Sparks Fly

talk to her, needed to hear her voice.
    He didn’t know when exactly she had become so important to him. Just that she was.
    “Angelina,” he said, knowing better than to hang up without leaving a message this time, “I’m calling to let you know that I may be out of touch for another few days.” He paused, trying to gather his thoughts. “Things here are at the breaking point and I’ve got to head deep into the trenches until the war is won.” He laughed softly into the phone, his only smile in days. “Sorry about the war metaphors.
    I guess they don’t call it corporate warfare for nothing.” He was getting way off track, so he cleared his throat and said, “What I’m trying to say is, I miss you. And even if I don’t call you for a while, I’m thinking about you every moment. And I—”
    Midsentence, he stopped speaking, realizing he was just about to say, “I love you.”
    Overwhelmed by the force of his emotions, he fumbled, “And I can’t wait to see you again.”
    He clicked his phone shut and leaned against the tree trunk, wondering when he had become such a bumbling fool. But since he hadn’t slept for more than an hour or two for a while, he cut himself some slack. He needed a long hot shower and to sleep for twenty-four hours straight.
    He went back inside to face his opponents and as the corporate battle raged on, he found solace and strength only by drawing Angelina again and again on his yellow notepad. He drew her from every well of memory he could mine—sitting on the dock at the lake, standing on his front porch the day they met, hiking on Angel Island. He even drew her sitting on top of the Ferris wheel with the lake and trees behind her, a place he thought he would never have been able to get right.
    But with Angelina smiling up at him from the sketch he had drawn, he suddenly realized that she had been the missing link all along.

    * * *
    Angelina heard the phone ring and instinctively knew it was Will. She stopped packing up her office and stood still as a statue, afraid to even breathe for some absurd fear that he would hear her and know she was avoiding him.
    When the red light on her phone started to blink with a message waiting, she hesitantly picked up the receiver and dialed her mailbox number. At the sound of Will’s voice, she wanted nothing more than to weep. But she had promised herself when she woke up that morning, after a long night of tears, that she was going to face her new life—the life she had manifested through her own actions—with a positive outlook. If not for herself, then for her baby.
    All day she had been working diligently to get her affairs in order for her big move across country. She had contacted each of her clients with referrals to other consultants, deflecting their questions regarding her sudden change of plans by mustering up a cheerful tone of voice and speaking vaguely about “the wisdom of change.”
    Angelina, however, wasn’t sure that there was anything wise at all about the changes she was making. She could no longer live fifteen minutes away from the man she loved, with his baby in tow.
    Both of their lives, she acknowledged with a further sinking of her heart, would become a media spectacle if and when anyone ever found out.
    At the least, she felt a small measure of peace knowing that Krista had found her a cozy cottage on Wishing Lake in New York and that her child would grow up with a loving grandmother close by.
    Krista had negotiated a deal with the owner whereby Angelina could lease for six months and then if she wanted to stay, she would be able to buy it at a fair price.
    Joyce was going to be surprised by her return to the lake and frankly, Angelina wasn’t sure when or how she was going to tell Joyce that she was pregnant with Will’s baby. No matter how she looked at the situation, it wasn’t fair to make Joyce pay for their sins.
    The situation with Will, on the other hand, was far less clear. She would have to come clean with him at some point in the future. But first she needed some time to sort things out for herself.
    Including how to get over a broken heart, particularly when she’d been instrumental in breaking it herself.
    By noon Angelina was utterly exhausted from packing and thinking and worrying. She had just plopped down on the couch in her living room to take a five-minute nap when Krista came barreling through her front door already midsentence.
    “—heading out for my lunch break and I