The Mourning Mail (final release candidate #7)

Chapter 14

The crowd was building at the Born and Raised Steakhouse. Those working from offices in the surrounding businesses were filtering in on their lunch breaks. Marci beat me there and took a table in the back. As I joined her, I couldn't help but notice she had a new emerald ring. The way she was displaying her hand made it hard to miss.

"Oh, Marci, I see you've been holding out on me... care to share?" I asked with a quick laugh as I sat down, taking the extended fingers of her right hand into mine to admire the stone.

"I thought you'd never ask!" Marci replied with an affected high-society inflection in her voice.

We both laughed, and I asked, "Nice stone! So, who is the new love interest in your life? Or is the rock on your finger something you saw in a store window that you couldn't resist?"

"I've kept it a secret until now, but I met Danny at AA. I'd seen him at several meetings—he'd just gotten his five-year recovery medallion. Four months ago, we left a meeting at the same time and played a round of 'whose Uber is it, anyway?' He asked me to go out for coffee, and things took off from there."

"I can tell you are happier than I've seen you in quite a while," I said, truly glad she had good things going on in her life. "Okay, out with the goods—what's he like?"

"He's a lieutenant at the Balboa Park fire station. He has a nice little place not too far off the beach. His sister dates my cousin, and we learned we have much in common. We've had some pretty deep conversations, some of them difficult. He's good at accepting me as I am, warts and all. So, he surprised the heck out of me last Wednesday when he popped up with this. He calls it a friendship ring, but I think it's a little more than that for both of us. Day by day, right? We'll enjoy the journey until we get to the destination, whatever it is."

"I am so happy for you," I said, "and it's good you found someone who feels right."

"What's going on in your romantic life?" Marci asked. "Not to be nosey, but Ray Costello in Major Case has a thing for you. If I don't ask, he's going to keep bugging me."

"We saw each other at the Warnake crime scene—I guess it was three months ago?—and I thought he was acting pretty friendly to be working a homicide," I said with a snicker. "He's a nice enough guy, but I don't think having a cop in the family would work too well for my career. No offense intended."

"None taken—any other prospects I should know about?" she said, batting her eyelashes.

"No, I've not been in the mood since Dad died," I said. "In college, I had a great relationship with an ROTC cadet, Paul Castro. Before the Navy commissioned him as an officer and he had to use his given name, everyone knew him as 'PJ.' Gotta love a man in uniform, and I did. My first experience with anything real. It was one of those things where it sneaks up on you. You don't realize how great it was until worse things come along. I still think about him now and then..."

"What broke the two of you up?" Marci asked.

"PJ had to serve out his Navy obligations," I answered. "Ended up in Annapolis, and I graduated and got a good job here. You know how it goes—you promise to keep in touch, but..."

"That was it? Nobody else came along?" Marci asked.

"When Mom got sick, I was thirty-one and feeling that biological clock ticking. The relationship I was in was horrible, but I talked myself into making do. I'm ashamed I didn't leave the first time he hit me. But the second time did the trick."

"Having been through that myself, I'm sorry it happened to you," Marci said, the smile leaving her face.

"Dad would never admit it," I said, "but he had some muscular men from one of his construction crews visit the guy afterward. Once my ex left the hospital, we never heard from him again. Two years of my life wasted – I just wasn't prepared for the depression and feelings of complete worthlessness that followed. People like that plant things in your head and you don't know realize how much of it takes root. I soured on relationships for a while after I got some semblance of myself back."