Authors: Rachael Herron

Tags: #Fiction, #General

How to Knit a Love Song (37 page)

“Have you seen a girl? Brown hair that curls at the ends, blue eyes? Slim?”

“Think she went out with the first batch…”

“How bad?”

“Don’t remember, buddy, we seen a lot in the last half hour. They’re all pretty bad. I’m sorry, I didn’t notice.”

Cade started running.

This was everything.

She was everything.

He ran through the low river, not letting out the sob that threatened to rip from his chest. He ran up the other side of the hill, not allowing himself to fall when he stumbled.

At the top, he saw the officer that had ticketed him.

“John! Have you seen her? Abigail?”

He looked at Cade blankly. Then nodded. “Yes. She’s at County.”

“How bad is she?”

“I don’t know, someone just told me that’s where she’d gone, with the driver of the tanker. Don’t think he’ll make it though.”

“Drive me.”

“I can’t leave!”

“Look, two more of your guys are pulling up, over there. I’m begging you with all that’s holy, if I don’t get to County—” Cade’s voice broke.

John nodded. “All right. I need a report from a medic there anyway. Let me tell the sergeant…”

“Tell him later!” Cade roared.

As they raced up the coastal highway, Cade kept his forehead pressed against the glass of the passenger-side window.

If this was love, if this is what fear felt like when you loved someone, he didn’t know how so many people made it through life.

What had Aunt Eliza done with this fear, when Uncle Joshua was so sick?

What did anyone do?

He couldn’t live without her. It wasn’t possible.

At County Hospital, the emergency room was a battlefield. Every nurse and doctor was yelling, every intern racing from bed to bed. Two more ambulances pulled up behind the cop car, but Cade beat them inside.

A nurse yelled at him to stop, but he pulled sheet after sheet aside, looking at bloody faces, bodies. A horribly burned man turned haunted eyes to him as he yanked aside another curtain. This must be the tanker driver. He looked alert, though, and he was breathing.

“What the hell are you doing?” shouted the nurse. Cade was gone, pulling aside the next curtain.

The sheet was pulled up over the body in the bed, blood staining red against the white. The face was covered. Cade used every ounce of willpower he had. He yanked back the sheet. A man’s face. Eyes open, still, staring. The left half of his face was burned to blackness, the skin rippling and charred, peeling back against white skin. The right side of his face looked undamaged, white and pink. The name on the slip of paper next to his head read, “ID: Samuel Collins.”

Cade had never prayed before, but he sent something up with all his heart, and he didn’t stop to analyze what it was.

He went through the entire emergency room twice. They were too busy to stop him.

She wasn’t here.

If she wasn’t here…

She
had
to be here.

A firm hand grasped his upper arm so hard that it hurt. A small nurse with blood on her scrubs said, “Out. Now. I mean it.”

“But…”

“Out.” She dragged him into a large waiting room. “Stay. If I see you in there again, I’ll have you arrested.”

Being arrested was the least of his worries, but he couldn’t think of a single other thing to do.

Her cell phone. Yes.

Cade dialed.

He waited. It connected.

And then he heard her ring tone play, faintly, around the corner.

He stood. His legs shook, but they bore his weight.

As Abigail answered, he’d already made the turn and was standing in a small hallway.

She sat in a brown plastic chair, the color gone from her face. Her clothes were ripped, and it looked like she was getting a black eye. One to match his.

“Hello?” she repeated into the phone. “Cade? Please?”

Then she looked up at him.

He looked down at her.

Abigail burst into tears.

Cade’s arms went around her. He wrapped her up, making sure he cradled every part of her. He kissed her face, her hair, her cheeks.

“You’re alive. You’re alive.” He murmured the words over and over. She said words, too, but he couldn’t understand them, at first. They didn’t sound like English through her tears, and then she stopped making any noise at all and just shook in his arms.

He hoped she couldn’t tell how much he was shaking, too.

After long, long moments, Cade felt her take her first full breath. He released her only enough to look into her face.

“My love,” he said.

And he watched that light, that light that he thought he had extinguished, come back on.

“But Samuel…”

“Is his last name Collins? Dark-haired? Suit?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“He’s dead.”

She sagged against him, as if all the air had left her lungs. “I’m not sorry,” she said. “It’s so awful. But I’m not sorry.”

“Nothing matters without you,” Cade said against her hair. “Nothing. And I didn’t know, I didn’t understand that until I thought I lost you.” The hot tears that had been threatening finally filled his eyes. “When I saw the truck…When I couldn’t find you there, or in the ER…I thought…”

“I was with the tanker driver. No one but me knew CPR before they got there. He was so burned. His lungs were burned. He couldn’t breathe. I did CPR until the ambulance got there. I wouldn’t leave him, so they took me in the ambulance. But I don’t think he’ll make it.”

“I saw him. He didn’t look great. But he was breathing. He was breathing, honey.”

Now her eyes were the ones to fill.

“And you’re alive,” he said. “You’re alive. You’re here.”

She pressed her lips against his, softly. “I’m not going anywhere, cowboy.”

He used the back of his hand to swipe away the tears rolling down his cheeks. He wasn’t ashamed of them. They were for her.

