When Terel was gone, Nellie ate a dozen cupcakes.
Jace stepped off the train and breathed the cold Colorado mountain air. It felt good to be back, good to return to the place he’d come to think of as home. He gave a boy a nickel to carry his bag to the hotel and check him in. He didn’t want to take the time to go to the hotel first. All he wanted now was to see Nellie.
He smiled as the cold, dry air hit his face, and he patted his breast pocket where all Nellie’s letters lay, tied with a ribbon. It had been two and a half months since he’d seen her, the longest ten weeks of his life, but it had taken that long to arrange everything. When he’d first arrived in Warbrooke and found his father to be perfectly healthy, his impulse had been to jump right back on the train and go back to Chandler. He’d had no doubt the rotten Terel was behind the phony telegram.
But the telegram had made him realize how much his parents meant to him, so he’d gone out sailing, just he and his father, and he’d found himself telling his father all about Nellie. At the end of the day’s sailing he’d known what he wanted to do with his life. For all that he loved the sea, for all that he knew he’d miss it, he knew he wanted to live in Colorado with Nellie.
That night he’d written her and told her of his plans. He didn’t tell her that someone had created the telegram. He didn’t want to fight Terel from across a continent, so he just wrote of his plans. He planned to remain in Warbrooke long enough to sell most of his holdings, the land and house he and
Julie had owned, all three of his sailboats, and he needed to work out property divisions with his brothers and father. When that was done, he planned to return to Chandler and make her his wife.
He’d written her long letters telling her of his home town, telling her about his father and brothers, telling her of his mother’s music and how good it was to hear her sing again. Once he was in Warbrooke he realized how little he and Nellie had talked, so he found himself pouring out everything to her. He told of visiting the grave of Julie and his little son and how his grief for them had been merely a dull ache. He wrote of the future he had planned for them, and one night, very late, when he was feeling very lonely, he told her of the trick he’d pulled on her by taking her to the Everetts’ house. And always, repeatedly, he told her he loved her.
Nellie’s letters to him hadn’t been as long as he would have liked; in fact, they were almost curt, but they had been enough to let him know that she was all right. He hadn’t written to tell her he’d be arriving today because, unexpectedly, he’d found a buyer for his last sailboat, and he was at last free. He had thrown clothes in a bag and taken the next train out of Warbrooke. He wanted to spend this Christmas with Nellie, and next Christmas his family promised to come to Colorado to visit him and Nellie and—he grinned—maybe his first kid.
Now, leaving the train station, he was on top of the world. Everything was cleared away for him and Nellie. Nothing else stood in the way of their happiness.
He was so happy, so engrossed in his thoughts that he didn’t see the way the people of Chandler stopped and stared at him. They stared, then they frowned, then they put their heads together and muttered about how he had dared to return to this town.
He was walking so rapidly, trying to get to Nellie as quickly as possible, that he didn’t see the door to The Famous swing open and Terel’s friends step out. He walked right into them and packages went flying.
“Excuse me,” he said, stooping to pick up packages, “it was all my fault. I wasn’t watching where I—”
“You!” Louisa said.
Jace looked up at the three young women and was puzzled to see them looking at him in horror.
“How could you dare show your face in the town?” Charlene said, teeth clenched. “After what you did to Nellie!”
“Is Nellie all right?” Jace asked, rising.
“As if you cared,” Louisa hissed.
Mae had not said a word, but suddenly she whipped out her hand and slapped Jace across his cheek. “I will not have your child,” she said, pushing past him. Louisa and Charlene, after snatching their packages from him, followed her.
Jace put his hand to his cheek and stared after the women. “What in the world is going on?” he said aloud.
After that encounter he slowed his pace and began to notice the unpleasant looks he was receiving from nearly everyone he passed. He was beginning to feel like the villain in a melodrama.
Three blocks from Nellie’s house he saw Miss Emily.
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d have the nerve to return,” Miss Emily said. “I guess you heard that Nellie’s, shall we say, dilemma was a false alarm, so perhaps you figured it was safe to return, but I doubt very much if Charles will give you the freight company now.”
She started to walk past him, but he caught her arm.
“Would you please tell me what’s going on?”
Miss Emily looked down her hawklike nose at his hand on her arm, and Jace dropped his hand. “Is no woman safe from you?”
“Safe?”
Miss Emily started to walk away, and Jace’s temper got the best of him.
“What the hell is going on?” he bellowed.
Miss Emily was disgusted by his language, and she was furious with him for hurting Nellie, but something in his tone made her halt and turn back. “Where have you been since the Harvest Ball?” she spat at him.
“Home in Warbrooke, Maine. I sold everything I owned there so I could come back and marry Nellie and live here in Chandler.”