ocky Mount, 2002

Adrienne had finished her story, and her throat was dry. Despite the breezy effects of a single glass of wine, she could feel the ache in her back from sitting in one position too long. She shifted in her chair, felt a tinge of pain, and recognized it as the beginnings of arthritis. When she’d mentioned it to her physician, he’d made her sit on the table in a room that smelled of ammonia. He’d raised her arms and asked her to bend her knees, then gave her a prescription that she’d never bothered to fill. It wasn’t that serious yet, she told herself; besides, she had a theory that once she started taking pills for one ailment, more pills would soon follow for everything else that doomed people of her age. Soon, they’d be coming in the color of rainbows, some taken in the morning, others at night, some with food and some without, and she’d need to tape up a chart on the inside of her medicine cabinet to keep them straight. It was more bother than it was worth.

Amanda was sitting with her head bowed. Adrienne watched her, knowing the questions would come. They were inevitable, but she hoped they wouldn’t come immediately. She needed time to collect her thoughts, so she could finish what she’d started.

She was glad Amanda had agreed to meet her here, at the house. She’d lived here for over thirty years, and it was home to her, even more than the place she’d lived as a child. Granted, some of the doors hung crookedly, the carpet was worn paper thin in the hallway, and the colors of the bathroom tiles had been out of style for years, but there was something reassuring about knowing that she could find camping gear in the far left corner of the attic or that the heat pump would trip the fuse the first time it was used in the winter. This place had habits; so did she, and over the years, she supposed they’d meshed in such a way as to make her life more predictable and oddly comforting.

It was the same in the kitchen. Both Matt and Dan had been offering to have it remodeled for the last couple of years, and for her birthday they’d arranged to have a contractor come through to look the place over. He’d tapped on doors, jabbed his screwdriver in the corners of the cracking counters, turned the switches on and off, and whistled under his breath when he saw the ancient range she still used to cook with. In the end, he’d recommended she replace just about everything, then dropped off an estimate and a list of references. Though Adrienne knew her sons had meant well, she told them that they’d be better off saving the money for something they needed for their own families.

Besides, she liked the old kitchen as it was. Updating it would change its character, and she liked the memories forged here. It was here, after all, that they’d spent most of their time together as a family, both before and after Jack had moved out. The kids had done their homework at the table where she now sat; for years, the only phone in the house hung on the wall, and she could still remember those times when she’d seen the cord wedged between the back door and the frame as one of the kids tried his or her best for a bit of privacy by standing on the porch. On the shelf supports in the pantry were the penciled markings that showed how fast and tall the children had grown over the years, and she couldn’t imagine wanting to get rid of that for something new and improved, no matter how fancy it was. Unlike the living room, where the television continually blared, or the bedrooms where everyone retreated to be alone, this was the one place everyone had come to talk and to listen, to learn and to teach, to laugh and to cry. This was the place where their home was what it was supposed to be; this was the place where Adrienne had always felt most content.

And this was the place where Amanda would learn who her mother really was.

Adrienne drank the last of her wine and pushed the glass aside. The rain had stopped now, but the drops remaining on the window seemed to bend the light in such a way as to make the world outside into something different, a place she couldn’t quite recognize. This didn’t surprise her; as she’d grown older, she’d found that as her thoughts drifted to the past, everything around her always seemed to change. Tonight, as she told her story, she felt as if the intervening years had been reversed, and though it was a ridiculous notion, she wondered if her daughter had noticed a newfound youthfulness about her.

No, she decided, she almost certainly hadn’t, but that was a product of Amanda’s age. Amanda could no more conceive of being sixty than she could of being a man, and Adrienne sometimes wondered when Amanda would realize that for the most part, people weren’t all that different. Young and old, male or female, pretty much everyone she knew wanted the same things: They wanted to feel peace in their hearts, they wanted a life without turmoil, they wanted to be happy. The difference, Adrienne thought, was that most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older people believed that they lay in the past.

It was true for her as well, at least partly, but as wonderful as the past had been, she refused to allow herself to remain lost in it the way many of her friends had. The past wasn’t merely a garden of roses and sunshine; the past held its share of heartbreak as well. She had felt that way about Jack’s effects on her life when she’d first arrived at the Inn, and she felt that way about Paul Flanner now.

