Holly Jacobs - A Walk Down the Aisle

Now, we’d cut the cake.

Now, we’d have our first dance.

Now the reception would be over, and he’d bring his wife home.

Now...

None of that had happened.

At eight in the morning, he knew a phone call wouldn’t work. So, he drove to Sophie’s house. The house they’d planned to put on the market because she was going to move into his house after they got back from the Poconos.

As a matter of fact, now they should be in the car and headed to their friends’ mountain retreat.

He knocked at Sophie’s door. He hadn’t knocked on her door for months. Not since the day she’d given him a key. As he waited for her to answer, he noticed a dark scuff mark on the door itself and wondered what had happened.

He wondered if she’d been so upset that she kicked the door when she got home, but he knew her wedding shoes couldn’t have left a mark like that.

The door swung open and there she was. He drank in the sight of her. It felt as if he hadn’t seen her in years rather than just hours.

“I thought you’d come,” she said by way of a greeting as she opened the door and let him in.

“Kitchen?” he asked, trying not to notice the boxes that were pushed against the hall walls. She’d told him that she’d started packing her mementos and books. The only furniture she was bringing was her grandmother’s writing desk and rocker. He’d told her to feel free and move in whatever she wanted. She’d hemmed and hawed about the plaid couch she loved. He’d assured her that she could redecorate the whole house if she wanted. She could buy them a pink polka-dotted couch and he’d sit on it, as long as she’d sit next to him. She’d kissed him after that declaration—only a small peck on the cheek—and told him there wasn’t anything she wanted to change about the house. It was perfect.

She’d laughed then and told him that maybe, if they were lucky, in a few months, they’d change one of the guest rooms into a nursery.

The thought of Sophie pregnant with his child had thrilled him.

But that memory only served to remind him that while that child would have been his first, it wouldn’t have been Sophie’s first. She’d had a baby and given her away.

And she’d never told him anything about that baby.

And she’d certainly never mentioned who the baby’s father was.

He felt an uncharacteristic spurt of jealousy at the thought of some unknown man with Sophie.

“The kitchen is as good a place as any,” she replied, pulling him back to the present.

The last time he’d seen her, she’d been wearing her wedding dress. Her hair had been all fancy and styled. Now, she didn’t have on a speck of makeup, and her hair was pulled back into a messy bun. She wore a pair of cutoff sweats and his old Gannon University T-shirt.

She looked like his Sophie again.

But he wasn’t sure she was...he wasn’t sure she had ever truly been the woman he’d thought she was.

She nodded at the table in the sunny breakfast nook and took a seat. He sat across from her.

Colton had planned to start slowly. To ask her to tell him what happened, but instead he found himself jumping right into the thick of it. “How could you be willing to marry me and never tell me about whatever happened in your past? You said your parents were dead.”

“They were—are—dead to me. They stole the life I planned. They stole my hopes and dreams. They stole my daughter,” she added softly. “I couldn’t stop it. I work at forgiving them every day—not that they’d ever think to ask for my forgiveness. I work at it anyway, and most of the time I think I’ve succeeded in forgiving them, but I can’t forget any of it. I finished school and then I left. I changed my name and I’ve never, never looked back.”

She wasn’t even really Sophie Johnston? “Who are you really?”

“Sophia Moreau-Ellis.”

He tried to imagine her as Sophia Moreau-Ellis, but he couldn’t. She still looked like Sophie.

His Sophie. But she wasn’t his—not really. Not ever.

“And you haven’t seen your parents since?” He couldn’t imagine that. He was close to his family. His parents had been calling, wanting to be there for him. Normally, he’d want that, too, but this time, he simply wanted to be left alone to process what had happened.

“My parents aren’t anything like yours. Image. Position. Money. Those are the things that matter. I think the fact that I’m gone is a relief to them. They can moan to their friends about how ungrateful their daughter was. But, to be honest, I can’t imagine my name comes up often.”

Her parents were rich. He knew that suddenly. “You have money?”

“A trust my grandmother set up.”

Which explained how she could afford her house. She worked hard at her job, but since he was a member of the newly formed wine association, he knew what they paid her for her PR services. Even with the other occasional freelance jobs she did, now that he thought about it, he knew she had to have another source of income.

Sophie having a trust fund made the idea of her marrying him even more of a mystery. He’d always wondered why she’d chosen him. Sophie could have had any man in Valley Ridge.

Any man, period.

And yet, she’d picked him.

“My grandmother’s father started with one small gas station. West’s. It grew into a large chain in Ohio and Kentucky. The name has meaning there. That makes my mom first-generation rich. My dad’s family, the Ellis family, made their money in fertilizer two generations ago. He’s worked hard to get the stench of that poop off him all his life.” She said the words as if by rote, as if she’d said them or thought them many times.

It all made sense now. “So, your family’s rich. You’re rich. A poor little rich girl? You came here and worked as a PR person. You found a simple farmer and thought, Gee, that’ll show my parents?”

“I came here and worked at a job I’d been preparing for since birth. Public perception is everything in my family. My parents could be fighting, screaming at each other, then hold hands and be all smiles for a party. I learned how to present a public face at birth. I simply took all those tools they gave me and turned it into a job. I take the wineries and give them a public face.”

For a moment, he thought she was going to cry, and that would be his undoing, but she didn’t. She simply said, “And when I came here, I planned on finding a place I could build a home. I came looking for a community. I didn’t plan on finding love. Frankly, I didn’t plan to ever marry. Especially...”

“Especially what?” he asked. “You didn’t plan on marrying, especially not a farmer? Not a man who comes home covered in dirt? A man who rhapsodizes over a new tractor, not the newest opera? A man who wears a cowboy hat and lives in a house his family has owned for generations?”

“I never planned on marrying...especially not a man as perfect as you.”

* * *

SOPHIE WAITED, PREPARING herself for more of Colton’s questions or accusations. “I want to tell you—” she started.

But he shook his head. “Sophie, it’s obvious that you aren’t the woman I thought you were. I’m not saying this to be cruel, or to hurt you. And I don’t want you to think it’s because you had a child. It’s simply—well, not simply. Nothing about this is simple. It’s that you obviously have a lot of things you didn’t tell me about. Things you couldn’t trust me with. I don’t think I ever really knew you.”

“You did,” she said. She wanted him to understand. She needed him to understand. “You knew the real me. Know the real me. The me that my parents wouldn’t recognize. The me I always wanted to be. That’s what I found here in Valley Ridge, not only a home, but a place where I could be the real me.”