Sidney Sheldon - Chasing Tomorrow

“He may also be anywhere else on the planet.”

“Tracy, please. With your help we have a chance of—”

“Jean.” Tracy spoke kindly but firmly. “I’m not staying. Not another day, not another minute. You can threaten to tell Nicholas till you’re blue in the face. Who knows, maybe you’ll even carry out on your threat. But it’s Christmas and I’m going home to my son.” Pushing past him, she opened the door. “You have my number if you need it.”

Jean Rizzo stood and watched her go. He felt bereft, and not just because of the case. With Tracy around, he felt hopeful, energized, empowered. Without her, all the despair and emptiness came rushing back. How the hell had Jeff Stevens let a woman like that slip through his fingers?

“Don’t you have a home to go to?” Tracy stopped at the door. “You have kids, right?”

Jean thought about Luc and Clémence. He realized guiltily that he hadn’t given them a thought in days.

“I’ll call you,” Tracy said.

She was gone.

BLAKE CARTER DRIED THE dishes slowly and carefully. It was the same way he did everything else, the way his father had taught him. Blake’s father had a saying he was fond of. “God made time, but man made haste.” William Carter had been a good man, the best. Blake had often wondered what he would have made of Tracy Schmidt. Would he have understood Blake’s love for her, with her warmth and kindness and beauty, her secrets and sadness and pain? Probably not. William Carter had lived in a world of moral absolutes, of right and wrong, black and white. There was much that Blake didn’t know about his employer, the woman whom he’d loved silently and steadfastly these past ten years. But he did know that the world Tracy had come from before they met her was a world of gray. Nothing was black and white with Tracy. Nothing was what it seemed.

Jean Rizzo had come from that world. Ever since Tracy took Nicholas to L.A. in the summer, Blake had watched the gray world of her past come back to haunt her. But since the day Rizzo had shown up at the door, things had gotten exponentially worse. Blake had watched Tracy grow tense and fearful, jumping every time the telephone rang. She’d returned from her “Christmas shopping trip” to New York looking haggard and thin—and without any purchases. Blake knew he had to say something. He just didn’t know what, or when, or how.

It was nine P.M. on Christmas Day, and Tracy was curled up on the couch in the family room with Nicholas watching The Polar Express for the nine hundred and eighty-eighth time. That’s another paradox about her, Blake reflected. She’s practical and tough but she’s wildly sentimental too. Blake Carter’s own mother had died when he was young. That was probably one of the reasons why he’d never married, and learned to rely only on himself. Tracy’s maternal side exerted a huge pull over Blake. Who am I kidding? Every hair on her head exerts a huge pull. Blake Carter had never been in love before. He was not enjoying the experience.

Tracy caught him staring. “You okay in there?”

“I’m fine. Almost done.”

Leaving Nicholas wrapped up in a faux-fur blanket, Tracy came over to join Blake in the kitchen. “You don’t have to do all that, you know.”

“Sure I do.” Blake smiled. “You sure as hell ain’t going to.”

“True. But Linda’ll be in tomorrow.”

“Never put off till tomorrow what you could do today,” said Blake. “Close that door, would you?”

He dried the last of the dishes. Tracy closed the door to the family room and opened a box of chocolates.

“Want one?”

“No thanks. Tracy, listen. There’s been somethin’ I’ve been meaning to say for a while now.”

Tracy noticed that Blake’s hands were shaking. He was always so calm. She began to feel nervous herself.

“You’re not sick, are you?”

“Sick?” Blake frowned. “No. I’m not sick. I’m . . . well, fact of the matter is . . . I’m in love with you.”

Tracy stared back at him with naked astonishment.

“I’d like you to consider becoming my wife.”

For a long time, Tracy said nothing. Once she’d had time to think about it, she came back with the impressively articulate: “I . . . wow.”

“Now, I know I’m older. Too old for you, really,” Blake continued in his quiet, comforting, gentle manner. “But I reckon we get along pretty well up here. And I love the boy like he’s my own.”

“I know you do,” Tracy said. “Nicky loves you too. And so do I.”

Blake’s heart soared.

“But I can’t be your wife, Blake.”

The old cowboy took two deep breaths. “Is there someone else, Tracy?”

She hesitated. “Not in the way you mean. But in my heart, yes. There is.”

“Is it Nick’s father?”

Tracy felt utterly miserable in that moment. Because the answer to Blake Carter’s question, the answer she could never admit to, was yes.

She’d told Jean Rizzo that she needed to leave New York to get back to her son, and that was true as far as it went. But there was another need, equally strong, another force propelling her to take the first plane out of the city and never look back. Being in New York, talking to Elizabeth, reading about the theft of the Byzantine coins, Tracy was forced to face the truth. She was still in love with Jeff Stevens. She’d never stopped loving Jeff, and never would stop. She hated herself for it, and she cried and screamed and railed at the heavens. But the feelings were still there, as deep and true as they had been the day she married him in that tiny Brazilian chapel, years ago.

Blake saw the torment in her eyes. His compassion trumped his disappointment. He took Tracy’s hand.

“Nick’s father isn’t dead, is he?”

“No.”

“You can talk to me, you know. I know you aren’t who you claim to be. I know you’ve got some kind of past. I’m not stupid, Tracy.”

“I never thought you were,” Tracy said vehemently.

“It’s that Rizzo character, isn’t it?” There was a bitterness to Blake’s voice that Tracy had never heard before. “He’s the one that’s sucked you back in. To whatever it was you came here to forget.”

“Jean Rizzo’s a good man,” Tracy said. “It may not seem that way. But he is. He’s doing what he has to do.”

“And what about you?” said Blake. “What do you have to do? For God’s sake, Tracy, what hold does that man have over you?”

Tracy said nothing. A heavy silence hung in the air between them.

When Blake next spoke he’d regained his composure. Looking Tracy steadily in the eye, he said, “I don’t need to know who you were before, Tracy. Not if you don’t want to tell me. I’m in love with who you are now. I’m in love with Tracy Schmidt. I want Tracy Schmidt back.”

“So do I.” Tracy started to cry. Hot tears rolled down her cheeks and splashed onto the chocolate box. “But it isn’t that simple, Blake.”

“Isn’t it? Marry me, Tracy. Choose this life, our life, not your old one. You’re happy here in the mountains with Nicholas and me.”

Tracy thought, He’s right. I am happy here. At least I was.

Will I ever be happy again?

“Don’t say no,” said Blake. “Think on it awhile. Think about what you want the rest of your life to look like. Yours and the boy’s.”

Blake left. The movie finished and Nicholas went to bed.

Tracy followed suit, but she couldn’t sleep.

She thought about Jeff Stevens and Daniel Cooper and Jean Rizzo and Blake Carter. The four of them weaved in and out of her consciousness like dancers around a maypole, their ribbons becoming tangled and entwined as the music played on and on and on.