Tonight, she would cry, but as she’d promised herself every day since he’d left Rodanthe, she would go on. She was a survivor, as her father had told her many times, and though there was a certain satisfaction to that knowledge, it didn’t erase the pain or regrets.

Nowadays, she tried to focus on those things that brought her joy. She loved to watch the grandchildren as they discovered the world, she loved to visit with friends and find out what was happening in their lives, she had even come to enjoy the days she spent working in the library.

The work wasn’t hard—she now worked in the special reference section, where books couldn’t be checked out— and because hours might pass before she was needed for something, it offered her the opportunity to watch people who pushed through the glassed entryway of the building. She’d developed a fondness for that over the years. As people sat at the tables or in the chairs in the quiet rooms, she found it impossible not to try to imagine their lives. She would try to figure out if a person was married or what she did for a living, where in town she lived, or what books might interest her, and occasionally, she would have the chance to find out whether she’d been right. The person might come to her for help in finding a particular book, and she’d strike up a friendly conversation. More often than not, she’d end up being fairly close in her guesses and would wonder how she’d known.

Every now and then, someone would come in who was interested in her. Years ago, those men had usually been older than she was; now they tended to be younger, hut either way, the process was the same. Whoever he was, he would start spending time in special reference, would ask a lot of questions, first about books, then about general topics, and finally about her. She didn’t mind answering them, and though she never led them on, most of them eventually asked her out. She was always a bit flattered when that happened, but at her core she knew that no matter how wonderful this suitor might he, no matter how much she enjoyed his company, she wouldn’t be able to open her heart to him in the way she once had done.

Her time in Rodanthe had changed her in other ways as well. Being with Paul had healed her feelings of loss and betrayal over the divorce and replaced them with something stronger and more graceful. Knowing that she was worthy of being loved made it easier to hold her head high, and as her confidence grew, she was able to speak to Jack without hidden meanings or insinuations, without the blame and regret that she’d been unable to hide in her tone in the past. It happened gradually; he’d call to talk to the kids, and they’d visit for a few minutes before she handed off the phone. Later, she’d begun asking about Linda or his job, or she’d fill him in on what she’d been doing recently. Little by little, Jack seemed to realize that she was no longer the person she used to be. Those visits became more friendly with the passing months and years, and sometimes they called each other just to chat. When his marriage to Linda started to unravel, they’d spent hours on the phone, sometimes until late in the night. When Jack and Linda divorced, Adrienne had been there to help him through his grief, and she’d even allowed him to stay in the guest bedroom when he came to see the kids. Ironically, Linda had left him for another man, and Adrienne could remember sitting with Jack in the living room as he swirled a glass of Scotch. It was past midnight, and he’d been rambling for a few hours about what he was going through, when he finally seemed to realize who it was that was listening to him.

“Did it hurt this bad for you?” he asked.

“Yes,” Adrienne said.

“How long did it take to get over it?”

“Three years,” she said, “but I was lucky.”

Jack nodded. Pressing his lips together, he stared into his drink.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The dumbest thing I ever did was to walk out that door.”

Adrienne smiled and patted his knee. “I know, But thank you anyway.”

It was about a year after that when Jack called to ask her to dinner. And as she had with all the others, Adrienne politely said no.

Adrienne rose and went to the counter to retrieve the box she’d carried from her bedroom earlier, then came back to the table. By then, Amanda was watching her with almost wary fascination. Adrienne smiled as she reached for her daughter’s hand.

As she did, Adrienne could see that sometime during the past couple of hours, Amanda had realized that she didn’t know as much about her mother as she thought she did. It was, Adrienne thought, a role reversal of sorts.

Amanda had the same look in her eyes that Adrienne sometimes had in the past, when the kids would get together over the holidays and joke about some of the things they’d done when they were younger. It was only a couple of years ago that she’d learned that Matt used to sneak out of his room to go out with friends late at night, or that Amanda had both started and quit smoking as a junior, or that Dan had been the one who’d started the small fire in the garage that had been blamed on a faulty electrical outlet. She’d laughed along with them, feeling naive at the same time, and she wondered if that was the way Amanda was feeling now.

