Stephanie Doyle - Married...Again

“The ship...it’s gone. They think it went down in a storm. They’ve been looking for weeks and weeks. But there is no communication and no sign of it on any radar. I just got a call from the university today. They told us at this point we have to assume there were no survivors.”

He stopped talking, and Eleanor took a second to process what he was saying.

Max was on a ship. The ship was gone. There were no survivors.

Max was dead.

It was the strangest thing she ever did, but she laughed. Actually laughed at her husband’s grieving father. She reached out and gently touched him on the arm.

“Oh, Harry, Max isn’t dead. He can’t be.”

She would know it if he was dead. She would feel it. Her plan in life was to hate Max Harper every day from now until the day she died. A lifetime of hating him for not putting her first. For not choosing correctly when he had a choice between his work or her.

A lifetime of it.

He couldn’t be dead.

“I’m sorry, sweetie. I know things didn’t end well between you two. Sarah and I were both so sad about that.”

“He’s not dead, Harry. I would know it.”

He nodded. “Sarah says the same. But we can only go by what the experts are telling us, and they have officially declared him dead. We’re going to hold a service, and we would appreciate it if you were there. No matter how you two ended, you were family. His and ours for a time.”

Harry patted her hand, then turned to leave. Eleanor shook her head, still not understanding what had happened. There was no way this could be right. No way she was going to lose Max.

Again.

She stumbled back to her desk in the center of the loft and pulled up her laptop.

“Eleanor? Everything okay?”

She ignored her assistant while she typed Max Harper Oceanographer in a Google search page.

And there it was on her screen.

Max Harper, renowned oceanographer and climate scientist, declared dead along with the crew of the ship the Savior.

She fell to her knees, and Selena immediately crouched on the floor next to her.

“Eleanor, what’s wrong? What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

No, she thought. I’m not sick. I’m dead.

Chapter Two

Two and a half years later

“A TOAST! TO my lovely daughter and her fiancé. I, as I’m sure everyone here does, wish them the most happiness. And I know my dear husband, Frank, is smiling down on them from heaven.”

Eleanor looked at her mother in the center of the room and smiled even as she lifted her glass in the air. She glanced at her sister, Allie, and her fiancé, Mike, and was happy to see they seemed to be having a nice time.

The house was filled with family and friends for the engagement party. A party she knew Allie and Mike didn’t originally want, hoping to keep things as low-key as possible. They had just announced their engagement last week, and no sooner had that happened than Marilyn was planning the party despite Allie’s objections. However, Marilyn was insistent, and, in the Gaffney household, whatever Marilyn wanted, Marilyn got.

Whether her children felt the same or not.

The wedding was almost a year away, but Eleanor had already agreed to take time from her company to make sure she could attend all the various activities. Tonight was just the start. Eventually there would be a bridal shower, then the bachelorette party, the rehearsal dinner, all culminating in what Marilyn Gaffney was proclaiming would be the event of the season in the town of Hartsville, Nebraska, next June.

Given that the population of Hartsville was just a little over five thousand citizens, any wedding that happened in town usually was the event of the season.

“Some champagne?”

Eleanor turned at the sound of the voice behind her. Daniel, her date for the evening, held up two flutes. She gladly accepted one.

“Thank you. You may need to keep this coming.”

“You seem to be getting along with your mother,” he said in a lowered voice. “From everything you had told me on the drive here, I was expecting something a little more dramatic between you two.”

“I’m trying to do everything I can to avoid the drama. Mom and I are fine as long as I’m agreeing with her. It’s when I don’t that things become difficult. Take this party, for example. Completely unnecessary. We’re going to be seeing all these same people at the wedding. What’s the point of doing it twice?”

Daniel raised an eyebrow. “What’s the point of any party? To have fun.”

Eleanor looked at Allie and Mike again. They were still smiling, still chatting with the people around them. They looked like what they were. A couple in love. A couple who was excited about their future.

And Eleanor was happy for them.

All this wedding paraphernalia didn’t bother her. Not in the least. That’s what she was telling herself anyway, and she could be very convincing when she needed to be.

Still, she knew everything on the surface wasn’t always as it appeared.

“I know my sister. It’s going to be hard enough for her to be the center of attention for a day. To keep this up for the next year will be laborious. A wedding shouldn’t be that much work.”

“Speaking of weddings...do you like big ones or small ones? Just so I can get an idea.”

“Daniel,” she said with a soft sigh.

“I hate that sigh, you know. I was only teasing.”

Was he? It was hard to know with Daniel. He liked to call himself a man of action, and that was true. He was always very persistent in getting what he wanted. Much like her mother.

Like convincing her to go out with him when she’d refused him for months.

“This is only our second date. I think it’s a little too soon to talk about weddings, don’t you?”

He gripped his chest in mock pain. “What? You’re not counting all those lunches?”

“They were business lunches,” she reminded him.

“One woman’s business lunch, another man’s date.”

“So you’re saying you have no real interest in investing in Head to Toe?”

He sipped his champagne. “I wouldn’t say that exactly. No.”

“That’s what I thought,” Eleanor said smugly. “Daniel, I agreed to go out with you. I agreed to bring you here so you could meet my family. But you know where my head is right now. Head to Toe is getting bigger every day, and it has to be my number-one priority. I’ve told you my plans.”

“You have. Or you could turn those plans over to me and let them be my number-one priority. Then you could go back to focusing on...other areas of your life.”

Again, she thought he was teasing, but it was hard to tell. Their relationship had started when Daniel, an investment banker, had shown interest in the growth rate of her company located in Denver. He’d asked her out to lunch to discuss the idea of what a large cash infusion could mean. She’d rejected the idea at first, but then the idea to get ahead of the game by growing her company at an accelerated rate seemed compelling.

Which led to another lunch.

Which led to her thinking Daniel himself was rather attractive. It might have been the first time in years she had even registered a man’s appearance. That had to be a good thing, she told herself.

In the end, Daniel hadn’t swayed her with his pitch. Head to Toe was her baby, and a cash investment from someone else meant giving part of it away. Whereas, if she took a loan out for the money to expand, it would still be hers. One was riskier, but the other was tantamount to giving over part control of the business. She didn’t know if she was willing to do that.

Daniel, however, had not been willing to walk away, either.

She would have thought his interest was solely in the company until he surprised her on lunch number two by asking her out on a date. Of course, she said no, for any number of reasons. But he persisted until she got to that point where she realized there was absolutely no reason for her not to go out on a date with him.