Page 87 of Love Redesigned
“But that makes sense if you were trying to get a job designing for LeFranc.”
“True.” She hesitated, like she was afraid to say what came next.
I opened the door to the pool house and motioned her inside.
“But what if I don’t want to design for somebody else? What if I want to design as me?” She paused and looked around, surprise filling her eyes. “Wow. This is the pool house? It’s amazing.”
“Wait until you see the view.” I walked across the living room and opened the patio doors. The pool was a sparkling blue in the sunshine; just beyond it, the open water of the ocean shone a bright, brilliant turquoise.
Dani stared, her eyes wide. “This place is magical,” she said. “You spent every summer here?”
The sea breeze lifted a strand of her blonde hair and tossed it across her cheek. I barely resisted the urge to brush it away before she reached up and tucked it behind her ear. “We spent more time in Manhattan,” I said. “But yes. We were always here for at least a few weeks, maybe a month or so, every summer. Christmas was always here, and Thanksgiving when I came for that.”
“I can’t even imagine,” Dani said. “I thought I was lucky growing up in Charleston, but this takes the beach to a whole new level.”
I pushed my hands into my pockets, the safest way to keep myself from touching her. “Hey,” I said.
She turned to face me. “What?”
“I think you’d be great designing on your own.”
She grinned. “Really?”
“Really.”
There was so much more I wanted to say. To ask. Would she go back to New York to do it? Would she stay in Charleston? Did this version of her future have room for me in it?
She bit the side of her bottom lip and looked at me in a way that spoke of possibility. “It would be really risky,” she finally said. “I might not make it. Especially if Sasha works against me.”
“But you might. And you’ll never know if you don’t try.”
She nodded, looking back out toward the ocean. “It’s hard to let go, Alex. One minute I think I can do it, and then the next it’s like I don’t even know myself anymore and I just want things to be the way they were before, when I still believed designing for LeFranc was a possibility.”
But what about me? What about us?The question pulsed through my brain, willing me to open my mouth and ask her.
I took a step backward. “I should get our bags from the car.”
“Right,” she said, pressing a hand to her stomach. “I’ll just wait here if that’s okay.”
I left her staring into the Atlantic and headed back to the front drive to move the car and get our bags. I’d wanted to ask her, but I couldn’t do it. If I’d asked, she might have answered. And I still wasn’t sure she was willing to give the only answer I wanted to hear.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Dani
While Alex went to park the car and retrieve our bags—all but the wedding dress which we felt was probably better hidden in the trunk of his car—I wandered around the pool house. It was nicely decorated, comfortable, but not showy or gaudy in any way. Pictures of Alicio’s sons filled the living room, snapshots from their youth of them swimming in the ocean behind the house, paddle boarding, surfing, eating ice cream on the small boardwalk that led down to the water from the house. Alex was conspicuously absent from all but a few photos. In those few, he never looked very comfortable; he seemed to be hovering on the fringes of the photos, in the frame, but not reallya part.
But then, he hadn’t been around nearly as much, only spending a few months out of the year with his mom and Alicio’s family. Maybe that was enough to justify the disparity.
In the wide hallway that led to the bedroom, a large, family portrait hung across from an ornately framed mirror. Victor and Gabriel were maybe twelve and fourteen years old in the photo. They posed with their parents on the beach, the blue waves crashing behind them. Their father looked flawlessly tanned, not too different from the Alicio I’d caught glimpses of around the office, except that his hair was dark instead of the snow-white he now sported. He had his arm around Alex’s mom, her hand resting loosely on Gabriel’s shoulder. It was the perfect family photo, except Alex wasn’t in it.
Sadness swelled inside as I thought of him coming home each summer, seeing the portrait, and countless others undoubtedly just like it. She washisMom, and yet, looking at the photo, you’d never know she had any other children.
A noise sounded behind me and I turned, attempting, and likely failing, to wipe the sadness from my face.
Alex followed my gaze back to the portrait.
“She wasyourMom,” I said sadly. “How could she—”
