He intended to begin her transformation by building her a magnificent home overlooking the ocean. It was time to leave Aunt Kibble. Every woman needed a home of her own. Every couple required privacy. A new marriage deserved a new beginning. It would be difficult to manage his business from a small town like Linda Vista.
Gradually, the weight of reason toppled her objections. She had agreed to a home perched on the coast of Oregon. And then she had written a bank draft—a loan, he insisted—and he had ridden away.
“Moving to Oregon will be difficult,” she conceded. Jean Jacques had worn away her protests, but not her anxiety or her fear of travel and the unknown. Even Jean Jacques could not completely convert her timidity to boldness.
“Is it necessary to point out that nothing he told you about himself has been verified? You have only Mr. Villette’s word that he’s a wealthy businessman, and that his fortune was tied up in—what was it?—inventory. He could have invented everything he told you.”
She didn’t believe that. In any case, she knew the important things. She knew that Jean Jacques was a man who savored every minute, who lived each day as if it were his last and best. She’d never known anyone who took such joy in small things. He rhapsodized about the shine of sunlight in her hair, saw poetry in her earlobe. He could recite in two languages, and he liked to read aloud before sleeping. He teased about her attention to etiquette, but she hadn’t minded.
Their wedding night proved his capacity for patience and tenderness. In the ensuing weeks, she had observed his unselfish commitment always to put her pleasure before his own. Most important, Jean Jacques Villette had made her feel cherished and loved, pretty and interesting and desirable, and younger than her twenty-nine years.
These were the truths that mattered. Not whether his background and his bank account measured up to the impossible standards that had turned Juliette into a spinster.
“I wish he would come home.”
“He never will, darling. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can get on with your life.”
But she couldn’t go on as if her marriage had never happened. She had to do something. Waiting for him was driving her crazy.
“It’s time to begin divorce proceedings,” Aunt Kibble said, pouring more coffee. “As I’ve been advising you to do for weeks.”
Juliette drew a breath and stiffened her backbone.
“Respectable people do not divorce.” She paused and then made herself state her decision aloud. “I’ve considered what to do for weeks, and I’ve reached the conclusion that my only course is to search for Jean Jacques. Perhaps he wrote, sending for me, but his letter was lost. Or he may be lying in a hospital bed, horribly injured, wondering why I haven’t come.”
Aunt Kibble’s mouth dropped, and she stared. “Are you saying that you intend to travel to Oregon?”
Juliette shrank from the wordtraveland the images of change it conjured. She didn’t like new experiences. “I’ll follow my husband’s most likely route. If that takes me all the way to Oregon, then I suppose that’s where I’ll end.” Merely talking about leaving all that was safe and familiar made her feel slightly ill.
“I can’t agree to this foolishness,” Aunt Kibble said after a moment. “If your mother were alive, she would strenuously disapprove.”
“With due respect, Aunt, I don’t require permission to search for my husband.” Aside from announcing her marriage, this was the bravest thing she had ever said to Aunt Kibble.
“You do require a companion,” Aunt Kibble reminded her sharply. “But I’m too old to go traipsing around the countryside on a fool’s errand. I won’t do it, Juliette.”
She had anticipated this response and steeled herself for what must follow. “I can’t stay here and do nothing because I lack a traveling companion. If I must, I’ll search for my husband alone.” Everything in her shrank from this decision, but there was no longer a choice. She had to know what had happened to Jean Jacques.
Aunt Kibble gasped and pressed a hand to her mouth. “You’re making another dreadful mistake. Haven’t you learned that following the dictates of your heart instead of the rules of propriety only leads to disaster?”
Juliette couldn’t bear not knowing. When she stood on the porch at one o’clock watching the road, she felt as if she were losing her mind.
As for what her mother might have said…She had worried over that question for weeks. Certainly a respectable woman did not chase after a man, not even if the man who needed chasing was her husband. She suspected her mother would have advised her to hold her head high and live out her days pretending that her husband would return at any moment.
Over the last nine months Juliette had done just that, but she couldn’t follow that path any longer. Her bone-deep need to know gave her the daring to flout propriety and travel alone.
But, heaven above. The world beyond Linda Vista was alien and frightening, peopled with strangers who didn’t know or care about Juliette March Villette.
The outside world wouldn’t know that her needlepoint had won a blue ribbon at the fair last Fourth of July. Strangers wouldn’t care that when she was twenty, she’d been chosen to carry one end of the memorial quilt in the Founder’s Day parade. No one would give a fig that she kept the milkweed off her parents’ graves or that every week she dutifully dropped fifty cents in the Cup for Charity.
Moving among strangers would shake her very foundation. How could she know who she was if no one around her knew?
For the occasion of Juliette’s departure, Aunt Kibble wore her best at-home dress and powdered her nose.
Juliette touched gloved fingertips to her aunt’s cheek while Aunt Kibble fussed with Juliette’s traveling suit, straightening her collar, adjusting her hat, picking imaginary lint from her sleeve.
“Thank you for taking me in.” Aunt Kibble had rescued her from the yellow fever epidemic that carried away her parents.
“You sound as if you’ll never come back!”