As gently as he could, he released her from his arms, and set her back on the hard plastic chair. And he slipped off the chair, onto the ground and onto his knee.

“Might not be the best time or place, and I don’t have anything to give you, except myself. And some sheep. But Abigail, will you marry me?”

He was startled by her laugh. “Eliza would be so proud of you!”

“But,” he said, “is that a yes?”

“Hell, yes, that’s a yes. You’re my heart.” Her smile radiated light—light that he would make sure never dimmed, not for the rest of their lives.

Epilogue

Love through everything
.

—E.C
.

O
n a cool Tuesday morning one year later, Abigail turned the “Open” sign to “Closed,” and then locked the door of the store. She packed a picnic lunch. She put on her favorite red polka-dot dress and pulled her hair back. She put on lipstick. She put on a new red angora lace cardigan she’d just finished making.

She’d lose money today. Tuesdays were usually good days, customers having missed her on Monday tended to wait impatiently for the next open day. But that would have to be okay.

She got in her blue Nissan pickup truck, the replacement one, and drove up to the barn. Tom and Cade were in the rafters, rigging ropes for something they were doing down below.

“’Lo, boys!”

“Watch out below,” hollered Cade, and then he slid down a rope, his gloved hands smoking a little as his legs hit the ground.

“Show-off,” she muttered, and kissed him.

“Get a room!” yelled Tom as he slid down the rope. When he got to the bottom, he said, “You should tell Janet I did that. That’s cool.”

“Tell her yourself tonight, when you go home.”

“It’s better if you tell her how cool I am. Sliding down a rope.”

Abigail raised her eyebrows at him.

Tom grinned, and then asked, “How’s the book going?”

“I’m done. I just finished, right now! I just typed ‘The End.’ And it’s time to celebrate with my guy.”

Cade smiled, but he said, “Honey, I still have to…”

“No, you don’t. You get two hours off.”

“Who says?”

“Your wife. Come on, I have something to show you.”

“This gonna at least be rated R?”

“Cade!”

Tom laughed. “See you later, boss. Have fun.”

Abigail drove, Cade complaining good-naturedly the whole way.

“I bet you didn’t even bring the turkey sandwich I like.”

“Brought it.”

“And the Hershey’s kisses?”

“You can have my kisses, if you want.”

“I always want. They taste better anyway.”

He threaded his fingers through the fingers of her non—steering-wheel hand.

“Are we almost there yet? I want some of those kisses.”

“Almost,” she said.

A few minutes later, “Here.”

A beat later, Cade said, “Oh.”

The newly reconstructed bridge gleamed in the sun, the long, flat curves angling away from them.

Cade pulled the russet Guernsey on over his head as he got out of the truck. It was the first sweater she’d knit for him, and it was still her favorite on him.

“It’s been a year?” he asked.

Abigail nodded. She knew he’d get it. “One year exactly. Come on, let’s eat on the edge.”

“Doesn’t make you nervous?”

“Nothing could today.”

She took his hand. God, he was gorgeous. Look at him. He belonged in the movies, on a billboard, advertising saddle soap or something. Instead, he grinned at her, and walked with her, and loved her, every minute of the day. Even in the middle of their infrequent squabbles, she felt his love, all the time.

She was so lucky.

And they were getting luckier by the day.

Abigail led him to the edge of the bridge, to a little metal piece that was wide enough for both of them to sit on. She swung her legs over the edge. The fall sunshine danced on the water below.

They ate their sandwiches, leaning comfortably against each other.

He kissed her, and she kissed him back.

“You taste like onions,” he said.

“Yep.”

They sat in silence, looking down. Most of the metal had been cleared out during construction, but they hadn’t removed the bumper from her old pickup truck, and it shone in the sun below.

Cade cleared his throat and pushed his lunch away. He put both arms around her. “Worst day of my life.” He kissed her again, and her heart beat faster, as it always did. “And the best day of my life.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

Cade held her tighter. The handspun merino was soft under her cheek. “So, you finished the book! Eliza’s book?”

“Our book.”

“When will I get to read it?”

“Soon.”

“Is it about me?”

“No. But you’re definitely in it.”

“The knitters will love it. Big day! I wish I’d have known, I would have brought champagne.”

“I wouldn’t have had any.”

Cade laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“You love champagne. And
I
love how giggly it makes you.”

“No alcohol for me for a while.” Abigail smiled at him, the biggest smile that she’d ever smiled in her whole life.

“I don’t get it.”

She raised one eyebrow and kept smiling.

“Oh, hot
damn!
” yelled Cade. He scrambled to his feet and whooped, then he grabbed Abigail, and led them both back to solid ground. Then he picked her up and swung her around and around and around.

Abigail’s head spun, in a good way.

He kissed her. She kissed him back, and felt him stirring against her.

“We do need to celebrate, though,” she purred. “Can you think of any other way we can do it? Champagne aside?”

“Strangely enough, I think I can.”

“Back of my truck! Now!” Laughing so hard she almost fell over, Abigail raced for the truck, where she’d already laid out the blankets.

She needed him now. She always did. Always would. She opened her arms, and he held her, and the world spun away, and there was nothing but the two of them, on top of her handspun blanket.

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RACHAEL
HERRON

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AVON A