Free If I'd Never Known Your Love by Georgia Bockoven Page A

the month it took to close, planning, deciding which projects they work on first, which could be postponed. Her enthusiasm for the inside became his, while she grew more and more caught up with his ideas for the garden, picturing the four of them eating outside on the deck under the oak tree surrounded by a living rainbow.

    They met at Venita Rhea's so often over the next month to go over kitchen-design brochures and paint chips and carpet samples that Julia put on three pounds.
    The pounds came off the week they actually moved in, when they alternated between euphoria and exhaustion, eating off paper plates set on boxes, working until two in the morning to clean years of accumulated dirt in the kitchen and then getting up at six to work their paying jobs. They barely gave themselves time to stop and admire a finished room before moving on to the next. It was a perfect month, filled with dreams, with hope, with nonstop talk of the future. Words that still haunted her when she thought of everything Evan had missed.
    Julia curled the retrieved piece of lint into a ball between her fingers and finished climbing the stairs. She was on her way to the bathroom to toss the lint in the trash when the phone rang. She hesitated. For an instant she considered letting it go to the answering machine, but was brought up short by her bizarre reaction. Not once in five years had she ever ignored a ringing telephone.
    She answered in the bedroom.
    "Hope I didn't catch you at a bad time," Harold said. The necessity to identify himself had disappeared years ago. "Something has come up that I have to take care of before we leave for the airport. Would it be all right if Mary swung by an hour earlier to pick you up first?" He was as involved with working to bring Evan home now as he had been in the beginning.
    "Sure." And then she remembered. "I thought Mary was out of town."
    "She came home last night."
    Julia laughed. "Didn't trust you to pack for yourself?" Harold was notorious for his unusual taste in clothes. As her and Harold's and Mary's friendships had grown into something far past ordinary, Mary had gently tugged Julia out of several deep emotional holes with stories of Harold's lifelong fashion faux pas. She particularly loved the one about the Hawaiian shirt and pin-stripe suit combination he'd worn to a semiformal award ceremony, but had only personally witnessed his appearance at a company picnic in brown socks, loafers, rainbow-colored shorts and a turtleneck.
    "Maybe, but she had the good grace to tell me it was because she missed me. Of course, she was going through my suitcase at the time, so I wasn't entirely convinced."
    "Tell her I'll be ready."
    "Thanks, Julia."
    "No problem."
    She glanced at the clock when she hung up and jumped when the phone instantly rang again. Five minutes to nine. Her mother. The two-hour time difference between California and Kansas put her mother between the work she did for the volunteer fire department on Wednesday and getting lunch ready for her father.
    Julia tucked the receiver between her ear and shoulder and reached into a drawer for a shoe bag. "Hi, Mom."
    First silence and then static filled the line.
    Dropping the bag on the bed, she shifted the receiver to her hand. "Hello?" She waited. "Is anyone there?"
    The line cleared. She heard a man say,"...twelve kilometers south of Envigado..." A series of clicks followed.
    Envigado? She knew that name. It was a city in Colombia just south of Medellin.
    "Evan?" she said in a choked whisper. "Evan, is it you?" More clicks, and then a hum telling her she'd been disconnected.
    She put the phone down and bumped the vase with the peach-colored rose. A petal fell. Her breath caught. Seconds passed as she stood there and stared. She absolutely refused to see it as a sign. She couldn't live that way. The rose was old and fragile, and.
    freeze- dried flowers weren't meant to last forever.
    Damn it, Mother. Why have you done this to me?
    She headed for the