Once in a Blue Moon by Kristin James

clean or get a job to help out with the expenses? Oh, that sounds like an admirable sort of person.”
    “That isn’t what I thought of you. I just wanted to protect you, to keep you from making a serious mistake with your life. I wanted you to have a chance to see more of life before you tied yourself down to one person. I wanted you to have all the things a girl your age should have. Hell, Isabelle, I was thinking of you! I gave you up because I loved you!”
    “Then God preserve me from your kind of love,” Isabelle retorted bitterly. She turned and started away, then stopped and swung back around to say, “You didn’t even have the nerve to tell me to my face. You could at least have done that, instead of leaving me a note.”
    “You weren’t there. You were at your parents’ house.”
    “You could have called. You could have come to see me. You didn’t have to leave it in a note. But I can guess why you did. You were afraid to tell me face-to-face. You were a coward.”
    Michael shook his head, regret and frustration mingling in his face. “I tried to call you later, and you wouldn’t talk to me.”
    “Did you honestly think I would? After what you’d done?”
    He sighed. “I never meant to hurt you. I figured before long, after you’d gone to college and met someone else, you’d realize what a favor I’d done you. That you’d say, ‘Thank heavens I didn’t run away with that starving actor when I was eighteen.’”
    “You say you loved me,” Isabelle said coldly. “But you obviously didn’t even know me.”
    * * *
    Isabelle got through the rest of the day in an odd, numbed state; she felt almost as if she were sleepwalking, doing all the things she was supposed to, but without really feeling or thinking about any of it. She got in the open Jeep beside Michael, and they drove along the highway while the van drove in front, behind and beside it, taking shots. Then with the cameraman and the camera attached to the side of the car, they drove slowly over the same stretch of road while they took the close-up shots. Later the shots would be spliced together to be shown with music playing in the background.
    When they were through, Isabelle rode back to the hotel in the van with the others, her eyes closed, pretending to sleep. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, and when she reached the hotel she ordered her supper from room service and spent the remainder of the evening in the room by herself. She sat for a long time on the balcony, watching dusk settle over the ocean, remaining even after it was dark. The lights of a cruise ship anchored offshore twinkled in the distance, and the faint sounds of music from one of the party boats traveling over to the Isla Mujeres drifted across the water to her.
    She thought about what Michael had told her, about the pain and sorrow she had seen in his face. Had he really loved her ten years ago? Had it hurt him to leave her? And had he truly left her because he thought it would be the best thing for her?
    At first she rejected that idea. How could anyone think that hurting someone he loved would be the best thing for her? But Isabelle was honest enough to go past the wall of remembered pain and despair. She knew that if doctors had told her that Jenny had to attend a special school somewhere away from Isabelle, if they had said that that was the best way for her to learn and grow, then she would have agreed to send Jenny. She would have made Jenny go, even though it would have broken her heart to be separated from her...and even though it would have made Jenny sad at the time.
    It was easy enough to see how someone would suppose that an eighteen-year-old was too young to make life decisions like giving up college and following the man she loved. Looking back, she could understand that someone else might think an eighteen-year-old girl’s love was a passing, shallow fancy, that she really didn’t know what love was. Michael would have assumed that her pampered