CHAPTER 1: THE BAKE SALE
Garrett had kissed me behind the bleachers in 1972 and promised, "Eleanor, someday I'll buy you a diamond ring."
Then life pulled us apart.
I married a good man. Garrett married a good woman. We buried them both, raised our families, and somehow got old without ever crossing paths again. Fifty-three years of that.
Then he found me at a church bake sale.
I was seventy-two years old, wearing a faded floral dress and a pair of sensible shoes. I was buying a loaf of banana bread for my sister's birthday when a voice behind me said, "You still wear your hair the same."
I turned around.
Garrett was standing there, older but still recognizable, his hair silver, his face lined with wrinkles, his eyes still holding that same spark I remembered from a lifetime ago.
"And you still talk too smoothly," I told him.
He laughed. It was the same laugh I had fallen in love with half a century ago.
"Eleanor," he said, "I've been looking for you for years."
"Why?"
"Because I never stopped thinking about you."
I didn't know what to say to that. So I didn't say anything.
He asked me to coffee.
I said yes.
He asked me to dinner.
I said yes.
He asked me to marry him.
I said yes.
He proposed three months later. I said yes—not for the mansion I'd never asked to see, not for money I didn't need. But for the boy who once walked me home two miles in the rain and never once complained about his shoes.
His children never believed that.
They thought I was after his money. They thought I was a gold digger. They thought I had manipulated their father into marrying me.
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They were wrong.
But they never gave me a chance to prove it.
