Shea Summers stood on the street outside the Valentine Bar and Grill and looked at it wistfully. The first time she had been here fifteen years ago, she had met the man who would be the love of her life; the last time, eleven years ago, was the day she had lost him.

            She sighed to herself. “Just what in the heck do you think you can accomplish here, Shea?” she asked herself. “All that’s over and done, and you can’t recapture the past. All you’re gonna do is just torture yourself remembering what might have been.”

            February 14^th… fifteen years ago, on her thirty-fifth birthday. She had come here with a small group of friends to celebrate the occasion. Turning thirty-five had not been one of the highlights of her life, and they had done it to help cheer her up. One of the other invitees had brought along Jamie Castillo, a twenty-one-year old guitarist from a local glam rock band, and Shea had instantly fallen head over heels in love with this dusky young godling.

            Foolish? Most definitely. But over the next three years, she and Jamie had first become friends, then best friends, and then more. The only note of discord in their relationship was the fact that he had always seemed overly concerned about the fourteen-year gap in their ages. He was the only one, though… everyone else appeared to consider them a couple. Shea assumed that Jamie felt as strongly about her as she did about him.

            Celebrating her birthday at the Valentine Bar and Grill became a ritual for them over the next four years. And on her thirty-ninth birthday, it became a place of disillusionment and extreme unhappiness for her. For several months before that day, Jamie had become increasingly restless and pensive; repeated questions from her as to what the problem was brought no response from him.

            And then, on the night of her birthday party came his stunning and devastating announcement of his plans to marry Laura Cummings, a twenty-two year girl he had met just four months earlier. The message had come across to Shea loud and clear…. The age difference was just too much for him to handle.

            Her heart wounded beyond any hope of recovery, Shea fled the city, going to stay with her sister in Santa Fe. Over the past eleven years, she had come to terms with his loss, but had never recovered from it. She had never fallen in love again, never married. Jamie had been too hard an act for any other man to follow; incomparable and without peer.

            With another sigh, she opened the door to Valentine’s and went in. She needed to exorcize old ghosts, and today was a perfect day to do it. Another milestone in her life… February 14^th… her fiftieth birthday.

            The interior of the place had changed little in the intervening years. Only the bartender seemed different, one of the many beautiful young creatures who worked jobs like this as they waited to get their big break in whatever business had brought them to Hollywood… acting, music, writing…         

            “What can I get for you today?” he asked her with a cheery smile.

            “How about a Long Island iced tea?” Shea requested. He made the drink with quick efficiency and handed it to her. She took it and went to sit in the booth that the old gang had always occupied on prior occasions, staring at the surface of the table on which the drink set as she contemplated the mistakes of her past.

She had been wrong to come here… all it did was stir up old, painful memories, had not laid any old demons to rest. Finish your drink and go, Shea, she told herself. There’s no reason to be here any more.

A shadow fell across the table, but she didn’t look up from her drink.

“Is this seat taken?” asked a voice whose familiarity had not faded one whit with the passages of time. She looked up to find Jamie standing there, an older Jamie, with a few fine wrinkles around his eyes, and a bit of gray at the sides of his collar length hair, but past that, not much changed. Strange that all she felt was the same awe that she had on the very first day that she had met him. There was no bitterness, no resentment, only the same longing that she had always felt when she had thought of him.

When she didn’t respond, he slid into the booth opposite her anyway and studied her appraisingly. “You don’t seem to have aged a day in the last ten years, Shea.”

“What are you doing here, Jamie?” she asked. “Surveying the wreckage?”

“I’m following an established tradition.” he replied. “I’ve come here on Valentine’s Day every year for the past nine years, hoping to find you here.”

“I can’t imagine why you would do such a silly thing.” she commented. “What ever did your wife say when you came here?”

“If you mean Laura, she hasn’t had much to say to me since our divorce about nine months after we got married.”

“So, the match made in heaven wasn’t?” Shea remarked cynically.      

“No, it wasn’t. I could never forget you. You don’t need to remind me of how much of an idiot I was, Shea. I’ve reminded myself every day for the past ten years. I’ve come back here every year, hoping to find you, hoping I could fix the mistake I made because I was a young, foolish boy, and I was more concerned about appearances than I was the truth. That you and I belong together. We did then, and we do now.”

She gave a bitter laugh. “We’re different people now, Jamie. Older people, much older. I’m fifty years old… what would you want with an old woman like me?”

“I’m older, too, Shea, and a lot wiser than I was before, I hope. Wise enough to realize that I’ve caused us to lose the last ten years, and wise enough to know that I want to make up for them. And if you’re older and wiser, too, you’ll realize that no matter how much older we are, we still have the time to change things.” He paused and held out a hand across the table to her. “What I want to know is are we going to try to do that?”

She stared across the table at him for a long moment with tears in her eyes, and then slipped her hand into his.

“I guess we can give it a try….”