gaze swept her tousled hair, yellow cotton nightshirt and shapely legs with sad fondness.
“An old friend of mine is going to call you sometime in the next couple of days,” he said after a long moment. “His name is Harry Griffith, and he runs a multinational investment company out of Australia. They’re opening an office in Seattle, so Harry will be living here in the Puget Sound area part of the year. He’ll get in touch to offer his condolences about me and pay off on a deal we made the last time we were together. You should get a pretty big check.”
Amy certainly hadn’t expected anything so specific. “Harry?” she squeaked. She vaguely remembered Tyler talking about him.
Tyler nodded. “We met when we were kids. We were both part of the exchange student program—he lived here for six months, and then I went down there and stayed with Harry and his mom for the same amount of time.”
A lump had risen in Amy’s throat, and she swallowed it. Yes, Harry Griffith. Tyler’s mother, Louise, had spoken of him several times. “This is crazy,” she said. “I’m crazy.”
Her husband—or this mental image of her husband—smiled. “No, babe. You’re a little frazzled, but you’re quite sane.”
“Oh, yeah?” Amy thrust herself away from the bathroom counter and passed Tyler in the doorway to stand next to the bed. “If I’m not one can short of a six-pack, how come I’m seeing somebody who’s been dead for two years?”
Tyler winced. “Don’t use that word,” he said. “People don’t really die, they just change.”
Amy was feeling strangely calm and detached now, as though she were standing outside of herself. “I’ll never eat nachos again,” she said firmly.
Ty’s gentle brown eyes twinkled with amusement. When he spoke, however, his expression was more serious. “You’re doing very well, all things considered. You’ve taken good care of the kids and built a career for yourself, unconventional though it is. But there’s one area where you’re really blowing it, Spud.”
Amy’s eyes brimmed with tears. During the terrible days and even worse nights following Tyler’s unexpected death, she’d yearned for just such an experience as this. She’d longed to see the man she’d loved so totally, to hear his voice. She’d even wanted to be called “Spud” again, although she’d hated the nickname while Tyler was alive.
She sniffled but said nothing, waiting for Tyler to go on.
He did. “There are women who can be totally fulfilled without a man in their lives. Give them a great job and a couple of kids and that’s all they need. You aren’t one of those women, Amy. You’re not happy.”
Amy shook her head, marveling. “Boy, when my subconscious mind comes up with a message, it’s a doozy.”
Tyler shrugged. “What can I say?” he asked reasonably. “Harry’s the man for you.”
“You were the man for me,” Amy argued, and this time a tear escaped and slipped down her cheek.
He started toward her, as though he would take her into his arms, then, regretfully, he stopped. “That was then, Spud,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. “Harry’s now. In fact, you’re scheduled to remarry and have two more kids—a boy and a girl.”
Amy’s feeling of detachment was beginning to fade; she was trembling. This was all so crazy. “And this Harry guy is my one and only?” she asked with quiet derision. She was hurt because Tyler had started to touch her and then pulled back.
“Actually, there are several different men you could have fulfilled your destiny with. That architect you met three months ago, when you were putting together the deal for those condos on Lake Washington, for instance. Alex Singleton—the guy who replaced me in the firm, for another.” He paused and shoved splayed fingers through his hair. “You’re not cooperating, Spud.”
“Well, excuse me!” Amy cried in a whispered yell, not wanting the children to wake and see her in the middle of a hallucination. “I loved you, Ty. You were everything to me. I’m not ready to care for anybody else!”
“Yes, you are,” Tyler disagreed sadly. Quietly. “Get on with it, Amy. You’re holding up the show.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, willing Tyler to disappear. When Amy looked again and found him gone, however, she felt all hollow and broken inside.
“Tyler?”
No answer.
Amy went slowly back to bed, switched out the light and lay down. “You’re losing it, Ryan,” she muttered to herself.
She tried to sleep, but images of Tyler kept invading her mind.
Amy recalled the first time they’d met, in the cafeteria at the University of Washington, when she’d been a lowly freshman and Tyler had been in his third year of law school. He’d smiled as he’d taken the chair across the table from Amy’s, and she’d been so thoroughly, instantly besotted that she’d nearly fallen right into her lime Jell-O.
After that day, Amy and Tyler had been together every spare moment. Ty had taken her home to Mercer Island to meet his parents at Thanksgiving, and at Christmas he’d given her a three-carat diamond.
Amy had liked Tyler’s parents immediately; they were so warm and friendly, and their gracious, expensive home practically vibrated with love and laughter. The contrast between the Ryans’ family life and Amy’s was total: Amy’s father, one of the most famous heart surgeons in the country, was a distant, distracted sort of man, totally absorbed in his work. Although Amy knew her dad loved her, in his own workaholic way, he’d never been able to show it.
The free-flowing affection among the Ryans had quickly become vital to Amy, and she was still very close to them, even though Tyler had been gone for two years.
Alone in the bed where she and Tyler had once loved and slept and sometimes argued, Amy wept. “This isn’t fair,” she told the dark universe around her.
With the morning, however, came a sense of buoyant optimism. It seemed only natural to Amy that she’d had a vivid dream about Tyler; he was the father of her children and she’d loved him with her whole heart.
She was sticking frozen waffles in the toaster when Oliver and Ashley raced into the kitchen. During the school year she had trouble motivating them in the mornings, but now that summer had come, they were up and ready for day camp almost as soon as the morning paper hit the doorstep.
“Yo, Mom,” Oliver said. He had a bandanna tied around his forehead and he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt with his favorite cartoon character on the front. “Kid power!” he whooped, thrusting a plastic sword into the air.
Ashley rolled her beautiful Tyler-brown eyes. “What a dope,” she said. She was eight and had a lofty view of the world.
“Be careful, Oliver,” Amy fretted good-naturedly. “You’ll put out someone’s eye with that thing.” She put the waffles on plates and set them down on the table, then went to the refrigerator for the orange juice. “Look, you two, I might be home late tonight. If I can’t get away, Aunt Charlotte will pick you up at camp.”
Charlotte was Ty’s sister and one of Amy’s closest friends.
Ashley was watching Amy pensively as she poured herself a cup of coffee and joined the kids at the table.
“Were you talking to yourself last night, Mom?” the child asked in her usual straightforward way.
Amy was glad she was sitting down because her knees suddenly felt shaky. “I was probably just dreaming,” she said, but the memory of Tyler standing there in their bedroom was suddenly vivid in her mind. He’d seemed so solid and so real.
Ashley’s forehead crumpled in a frown, but she didn’t pursue the subject any further.
Fortunately.
After Amy