“Well, Jack said later it was love at first sight. It was quite overwhelming for him, because he’d only recently given up trying to find help for you and had just been back to work for a month or so at that point. I remember something he said to me that week. I never forgot it. He said, ‘I wasn’t expecting to meet someone who’d make me want more.’ There was this helplessness to him. He worried about what people would say, and he was concerned about the girls.” Frannie shrugged. “It was tough for him, Clare. He agonized over it. Don’t think he didn’t. But he’d suffered so much that I remember being relieved to see a spark of life back in his eyes.”

“She went back to Chicago, right?”

Frannie nodded. “But he talked her into coming back to visit for a weekend. They had a wonderful time, but she decided that because of the distance and all the complications it just wasn’t going to work out between them. We tried to be supportive and to give him some space, but it was awful. He was so sad again. Strangely enough, it was right around then that Jamie proposed.”

“I’m so sorry I missed that part.”

“I was, too. I needed you to be my matron of honor.”

Clare’s eyes filled as she hugged her. “Oh, Frannie.”

“The girls did a wonderful job as my bridesmaids, but I never missed you more than I did during the months before my wedding.” Frannie dabbed at her eyes and shook off the melancholy. “Anyway, Jack moped around for a week or so after Andi left. Then my mother apparently gave him a talking to about life being too short to miss out on a chance to be happy. The next thing we knew, he was on his way to Chicago. I never heard much about what happened out there, but whatever he did must’ve worked. They started spending weekends and holidays together. She came with Eric when Quinn got married,” Frannie said, referring to Jack’s longtime assistant at work. “Then we had a hurricane that kept them here for a week.”

“A bad one?” Clare asked.

“Not as bad as it could’ve been but enough to disrupt travel for days. Long story short, Jack asked her to move here, and Andi’s boss sweetened the pot by offering her the job managing the Newport hotel. She and Eric moved here the following February.”

“That was after your wedding, right?”

“Right. We got married on New Year’s Eve.”

“I’ve wondered about how the girls reacted when he told them she was moving in.”