Middletide by Sarah Crouch

Author:Sarah Crouch [Crouch, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

21

JANUARY 11, 1994

Jeremy sat on the bed, transfixed. Downstairs, a door opened and closed and he heard Jim’s boots echoing dully across the hardwood, but he stayed where he was, his eyes flying across the pages of neat handwritten scrawl.

Dear Diary,

I thought it was over. I thought I’d never feel anything toward anyone again, let alone genuine affection. My heart was shattered into a million and one pieces when I lost Anna. Two million and one when Manny left, and I sat cross-legged among the wreckage, just running my fingers through the pieces, feeling the total impossibility of ever being able to put them together again, like sitting at a table with the world’s hardest puzzle laid out in front of me and not even knowing where to start. But yesterday, oh sweet yesterday, I felt at least a hundred of those pieces click back into place without even trying. Yesterday, I went on my first date since Manny and I split up.

I drove to Elijah’s house, chock-full of butterflies, and told myself a hundred times on the way that I was making a mistake, that it was too soon. But when I got there and he opened the door, it just felt… right. It felt like coming home. He made me dinner, one of the most delicious meals I’ve had in years, actually. Roast duck with a sauce that tasted like dates and oranges over wild rice. I don’t know if it was his cooking or the candlelight, or the way his deep blue eyes stayed trained on mine as we spoke, but for the first time in forever I felt the spark of something remotely resembling love and it felt so, so good.

Someone must’ve raised him right. He pulled out my chair for me, cleared my plate when I was done, and held my jacket up for me before we went on a walk afterward. His cabin is beautiful, and he showed me all around his property. He is so proud of his chickens and his garden. Manny never did anything outdoors at our house. Manny wanted all sorts of praise just for pulling a little hair out of the shower drain, but Elijah wanted to show me all of the ways he’s been able to “live off the land” as he calls it and I loved seeing the pride in his eyes. Then, he looked at me with a secretive smile and asked if I wanted to see where he shot the duck we’d just eaten. I’d assumed the duck had come straight out of the deli section, but nope, he shot it on a lake way back in the woods behind his property.

Thank goodness I’d decided to dress casually and was wearing sneakers and jeans. I never could have made it back there in heels! It was a good thirty-minute walk through the woods and the sun was setting when we got there. What a beautiful place! He’s so lucky to have found it. A little lake tucked back in the woods behind a row of pines that keeps it hidden from the sound.

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