Saving Grayce

By C.M. Berndt

A whirlwind summer romance gone wrong...


Grayce James was only nineteen years old when Private First Class Jack Dawson stole her heart and then crushed it under the heel of his combat boots little more than two months later.


A twisted web of lies...


When Grayce found out Jack was untruthful to her about the true cause of their breakup, she decided to keep a life changing secret of her own.


An unexpected reconnection...


A chance encounter at the grocery store throws Jack and Grayce back together over two years later, leading them on a heartbreaking, tangled, messy ride that just might lead to the truth... and forgiveness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312066007

Book preview

Part One

Chapter 1

When something happens to you that is going to seriously alter the course of your life, you would expect to feel it happen. For example, people tell stories of meeting the person they end up marrying and how they knew the very moment they first saw them, or first heard their voice, that it was going to turn out to be a forever thing. Some people talk about how on the day they had a bad car accident they just had a feeling when they woke up that morning that they should spend the day in bed. My whole life, I have been torn on whether or not to believe that or take it for the total load of baloney it sounds like.

I met Grant Landrie at a party in Eden Prairie, Minnesota when I was eighteen, back when I thought that going into the big city and partying was something that was cool to do every Friday, Saturday, Sunday and random night of the week. Growing up about thirty minutes away in very rural Minnetrista, population less than seven thousand, Eden Prairie was a whole new world for me. 

I was attending Hennepin Technical College there, and I had met quite a few people who lived in the city.  On the night I’m referencing, I was with a boy I had sort of been seeing, Dale, his best stoner friend JD, and my best party friend Hallie. Dale and I had a complicated relationship. He wanted to be with me, but only if he could be with everyone else, too. Needless to say, we weren’t really getting along. 

One night, on one of our adventures, the boys had acquired a keg, but had no place to have a party. So we ended up driving around the city aimlessly, with the keg in the trunk. We drove past a house that had an obvious party going on.  The boys left us in the car while they went up to the door. They announced they had a keg to share, as long as we could join the party, and just like that we had celebrity status at a house party on a street I was not familiar with, full of people I had never seen before in my life. 

When Dale went missing, I decided to do what I did best. Get drunk and meet people. Hallie and I were quite good at that, so we got to it. I had decided that I needed to play beer pong, and to do that, I needed a partner.

So I turned to the first person I saw and without thinking blurted out, Would you be my partner for the next game? The person said yes, and then I looked at him. I would like to say that this is the moment I was talking about earlier. Where the cosmic atmosphere shifted, and I suddenly knew right then that my life would never be the same. But it didn’t happen that way. Months later, I would look back at that moment and call it fate, kismet, anything to make it seem like it was one of those things that conceivably was meant to last a lifetime, but at the moment all I was thinking was that he was cute, and looked like a nice enough guy. 

I’m Grayce, I said to him. My friends call me Ray.

Grant, he replied. I warned him that I was terrible at the game, and he assured me that he also had no real talent. However, when the game started, he informed me that if I broke his seven-game winning streak he was never going to speak to me again. We were matched up against Hallie and the guy she had chosen to be her partner.

Of course, we lost. My aim and skills of depth perception, never extraordinarily high sober, took a huge hit when I was drunk. Contrary to what Grant had said though, he did speak to me again. He even asked if perhaps we would like to accompany him and his friend outside for a smoke. So we did. 

It was a freezing November-in-the Midwest night, and we were dressed for the party, not the weather. Snowflakes drifted down, setting quite a nice mood. However, the nice mood didn’t last when I learned that Dale and JD were looking for us, having heard that we had dared speak to somebody else. I won't lie, I had done the respectable thing to do and hid. Was it childish? Yes. But I was mad at the way they had treated us after we’d arrived at this house filled with strangers. Grant, who was actually one of the people who lived in the house, suggested that we go upstairs to his room and play video games. So Hallie and I agreed.

