Chapter 17

17

J essa woke up after tossing and turning most of the night. She barely slept. This place felt cold, but not because of the weather. Because it didn’t feel like home.

Home.

Something she never thought she’d feel. But she knew where her heart was, and it wasn’t here in Arkansas.

Megan slept on the second queen-sized bed in the room. It was still dark outside, so Jessa picked up her phone and looked at the time. It was only four in the morning. They didn’t need to be at work until eight.

She slid out of the bed and tiptoed to the bathroom, quietly closing the door behind her. Then she sat on the edge of the bathtub and dialed her mom’s phone number. It was outside of their scheduled call time, so she didn’t expect her to answer. But to her surprise, her mom picked up.

“Jessa? Are you okay?” Her mom’s voice flooding through the line had Jessa’s eyes welling up.

“Hi, Mom. Yes, I’m okay. I just was hoping to talk to you.”

“Hang on one second.”

Jessa could hear her mom calling over to her dad and then suddenly her dad’s voice came over the line.

“Hi, honey. How are you?”

“I’m good, Dad. How are you?”

“Better now that I’m hearing from my little girl.”

Jessa smiled through her welling eyes. She let out a shaky breath.

“What’s wrong, honey?” her mom asked.

She was on speakerphone, that much she knew. So both her parents could hear her. Jessa swallowed thickly.

“I think I met someone I really like.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“Is it?” Jessa asked. “He doesn’t want to leave his hometown.”

“And you don’t like it?” her dad asked.

“I do. I actually love it. But you know how it is.”

“I don’t think we know what you mean.”

Jessa laughed lightly. “Because we move. It’s what we do. We don’t stay in one spot.”

Her parents grew silent, only the sound of the crashing waves in the background coming over the phone.

Jessa furrowed her eyebrows. It wasn’t like her parents to get quiet. They usually had a reply for everything. “Um… I know I didn’t lose you. So what’s going on?”

“Do you believe you can’t settle down in a town because we are always on the go?” her mom asked.

“Well… yeah. It’s kind of how I was raised. I get restless in one spot. You do too.”

“We don’t. We actually enjoy a lot of places and have considered settling down.”

Jessa furrowed her brow. “So why were we always moving?”

As if she could picture her mom shrugging, she said, “For work. It’s hard to do the job we do if we don’t travel. And we always thought you’d enjoy a life of seeing the world. We both came from poor families who could never travel, so when we were offered the opportunity to do a photography job for a large nature magazine, we took it. Then it just kind of snowballed from there, and we got addicted to the high of traveling. We were afraid to turn anything down and risk the opportunity disappearing, so we just kept on doing it.” Her mom sighed. “I wish I knew you didn’t enjoy it. We would have stopped.”

“Oh, no. Don’t think that. I enjoyed it. I just thought it was the way we were. I got so used to traveling, I just continued with it, and assumed I’d be restless and wouldn’t be happy in one spot.”

“It was never about not being happy,” her dad said. “We just didn’t want to pass on any opportunities and risk never getting them again.”

As if this unlocked something she had pushed away, memories of her childhood flooded back to her of times she heard her parents talking about buying a house in Texas and settling down. But then they’d be off on the next adventure, and she’d forget all about it.

“Why do you still move?” Jessa asked.

“We created a habit at this point. And we don’t really have anywhere to settle down. We thought we would wait until you picked a place to live and then we would follow,” her mom said.

Jessa let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. It was like she had been punched and all the air had expelled from her lungs. She had no idea they were waiting for her.

“You were waiting for me?”

“Yes, but we didn’t want to force you to decide, so we’ve just been traveling until then.”

“I didn’t know.”

“We know,” her dad said. “We wanted you to make your own decisions and never wanted to add pressure. We still don’t. But if you think you’re in love with this guy, don’t pass that up just because you think you need to travel because that’s what you know. It’s okay to take risks and give love a chance. To stay in one place.”

Give love a chance. She squeezed her eyes shut and Noah’s face flashed through her mind. Love.

Jessa sighed and laid her head on the conference room table of the building she was in. She had just laid off her fifth employee, and she was drained. Megan was in the conference room beside hers, doing the same thing.

This part of the job was the only part she hated. Seeing the disappointment on the employee’s face was hard. She tried to soften the blow by showing them their severance package. She had to hand it to Brian. The severance packages were good. They always did well to take care of their employees, so closing down this entire building was a shock. They had never laid off to this extent before.

