catching up with an old...friend.” He made sure to say it in a way that implied they’d been more than friends, or so it sounded to Isabel.
“Uh-huh,” said Cormac, somehow managing to inject a world of meaning into two meaningless syllables. With his worn clothes, his hands and face swollen like a prizefighter’s, he looked like a guy no one in his right mind would want to tangle with. “The lady said she’s busy,” he added.
“Yes, we have to be going,” Isabel said with crisp decisiveness, hating the fact that her heart was still pounding crazily.
“Sure,” Calvin said smoothly, his delivery as polished as the TV chef that he was. “See you around.”
O’Neill stood unmoving while Calvin got into his cherry-red BMW and backed out with an angry stomp on the accelerator.
Cormac staggered and grabbed the Jeep. Under the red blotches, his face was ghostly pale. She quickly handed him the cane.
“Sorry about that,” she muttered. “Here, let me help you.”
“Sorry about what?” he asked. “That some douche bag was bothering you?”
“Was it that obvious?”
“That he’s a douche, or that he was bothering you? Yes, and yes. Who the hell is he?”
“He’s just some guy I used to know,” she said, trying to sound dismissive. “Come on. You need to get to the doctor.” She hurried to help him as he leaned on his cane, swaying slightly. Fearing he might topple over, she fitted herself against him. God, those shoulders. Dead weight against her. He smelled like a man. Uncomfortably aware of his muscular frame, she brought him into the clinic and waved to the guy at the reception desk.
“He’s allergic to beestings,” she said. “He got stung all over. We gave him an EpiPen shot but he needs to be seen.”
The receptionist hit a buzzer. A nurse in marigold-colored scrubs appeared. “Sign this form, and you can finish filling it out later. Let’s get you into an exam room,” she said, her gaze flicking expertly over the guy’s face. “Hey, Isabel.”
It was Kimmy Shriver, a friend from way back. They’d been in the 4-H club together in their school days. “I thought he was the beekeeper,” Isabel explained.
Kimmy grabbed a clipboard and motioned the guy through a doorway and into a curtained area. “Is he going to be okay?” Isabel asked.
“We’ll fix him right up.”
“Thank you. I’ll wait out here.”
“Sorry about your bees,” said Cormac O’Neill.
“Hey, just do me a favor and don’t die, okay?” After he’d gone to an exam room, she sat down and paged through a magazine, trying to forget the encounter with Calvin Sharpe. The magazine’s pages, nervously thumbed and dog-eared, displayed articles about couples breaking up, makeovers for mudrooms, recipes calling for canned mushroom soup, how to make a skirt out of four scarves, “What To Do When He Doesn’t Notice You.” She set the magazine aside and looked around, wondering how long it took to keep a giant stranger from dying.
She peeked at the “What To Do” article: Play up your air of mystery. Good one, she thought. There was nothing mysterious about her. She lived in the house where she’d grown up, she had a singular passion for culinary arts and teaching cookery with food from local sources, and she was following her dream. Some people claimed to be mystified by the reason she was single— “So pretty, at your age, I’ll bet the guys are flocking to you...” but there was no mystery about it. Isabel knew exactly why she was single and why she intended to stay that way.
On one side of the waiting room was a young mother and a toddler in a food-stained onesie. The harried-looking woman was wrestling with the kid to wipe the greenish sludge from his nose. In another corner was an older woman placidly reading a library book. Isabel had spent her share of time in the clinic. When she was little, she’d come for the usual immunizations. She’d also suffered the usual childhood ordeals of bumps and bruises. A dislocated shoulder from falling out of an apple tree. A gash on her arm, sustained while climbing a barbed wire fence. A raging fever in the night from an ear infection. And through it all, one of her grandparents had always been present, soothing her with calming words.
Later, when Bubbie fell ill, Isabel had been the one to worry and soothe, her heart breaking as she watched her grandmother getting sicker and sicker.
Restless, she gave the article another glance. Break out of your routine. Do something unexpected. Beekeeping. That wasn’t routine, was it?
Setting the article aside, she wandered over to a display of brochures on a variety of topics—immunization, food-borne illnesses, STDs, domestic abuse—Love isn’t supposed to hurt. She turned away, flinching at darker memories from nine years back, stirred up by the encounter with Calvin. She still remembered the night she’d driven at breakneck speed all the way from Napa, where she’d been attending cooking school. She had walked into the clinic, shaken beyond reason, unable to speak the words to explain what had happened to her.
There’d been nothing broken, only bruised, though she was bleeding. A miscarriage, the doctor concluded. It happens, he and the nurse told her. Many early pregnancies were not viable.
They asked her about the fear they must have seen in her eyes. They asked her if she was safe, if there was someone she could call.
I’m safe now, Isabel had told them.
They urged her to file a report. Isabel—to her eternal regret—had refused. She filed the incident away in the journal she’d always kept, closed the book on the past and went home. At Bella Vista, she’d buried the memory along with her dream of becoming a famous chef.
She’d spent the next several years trying to forget that dream and