I remember walking up that hardwood floor staircase and thinking that this was just like one of those stories where girls get date raped and dumped on the side of some road, and that perhaps Hallie and I should find the boys we’d come with and get out of there, but I didn’t feel very much like I had been drugged, and those were things that happened in movies, after all. Luckily enough, this was one moment in my life where my snap decisions didn’t get me into too much trouble. 

So we settled into this stranger’s bedroom, and he got his Xbox gaming system ready for action. However, another type of action quickly ensued when suddenly Hallie curled into a ball on the floor and announced that she was going to be sick. I had spent close to the next hour holding her hair back while she threw up and people pounded on the door, seeing as it was the only bathroom in a house filled with drunk people. Not exactly a great first impression, I had thought.

Coincidentally, when Dale and JD had searched the house and didn’t see us, they thought that we had left. It was a pretty stupid assumption, considering they had driven us there and my car was still at Dale’s apartment complex, miles across the city. So I had been assailed with text messages threatening that they were leaving and if we were there or nearby, we had to present ourselves promptly or be left behind. At which point, I’d left Grant to take over the hair-holding and stumbled down two flights of stairs into the basement. I won’t hesitate to tell you that I was quite ticked off. 

I lit into those guys hotter than fireworks on the fourth of July. They seemed properly chastised when I showed them the state that Hallie was in, and gave me a chorus of pathetic, Sorry Ray’s. I had let them take over the nursing for a moment and followed Grant out for another smoke break. It was the cool thing to do then. 

His brother joined us outside, and they were as nice as can be about the whole having a girl puking in their bathroom for an hour thing. Hallie still wasn’t willing to leave the toilet, and as Dale and JD were in such a hurry to leave, Grant and his brother offered to let us use their couch as a crashing place. Of course, Dale and JD were not fond of this idea. I was touched at Grant and his brother’s concern but knew that this was one of those moments where it's best not to stay with virtual strangers when you’re drunk, you don’t even really know where you are, and your mode of transportation is a good hike across the city away. 

So JD put on his man pants and insisted on precariously carrying Hallie down the stairs. I had exchanged numbers with Grant, and as I walked unsteadily away from his house that night, I can’t really remember what I was thinking. I’d had a lot to drink, but I do remember that when he’d given me a hug and whispered, Later, Ray, in my ear, it had sent tingles down my spine.

I don’t know if I planned to see him again or not, but I texted him as soon as we left, and the messaging went on as the night continued, until unbeknownst to me, Dale had texted Grant from my phone, telling him that I was not interested in him.

So I suppose I can see why Grant was so surprised when I messaged him the next day. In the end, we decided to see each other again. Hallie came with, and we met Grant and the guy she’d been matched up with the night we’d met at the mall. I remember being all worried that I wouldn’t recognize him, or that he would be different than my drunk self had remembered. But the instant I saw him walking towards me I knew who he was, and I was not disappointed. We all saw a movie, then wandered the city, eventually ending up back at Grant’s. 

It was this night, this unblemished, unmarked, sober, clear night that I realized the hitch in my heart was there without the alcohol’s fuzzy tinge, and that those butterflies in my stomach showed up every time he smiled.

He was a gentleman of the worst sort, dragging our dating process out for a month and a half. He was six years older than me and freaked out that I was only eighteen. Finally, when I had just about decided he had no intention of actually being with me, he asked me on my nineteenth birthday if I would be his girlfriend. Coincidentally, it was while we were drunk and playing beer pong. I happily accepted, and the next few months were incredible. 

We had the kind of chemistry I had dreamed about my entire life, that heart stopping, still tripping over my words the way I did on our first date, tongue-tied, talking on the phone until three in the morning, kind of love. 

I’d always had a deep desire to find the one. All I wanted was to find the man I would marry, then actually marry him, and then start having his babies. I just wanted my real life to start, and I had been that way since I’d been sixteen and in love for the first time. I’d had a few boyfriends in high school that I’d thought had been real contenders, but none of them had been quite as ready to grow up as I had been. 

