It would, apparently, take her considerably longer.
Her brush with mortality had taken its own toll on her. She’d fought hard to recover her own bravery in the aftermath of the accident. It had been surprisingly hard. She had changed. In some ways, she was stronger than she’d ever been, but in others, she was more vulnerable. And perhaps that was a good thing. Today, she took nothing for granted. What you thought you had your hands around could slip through your fingers in a moment. After this trip, she was determined to push forward with her life and appreciate every day as the gift she knew it was.
“What about Aaron?” Aubrey asked her, pulling her from her thoughts.
“Aaron? What about him?” He’d visited several times, and they had renewed their long friendship. But friendship was all there would ever be between them.
“You know he’s interested. I bet he’d go with you to Scotland. If it wasn’t for him, we might never have figured out it was Kinsey behind the wheel of that car. Besides, he’s crazy about you, Em. I can see it in the way he looks at you every time he’s in town.”
“I do love Aaron,” Emma admitted. “But he’s not the one.”
Aubrey chugged a sip of wine and bent to pull the salad she’d made from the fridge. “You say that like there’s somebody else in the running.” She raised her head. “Is there?”
Emma felt her cheeks heat. As if he were here in the room with her, she imagined him lounging against a doorway with that annoyingly devastating smile of his that still made her knees go weak.No. No there’s no one else in the running.
Aubrey straightened. “There is! Ooh, is it Manly? He is super adorable. And now that you’re all finished with PT, it would be totally cool to date him. Wouldn’t it?”
Emma laughed and shook her head. “Manly” was Aubrey’s secret code name for Michael—her very well-built, gorgeous physical therapist—a name often followed by the phraseplease date him. But Emma had already met Michael’s significant other, Benjamin. So that was a hard no.
“Stop. Please. I’m not dating Michael or Aaron or anyone now. I’m just going to do me for a while. If there’s one thing I’ve learned out of all this, it’s that life goes by too fast. And I haven’t been living it the way I need to. I’ve been married to my job. You said so yourself. So, this trip is the start to something new. I want to go, and I’m going. And I’m not taking any man with me.”
“I never said you were married to your—” Aubrey blinked, apparently remembering that she, in fact, had. “At least I never said that to you.”
True, she’d said it to the detective. Supposedly out of her hearing. “Never mind. The point is, I’m not the same old Emma I used to be. You’re just all going to have to get used to the new me.”
Jacob breezed in through the front door from work without knocking, which had become his custom since he practically lived here now that he and Aubrey were engaged. “I like the new you. What are we talking about?” He dropped his briefcase by the door.
Aubrey kissed him at the end of the island and poured him a glass of wine. “We’re talking about Emma 2.0, who’s having a software glitch regarding a certain solo Scotland trip.”
He shrugged. “Well, I think it’s a great idea. You go, Emma. You deserve a vacation after everything. Enjoy.”
“Thank you, Jacob. You’re my favorite nearly nephew.”
“Traitor,” Aubrey mumbled.
Jacob kissed Emma on the cheek and took a sip of wine. “Hey, guess who called me today?” The girls were all ears. “The Smithsonian.”
That little green piece of glass in Lizzy’s peace necklace, the one no one could explain ending up in her hand in the hospital room? Turned out it wasn’t glass at all but an actual emerald. A huge, rare emerald, cut in a very rare way. After they’d gotten over the shock of that revelation, the jeweler who’d assessed it suggested sending it to someone who knew more about rare stones than he did.
“And?” Aubrey asked.
Jacob grinned. “Are you ready for this? According to the museum, our emerald was one your mom and dad must have found in that shipwreck off the Florida coast that was reputed to carry bounty from rebels in Spain from the early seventeen hundreds.”
“What?” they gasped in unison.
“That stone once sat in the crown of the young Maria Luisa of Savoy, queen to King Phillip the Fifth, of Spain. That crown was stolen some three hundred years ago, during the War of the Spanish Succession, along with dozens other jewels and gold that belonged to the queen and the Spanish king.”
“So,” Aubrey said, “what happened to the rest?”
“The crown and the other jewels were returned to the Spanish government ‘anonymously,’ except for that one stone. The one you have. The Smithsonian was the facilitator in that donation. While they couldn’t legally divulge the names of the donators, I asked Dr. Covey to cough twice if I said the names of those responsible—Lizzy and Daniel—and he coughed twice. They believed and were told by this ‘anonymous’ source that the stone you have was never recovered.”
Shocked, Aubrey set her wine down, carefully staring at the glass. “Then we have to return it. It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to Spain and her history. It belongs in that crown with all the rest.”
Emma took a gulp of her wine. “Your mom wanted you to have something from her. Legally, it was hers to do with what she wanted. It was her last gift to you. It must be worth a fortune, Aubrey.”
She poured salad dressing onto the salad and tossed it. “I know. It was my birthstone and hers, and that’s probably true. But I can’t keep it now that I know. And selling it back to Spain feels wrong.” She met Emma’s gaze. “So, no. I’ll donate it in my parents’ name—on the condition that the whole discovery and donation is finally credited to them from Spain’s end. At least then they’ll be remembered. They’ll make history.”
Jacob kissed her cheek. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”