On the wall, the clock was ticking, the sound regular and even. The heat pump clicked on with a thump. In time, Amanda sighed.

“That was quite a story,” she said.

As she spoke, Amanda fingered her wineglass with her free hand, rotating the glass in circles. The wine caught the light, making it shimmer.

“Do Matt and Dan know? I mean, have you told them about it?”

“No.”

“Why not ?”

“I’m not sure they need to know.” Adrienne smiled. “And besides, I don’t know if they would understand, no matter what I told them. They’re men, for one thing, and a little on the protective side—I don’t want them to think that Paul was simply preying on a lonely woman. Men are like that sometimes—if they meet someone and fall in love, it’s real, no matter how fast it happened. But if someone falls for a woman they happen to care about, all they do is question the man’s intentions. To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll ever tell them.”

Amanda nodded before asking, “Why me, then?”

“Because I thought you needed to hear it.”

Absently, Amanda began to twirl a strand of hair. Adrienne wondered if that habit was genetic or learned by watching her mother.

“Mom ?”

“Yes ?”

“Why didn’t you tell us about him? I mean, you never mentioned anything about it.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

Adrienne leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. “In the beginning, I guess I was afraid it wasn’t real. I know we loved each other, but distance can do strange things to people, and before I was willing to tell you about it, I wanted to be certain that it would last. Then later, when I started getting letters from him and knew it would . . . I don’t know . . . it just seemed such a long time until you could meet him that I didn’t see the point in it. .”

She trailed off before choosing her next words carefully.

“You also have to realize that you’re not the same person now that you were then. You were seventeen, Dan was only fifteen, and I didn’t know if any of you were ready to hear something like this. I mean, how would you have felt if you’d come back from your father’s and I told you that I was in love with someone I’d just met?”

“We could’ve handled it.”

Adrienne was skeptical about that, but she didn’t argue with Amanda. Instead, she shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you could have accepted something like this, but at the time, I didn’t want to take the chance. And if I had to do it all over, I’d probably do the same thing again.”

Amanda shifted in her chair. After a moment, she looked her mother in the eye. “Are you sure he loved you?” she asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Amanda’s eyes looked almost blue green in the fading light. She smiled gently, as if trying to make an obvious point without hurting her mother.

Adrienne knew what Amanda would ask next. It was, she thought, the only logical question left.

Amanda leaned forward, her face filled with concern. “Then where is he?”

In the fourteen years since she’d last seen Paul Flanner, Adrienne had traveled to Rodanthe five times. Her first trip had been during June of the same year, and though the sand seemed whiter and the ocean melted into the sky at the horizon, she made the remainder of her trips during the winter months, when the world was gray and cold, knowing that it was a more potent reminder of the past.

On the morning that Paul left, Adrienne wandered the house, unable to stay in one place. Movement seemed to be

the only way she could stay ahead of her feelings. Late in the afternoon, as dusk was beginning to dress the sky in faded shades of red and orange, she went outside and looked into those colors, trying to find the plane that Paul was on. The odds of seeing it were infinitesimal, but she stayed out anyway, growing chilled as the evening deepened. Between the clouds, she saw an occasional jet trail, but logic told her they were from planes stationed at the naval base in Norfolk. By the time she went in, her hands were numb, and at the sink she ran warm tap water over them, feeling the sting. Though she understood that he was gone, she set two place settings at the dinner table just the same.

Part of her had hoped he would come back. As she ate her dinner, she imagined him coming through the front door and dropping his bags, explaining that he couldn’t leave without another night together. They would leave tomorrow or the next day, he would say, and they would follow the highway north, until she made the turn for home.

But he didn’t. The front door never swung open, the phone never rang. As much as Adrienne longed for him to stay, she knew she’d been right when she’d urged him on his way. Another day wouldn’t make it easier to leave; another night together would only mean they’d have to say good-bye again, and that had been hard enough the first time. She couldn’t imagine having to say those words a second time, nor could she imagine having to relive another day like the one she had just spent.