I thought that this time, with Grant, it might be different. After all, I was a grown woman now, out of high school by over six months. I had been working at a gas station in St. Bonifacius since graduation, and it might not have been a career, but it paid a decent wage, and I had money for the things I wanted. I was taking college classes and had plans for where my studies would go. I still lived with my parents, but that wasn’t all that strange considering I was only just barely nineteen, and the technical college I was attending didn’t have student housing. 

And he saw it as a liability, but I saw it as a point in forever’s favor that he was several years older than me. He was also attending classes at Hennepin Tech, and he had a solid job, lived on his own, and was definitely a grown man. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to settle down and get married, but he made casual references to a future that he said involved me, although he did continue to say many times that he worried I might be too young. 

That had been the reason behind his initial hesitation to make our dating official, but after a while, he’d seen that we were a good fit, and given us a chance. It was not a whirlwind romance by any means, but I liked that he was so thoughtful, that he took time to think things over. He thought with his brain, not his heart, which was a little bit of a foreign concept to a dreamer like me. 

Yes, everything was great. Aside from the fact that he had a crazy ex-girlfriend of three years that he was secretly still pining for.

Because I’m sweet, I’ll simply refer to her as Brittany, but usually we called her Crazy B. She was a manipulator, plain and simple, and she had Grant all tied up in knots. She would do whatever she had to do to get what she wanted, no matter the cost for the other people involved, and now that he’d moved on, she’d decided she wanted Grant again. She had treated him horribly for the longest time, cheating on him, always dragging him down, and blaming him for things that couldn’t possibly be his fault. She’d gotten him so convinced that she was the only one who would ever care about him that he had believed her. 

Of course, I had known about her from the start. It was kind of hard not to notice someone who messaged you on Facebook every day telling you how your boyfriend was meant to be with her, and only her. As soon as she had found out about me, she had made it her own personal goal to tear Grant and me apart. Not because she still loved him or wanted him for herself, but because it was all a game to her. She wanted Grant simply to prove that she could have him, and beyond that, she didn’t really care. 

Grant told me not to talk to her, that she was crazy, and if I didn’t respond to her she would eventually leave us alone. I had blocked her on all social media so that I didn’t get her messages anymore, and that seemed to have done the trick. Grant said he had done the same. Our relationship continued to grow, and I was more sure than ever that it was heading towards the dream of a real life that I had so coveted for so long. Marriage, babies, and my future - it was all finally within my grasp. 

Towards the end of our fourth month of dating, Grant and I were at a party, drunk and playing beer pong, and he told me that he loved me. Of course, I told him that I loved him too, and it only further solidified the feeling that this relationship was the real deal. 

The next day I received a lengthy message from Brittany, who had apparently created a fake profile just to be able to contact me, telling me that Grant was not being honest with me and that he hadn’t been for a long time. Grant happened to be sitting right behind me, reading over my shoulder when I opened the message. 

When I demanded to know what this was about, he told me that I needed to just ignore her. He said that she was just getting desperate since she hadn’t been able to mess with either of us, and that she knew we were in love and was trying her hardest to put a wedge between us.

He looked me in the eye and told me that he wasn’t keeping anything from me when I told him if he had something to say, he’d better say it then. But he was so clingy that night. I found it weird since he was never really overly affectionate. So despite his steady assurances that whatever she was saying could not possibly be true, I messaged her back after he’d left and asked her what she was talking about. She didn’t answer me right away, and I worried about what her response was going to be all day the next day while I was at work.

She had beaten around the bush, pretending that she didn’t want to cause trouble, but I knew that she was loving every minute of it. She proceeded to tell me that Grant had cheated on me with her the previous month, and that they had still been seeing each other when we weren’t officially dating, and on and on about how sorry she was, and on and on. Of course my first instinct was not to believe her. 

