Page 14 of Ripple Effect
Present Day
Elizabeth
“How long was it before you saw Cal again?” Dr. Powell asks me.
Twisting my rings around my fingers absentmindedly, I answer, “Three years. Time enough for life to have dealt me with the kind of hardship and heartache that even if I didn’t know what he went through personally, I grew up and understood the look Cal wore on his face wasn’t because he was trying to attract all the women on campus,” I say wryly. “It just had an added benefit.”
Despite the chuckle, it doesn’t stop Dr. Powell from asking me, “What do you mean?”
“In the years I knew Cal before, he rarely smiled. In the three years since I saw him, it was my time to learn what it took to cause someone to love like that. I understood why people saw the world through darkened eyes.”
“That wasn’t a good thing?” A question, not a statement.
“It’s neither good nor bad. It just is. The problem is once your innocence is stripped away, it’s impossible to return. Despite everything that’s happened to me, to us, Cal says I manage to maintain mine.” I shake my head with regret. “I don’t see it when I look in the mirror anymore.”
“What do you see?”
“Like many women, I see flaws. But when I look past the surface, I can see the scars of what happened and the time we lost because of it.” Especially the lost time.
“What happened to make you lose that innocence?”
“The first sheen of it started to fade when I was engaged and cheated on. I know so many women who have gone through that, it’s a disgrace. Respect your partner to end a relationship before starting a new one. It’s just wrong and makes you doubt yourself in so many different ways.” Coming off my high horse, I deflate. As much as I still hate what Kyle did, it led me to Cal. But nothing erases the ache in my heart over what happened next. “I lost more of it when my grandmother, Dahlia, passed on.” Even now, I can’t say the words without painful emotions surging through me. Fumbling, I reach for the box of tissues on the table next to me.
As I mop up the tears that begin to fall, Dr. Powell doesn’t look away the one time I wish he would. “That would be Dahlia Akin, sole heir to Akin Timbers family fortune?”
I nod, because there’s nothing else to do.
“I’ve heard she was quite eccentric,” he comments diplomatically instead of asking me the typical question of what it was like to grow up on a plantation still considered enormous by modern-day standards.
I throw back my long hair and laugh. “Oh, Nonna would have said you can do much better than that, Doctor. She was a grande dame, a beautiful force, and made me long to go home every time I was away.” There’s an abundance of love in my voice that I imagine will still be there when I talk about her in my eighties.
“When I was going through the worst of my suffering, I imagined her by my side, the sass I learned at her knee flickering through my body letting me know I wasn’t defeated though I may have been temporarily beaten. It was the gentle steel she forged in me that carried me through with the ability to come out the other side as I am.”
A wide smile crosses the good doctor’s face. “You’ll have to indulge me a moment. Was it legend or truth that she had a room in her home dedicated to hats?”
Even though the memories are bittersweet, I smile through my tears. “Truth. It was decorated in rose-colored velvet. Each hat had a special stand crafted out of Akin wood. And all of her grandchildren—the boys as well as the girls—wore one of those ostentatious contraptions to her funeral.”
Deep laughter comes from the man in the chair across from me. “I wish I knew that before I spoke to your cousin Sam the other day. I might have asked him which one he wore.”
Perhaps my smile doesn’t have the same kind of unguarded joy it would have shone with before everything happened, and so much happened between all of us. But the bonds have been repaired, so I do smile when I say, “It was hideous—a garish plum number with peonies and tiger lilies on the brim. If you do speak with him again, remind him that since he arrived late, he got stuck wearing it.”
“Was Sam late for a reason?”
“Yes.” I don’t elaborate.
Dr. Powell raises his brow, waiting for me to continue, as if he has all the time in the world.
“Sam was asked to pick up someone who wanted to pay their respects to me—to the family,” I correct myself automatically because back then, I truly had no idea what was in store when I saw Cal’s dark hair gleaming in the sun across my grandmother’s gravesite.
“I can only imagine your family’s reaction to your cousin being late on that most important of days,” he sympathizes.
“They were certain family members—one in particular—less than pleased to see his guest, but we all understood Sam was flying in. There was worry about how fast he would be driving. Since college, Sam had become somewhat of a speed demon.” The panic and sadness on varying cousins’ faces that day are etched in my mind. But those emotions paled when I told the family how Sam was part of the machinations that almost destroyed my life later. That’s one thing Cal never grasped until that dark period in our lives and Sam forgot about the Akin family.
Don’t dare cross us.
“Whatever shock they were feeling was nowhere near what I was when Calhoun Sullivan laid a bouquet of sunflowers at Nonna’s gravesite,” I admit. “Here he was after three years, with not one word to me in all that time. Yet, the darkest man I knew was bringing the sun on the saddest day of my life.”
“What did you do?”