Megan popped her head into the conference room. “I need to get out of here for a bit. Let’s get lunch.”

Jessa sat up and nodded, grabbing her coat and purse before following Megan out of the room. Word had already traveled through the building with what was happening, so the stares they got from the employees who had yet to be spoken to wanted to make Jessa cower.

This sucked. She was supposed to be in Wintervale enjoying life. She was supposed to be doing her job remotely and spending her evenings with Noah.

God, she missed him. It had only been a little over twenty-four hours since they had left, and she was already wishing she could see him again. That had never happened to her. She didn’t miss people. That just wasn’t who she was. She also never missed places. But she missed Wintervale a whole hell of a lot.

In that short week, she had felt more at home than anywhere else. The town, the people, the general energy. All of it. It made her feel like she was at home.

Megan and Jessa stepped into a restaurant down the street from the office building. Once they were seated, Jessa closed her eyes, imagining they were sitting around the bar with Noah and Jackson, enjoying nachos and beer.

“You miss him, huh?”

Jessa opened her eyes and sighed. “More than I ever thought possible. It’s weird, isn’t it? That I could miss a man I only met a week ago? That’s too soon.”

Megan shrugged. “Not when you’re in love.”

Love. She was in love. “Am I crazy?”

Megan reached across the table and took Jessa’s hand in hers.

“Honey, I think you’d be crazy not to feel the way you do.”

“I want to talk to him.”

“Have you been able to get ahold of him?”

Jessa shook her head. When they were traveling, her phone died from obsessively checking it and mindlessly scrolling on social media in the airport to kill time. And she realized her charger was in her checked bag. By the time she got to her hotel room that night and could charge her phone, it was late. She didn’t want to wake Noah since she knew he would be asleep, so she waited. When she tried calling this morning, it went straight to voicemail.

The server came over at that moment to take their orders. Jessa hadn’t checked out the menu yet, so she ordered the same as Megan. When he walked away, Megan smiled at Jessa.

“Why don’t you try calling him again?”

Jessa sighed. “Okay. Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. But if he doesn’t pick up, I might cry. You’ve been warned.”

“And I’ll be here to buy you ice cream,” Megan said.

Jessa pulled out her phone and checked the screen for any missed calls or texts. There were none. She scrolled through her contacts and clicked on Noah’s name before holding it up to her ear.

This time it rang, and her eyes widened.

“It’s ringing.”

Megan smiled encouragingly.

Jessa held her fingers up to her lips, nervous to hear his voice. She felt giddy, and she couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face and the tears that sprang to her eyes as soon as he answered.

“Hello, beautiful.” His voice immediately calmed her, and she wanted to climb through the phone and hug him.

“Hi,” Jessa said. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you.”

“I could say the same to you.”

She clutched the phone tighter to her ear. “My phone died in the airport and I didn’t have my charger with me. By the time I could charge it, it was too late to call.”

“It’s never too late to call,” he said. “I can guarantee I was probably awake.”

She took a shuddering breath. “I’m sorry I had to leave.”

“It’s okay, sweetheart.”

But those words didn’t come through the phone. They came from right behind her.

Jessa turned around in her chair to find Noah standing behind her. He smiled brightly.

“Hey, love.”

Jessa stood and immediately threw her arms around him. His arms wrapped around her waist and she never felt more whole.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’m here for you.”

She pulled back. “What do you mean?”

“I want you to come back to Wintervale. To stay. Move in with me, or find your own place if you prefer. But once you’re done here, come home. Come home with me,” he pleaded.

Tears sprang to her eyes. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

She nodded empathically. Never had something felt so right, and seeing him in person only solidified all the feelings she had been questioning.

“I’ll move to Wintervale. Permanently.”

His eyes flickered over to Megan before coming back to Jessa’s as if he had heard her wrong. “Seriously?”

Jessa giggled. “Yes. I wanted to come back. These last twenty-four hours have been miserable. I love being there. It’s the first town where I’ve felt a sense of home. And you… you’re there. You feel like home, and I’d like to see where that goes.”

He picked her up and twirled them around right there in the restaurant. She giggled.

“I don’t care how corny this looks. I’m celebrating,” he said.