But in truth, Grant and I’d had a rough patch during that time period with lots of fighting. I’d had a feeling that he’d been doubting our relationship, and he had been busier than usual. It was enough to make me have doubts about the whole situation.

I tricked him into telling me himself. We were talking on the phone that night. He asked why I was upset, and I just said, Why is it that you don’t want me to talk to Brittany? What is it that you are afraid she will tell me? And then he said the words that destroyed me. 

She’ll tell you that a while ago I got drunk and made a huge mistake and that I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life.

So I reverted back to what I did best. Remember? I got drunk. Killed the rest of the bottle of Jack Daniels that I had hidden in my underwear drawer. Grant asked me if I would come see him, if we could talk it out. I told him that it was his mistake and that if he wanted to talk, he had to make the thirty minute drive to Minnetrista to see me. 

He picked me up at my parent’s house and we drove a few miles down the road to Surfside Park in Mound, one of our favorite places to go. There weren’t too many people around except for a few ice fishermen trying their luck on Cook’s Bay, and I’ll admit I took the opportunity for privacy and threw a tantrum worthy of a two-year-old in the candy aisle of a grocery store.

Then we sat together for close to two hours, going from the park to the car, back to the park, to the car again, as I paced and tried to reason through things. He assured me that what had happened was a mistake and that it would never happen again. Even Brittany had told me that it was mostly her fault, that she’d pressured him into it very hard and very cheaply. She had said that after that time, Grant had refused to see her or speak to her. But I wasn’t sure I could let it go. I’d been taking my time with Grant, not really doing a lot of physical things with him. He hadn’t pressured me, and I had to wonder now if that was because he’d been getting his fill elsewhere. 

Somehow, I had pushed past the disgust, betrayal, hurt and the anger and managed to fall apart all over again in his arms. You see, not even the hurt or anger I felt at that point could compare to the sick feeling I got when I tried to imagine my life without him. I had been so sure that this was heading towards something that would last forever, that I was able to push past all the bad feelings and promised him that I would think about agreeing for us to start our relationship over again with a clean slate. 

For days, I lay in my pajamas. I pretended like I was in such a hard spot, having to decide whether or not I could bring myself to give him a second chance. But in the end, I took him back, as deep down I had always known I would. Even though I knew it wasn’t a healthy thing to do, I just pretended that the whole thing had never even happened.

As impossible as it seemed, things were actually better after that. We were closer. It seemed like both of us had thought about what it would be like to be without the other person and hadn’t found the visual to be profoundly enticing. 

So it went back to the way it had been before, when I firmly believed I had everything I could want out of life. I had a job, I was on the path to higher education, a boyfriend who said he loved me and a family that supported me. But inevitably, the high points in life just never seemed to last as long as they should.

Chapter 2

My mother got into a terrible car accident on her way to work. She was unresponsive, not breathing, no pulse when she got off the med-flight at the hospital. I was at work when my dad called to tell me that he and our pastor were coming to pick me up. When he said the pastor was coming along, I knew it must be bad.

 My mother and I had left home that morning at the same time. We’d had an ice storm the night before, and we’d been trying to chip solid sheets of ice off our car windows together for some time.

I’d been running late, and just chipped a tiny section of my window clean. I’d been driving too fast. I slid through a stop sign. But I had made it safely to work. However, my mother, who took the time to scrape her window completely clean, who drove much more carefully than I, had not been so lucky. 

We got to the hospital after what seemed like hours, as the roads were still not in great condition. She’d been med flighted to St. Francis Regional Medical Center in Shakopee, which was about thirty minutes from Minnetrista and fifteen minutes from Eden Prairie. A social worker was sent out to see us. She said my mom was in a transition period. Not in surgery, but not in a room, either. 

At that point, I was pretty certain that my mom was dead. As I waited for news, I called Grant. I needed him, and he came. He ditched out of school, even though he was taking some difficult classes that semester and he drove the fifteen minutes to the hospital. Eventually we found out that my mother was indeed in surgery, and that the odds were not in her favor to pull through. Grant stayed with my family all day. He wiped away my tears, he distracted my father, and he tried to lighten our spirits while we waited to hear if my mom would live or die. 

