The Contract (The Contract 1)

Time stopped as I scanned her words. I found I wasn’t able to stop reading. Her brief passages were filled with her essence; it was as if she was in front of me, telling me one of her stories. The depth of her love for Penny, the gratitude she felt for the home and unconditional love given to her by Penny was blatant. She wrote of their adventures, even made the search for bottles and cans sound fun. She described the dinners with Penny’s friends, her love for the different foods, and even jotted recipes on the pages. My breath caught at one passage.

We’re going to the beach next week. Penny has a friend who owns a small resort and she made a deal with him. We’ll clean the cottages daily, and in exchange, we can stay there rent-free for a week! With the two of us, we can get it done in no time and I’ll have most of the day to play! I’m so excited! I haven’t been to the beach since my parents died. I can’t believe she has done this for me!

My heartbeat sped up. This had to be it. Penny had mentioned cottages, and there were pictures of them from the beach. I kept reading.

Our cottage is so pretty! It’s bright blue with white shutters and is right on the end of the row. I can hear the water all day and night! There are only six cottages, and because it’s May, they are only half-full, so Penny and I are done by noon every day, and we spend the rest of the time exploring. I love it here!

Then there was another one a few days later.

I don’t want to go home, but Penny told me we could come back in September. Scott even promised her the same cottage. Another week to look forward to! I’m so lucky—the best birthday gift ever!

My eyes watered with the last entry. A working holiday. That was all they could afford. The same way they could only afford to eat out with the generosity of friends, and yet she felt lucky. I thought of my life of excess. Anything I wanted I could have—even growing up, I was denied nothing material. Yet, I was never satisfied, because the one thing I wanted most, they never provided.

Love.

Penny gave it to Katharine in spades. It made something like a trip together, even if she had to be a housekeeper for a week, special.

I started flipping through the pages faster, searching for entries about the location of the cottages. Near the end of the second book, I struck gold. One of her sketches was an archway with the name Scott’s Seaside Hideaway. I grabbed my phone, doing a search on the net for the name.

I found it. The picture on the site was the same archway as in her sketch, and the map indicated it was two hours away. Another picture showed the row of small cottages, the end one hardly visible, except for the blue color.

I looked back at her journal. Under the sketch were the words:

My favorite piece of heaven on earth.

I closed my eyes as relief washed over me.

I had found my wife.KATHARINE

THE GENTLE SOUNDS OF THE waves breaking on the shore soothed me. I rested my chin on my knees, trying to lose myself in the beauty of the beach. The gulls flying overhead, the ebb and flow of the moving water, and the utter peace.

Except, I wasn’t peaceful. I felt lost, torn. I was grateful Penny was no longer trapped in a never-ending nightmare of forgotten moments, but I missed her terribly. Her voice, her laughter, the tender way she would cup my cheek, kiss my forehead, tweak my nose, and in her rare moments of clarity, provide her wisdom.

If she were here I could talk to her, tell her what I was feeling, and she would explain it to me. She would tell me what to do next.

I was in love with my husband, a man who wasn’t in love with me. A man who felt love made you weak and couldn’t love himself. He would never be able to see his good traits; the ones he had buried deep inside in order never to be hurt again.

He had changed a lot since that fateful day he asked me to be his pretend fiancée. Gradually, he allowed a gentler, more caring side of himself to emerge. Penny broke through his remaining barriers. She reminded him of a time when he had felt love from another person. Graham Gavin had shown him how to work with people, not endlessly compete. He’d proved to him there were good people and he could be part of a positive group. His wife and children showed him a different version of what he believed a family could be. One filled with support and care, not neglect and pain.