The Borrowed Bride by Susan Wiggs

bed, clutching her stomach as if he had struck her. She swept him with a horrified gaze, taking in the huge iron device holding his head, the stiff cage around his middle. “I’m not leaving you,” she whispered.
    “I won’t let you stay. We can’t make it together. What happened today just proves it.”
    The pain that flashed in her eyes made him want to reach out, to beg her to stay, but he forced himself to say, “I never should have found you again in the first place. I’m sorry for that.”
    She looked at him for a long time. He thought she might cry, but she didn’t. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, looking both fierce and fragile. “I won’t force myself on you.”
    “Goodbye, Isabel,” Dan said.
    And when she turned away and walked out the door, he added in the faintest of whispers, “I love you.”

Eleven
    “I t’s wonderful to see all of you,” Isabel said, and she meant it. Sitting at her favorite garden café, enjoying a perfect Indian-summer afternoon, she truly did mean it. Six months after the disastrous bridal shower, Connie and Lucia had come over to Bainbridge Island for lunch.
    Connie handed her a cream stock envelope. Somehow, Isabel knew before opening it what she would find.
    It was an invitation to Anthony’s wedding.
    “We figured you’d want to know,” Lucia said.
    “You’re right.” Isabel smiled at them. Even after she had broken off the engagement with Anthony, his sisters remained friends with her. And Anthony surprised her by coming through with a contract for Dan’s lodge. By all reports, the team had a spectacular weekend, hosted by Clyde Looking and Theo Sohappy while Dan was still laid up.
    “I’m pleased for Anthony,” Isabel said with conviction.
    Connie touched the rim of her wineglass to the rimof Isabel’s. “We figured you would be. But what about you, sweetie?”
    In an odd way, Isabel cherished the hurt that she lived with night and day, the hurt she had endured since last April, when Dan had ordered her out of his hospital room, out of his life. Sometimes, that pain was the only thing that reminded her she was alive. Early on, she had tried to call, but again and again he refused to speak to her.
    “I’m all right,” she said, looking down, tucking a silky lock of hair behind her ear. She’d gone natural with her hair for the first time since high school, letting it grow in straight and stark black instead of using chemical perms and colors. Idly, she noted the blast of the one-fifteen ferry horn.
    Summer sales at the plant nursery had broken records. Of the three new staff members she’d hired, two were Native Americans, and one was an expert on traditional Indian herbs.
    In a burst of energy, she had totally redone her cottage. Over the bed hung her pride and joy—a Yakima mat woven with the design of a soaring eagle crest.
    On a good day, she avoided thinking of Dan for whole minutes at a stretch.
    But most days, she dwelled on the time she had spent at his lodge, remembering every moment, polishing it up in her memory until it gleamed with the soft patina of a lost dream.
    She had stayed in touch with the Sohappys. They told her little of Dan, only that he had gone to a hospital in Olympia for therapy and then returned home. The lodge was prospering thanks to the winery that hadsponsored the race and to record summer visitors. Word-of-mouth recommendations kept the place booked solid.
    From Dan, there was nothing but silence.
    Isabel gulped back her wine and tried to focus on what Lucia was saying, but a faint sound kept humming beneath the murmur of conversation.
    She gazed down the length of the café garden. Most of the plants had come from her nursery. The flower beds and trees burst with fall color.
    The roaring grew louder, more urgent. Lucia stopped talking. Isabel stopped breathing as unbearable anticipation built in her. And then, right where the gravel driveway turned off from the road, he appeared.
    He was an image out