My mother survived the surgery by a miracle, but we weren’t out of the woods just yet. I looked at her through the glass windows of her intensive care room, hooked up to tubes that were doing all her living for her, and listened as they said she might never breathe on her own. That she might never wake up, and even if she did, she might not know her own family. That she might never walk again. 

That night, as I was leaving the hospital with Grant and my dad, we stopped at the information desk to validate our parking slips, and there she was. 

Brittany. I had forgotten that Grant had mentioned once that she worked at a hospital. The place was such a huge maze of hallways and floors that it just seemed unlikely that we’d run into each other at all, yet there she was. Grant simply nodded to her, and she said something about how sorry she was for what my family was going through, and then Grant swept us away from there. 

In the following three weeks, Grant was a godsend. I was in and out of the hospital visiting my mom every day. I stayed over at his house or with another friend I knew from school to cut down on travel time, and he was always driving me to school, or to the hospital, and he’d shuttle me back and forth the thirty-minute drive to Minnetrista or St. Bonifacius when I had to work. He was kind, funny, and uplifting to my spirit as I went through the worst time of my life. 

My mother had proved the doctors wrong at every turn. She had in fact woken up, breathed on her own, known who her family was, and was learning to walk again, but it was devastating to see the pain she was in and the struggles she faced. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was also dealing with some post-traumatic stress from the whole thing as well.

Then something happened. At the time, I didn’t understand what.

Sure, we hardly had any time for each other outside of the hospital. Sure, tensions were running high, and patience was running low. Grant was studying to be a respiratory therapist and his classes were really tough that semester, and he was stressing out about it. He was nearing his twenty-fifth birthday and just seemed to fall into this funk that I couldn’t raise him from. Or maybe I never even really realized just how far into it he was. 

We were drifting apart, and a part of me noticed, but I couldn’t focus on it as much as I wanted to because I also had classes I was trying not to fail. I had hard family things to take care of. I had a job. 

And besides, he was my boyfriend. We were going to spend our lives together. He loved me, and I loved him. Relationships had hard times, but we would pull through. After all, he had cheated on me and lied to me and I’d forgiven him. Surely, he could forgive me for being absent or distracted more, or for needing more support from him than I had to give back to him just then.   

One night we were hanging out, and out of the blue he told me that he thought we might need to break up. He cited his need to buckle down and focus on his studies, and my need to focus on my family. I was blindsided, and overcome by the sick feeling in my stomach. After two hours of deep discussion, he told me that he’d decided to stay with me, after all. I reminded him that it was sure to be hard with the way my life was going right now, and he told me he knew that and that he wanted to be with me anyways.

I felt a deep sense of relief, but it didn’t last. He went against everything he said that night and three days later, he told me that it was over. He watched me cry for close to an hour and spoke words that ripped my already fragile world to pieces. He gave me a bunch of bogus reasons why we shouldn’t be together, and then I watched this man, the man I cared so deeply about, who had told me that he thought we could be together forever, raise our children together, but most of all who had told me he loved me, walk out of my life. 

I cried for days, not for Grant, but for my lost forever.

I finished out that spring semester of college, despite the mess my life was. I went to work when I was scheduled, although I was pretty down and people I didn’t even know told me I had to cheer up. I helped my mother work through her accident and the physical and emotional problems that came with it. It was a dark time, and the hardest period I had ever walked through. Even though I felt grown, I was so young to face all of that, and it felt like I was facing it alone. My family were all tied up in their own lives. My sister had her own husband, a job and a life, and my dad was trying to work and take care of my mom. 

I worked so hard at being strong, but I cried myself to sleep more than a few nights. I started slowly to hang out more with old friends from high school, and my work friends, who I hadn’t seen much of since I’d started dating Grant. It helped to be around them some, but soon, weeks had passed