The following morning, she began cleaning the Inn,

moving steadily, focusing on the routine. She washed the dishes and made sure everything was dried and put away. She vacuumed the area rugs, swept the sand from the kitchen and entranceway, dusted the balustrade and lamps in the sitting room, then worked on Jean’s room until she was satisfied that it looked the same as when she’d arrived.

Then, after carrying her suitcase upstairs, she unlocked the door to the blue room.

She hadn’t been in there since the previous morning. The afternoon sunlight cast prisms on the walls, He’d fixed the bed before he’d gone downstairs but seemed to have realized that he didn’t need to make it neat. There were slight bulges under the comforter where the blanket had wrinkled, and the sheet poked out in a few places, nearly grazing the floor. In the bathroom, a towel hung over the curtain rod, and two more had been lumped together near the sink.

She stood without moving, taking it all in, before finally exhaling and putting down her suitcase. As she did, she saw the note that Paul had written her, propped on the bureau. She reached for it and slowly sat on the edge of the bed. In the quiet of the room where they’d loved each other, she read what he had penned the morning before.

When she was finished, Adrienne lowered the note and sat without moving, thinking of him as he’d written it. Then, after folding it carefully, she put it into her suitcase along with the conch. When Jean arrived a few hours later, Adrienne was leaning against the railing on the back porch, looking toward the sky again.

Jean was her normal, exuberant self, happy to see Adrienne, happy to be back home, and talking incessantly about the wedding and the old hotel in Savannah where she had stayed. Adrienne let Jean go on with her stories without interruption, and after dinner, she told Jean that she wanted to take a walk on the beach. Thankfully, Jean passed on the invitation to go with her.

When she got back, Jean was unpacking in her room, and Adrienne made herself a cup of hot tea and went to sit near the fireplace. As she was rocking, she heard Jean enter the kitchen.

“Where are you?” Jean called out.

“In here,” Adrienne answered.

Jean rounded the corner a moment later, “Did I hear the teakettle whistle ?”

“I just made a cup.”

“Since when do you drink tea?”

Adrienne gave a short laugh but didn’t answer.

Jean settled in the rocker beside her. Outside, the moon was rising, hard and brilliant, making the sand glow with the color of antique pots and pans.

“You’ve been kind of quiet tonight,” Jean said.

“Sorry.” Adrienne shrugged. “I’m just a little tired. 1 guess I’m just ready to go home.”

“I’m sure. I was counting the miles as soon as I left Savannah, but at least there wasn’t much traffic. Off-season, you know.”

Adrienne nodded.

Jean leaned back in her chair. “Did it go okay with Paul Flanner? I hope the storm didn’t ruin his stay.”

Heating his name made Adrienne’s throat catch, but she tried to appear calm. “I don’t think the storm bothered him at all,” she said.

“Tell me about him. From his voice, I got the impression that he was kind of stuffy.”

“No, not all, He was . . . nice.”

“Was it strange being alone with him?”

“No. Not once I got used to it.”

Jean waited to see if Adrienne would add anything else, but she didn’t.

“Well.. . good,” Jean continued, “And you didn’t have any trouble boarding up the house?”

“No.”

“I’m glad. I appreciate your doing that for me. I know you were hoping for a quiet weekend, but I guess fate wasn’t on your side, huh?”

“I suppose not.”

Perhaps it was the way she said it that drew Jean’s glance, a curious expression on her face. Suddenly needing space, Adrienne finished her tea.

“I hate to do this to you, Jean,” she said, trying her best to make her voice sound natural, “but I think I’ll call it a night. I’m tired, and I’ve got a long drive tomorrow. I’m glad you had a good time at the wedding.”

Jean’s eyebrows rose slightly at her friend’s abrupt ending to the evening.

“Oh . . . well, thank you,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

Adrienne could feel Jean’s uncertain gaze on her, even as she made her way up the stairs. After unlocking the door to

the blue room, she slipped out of her clothes and crawled into the bed, naked and alone.

She could smell Paul on the pillow and on the sheets, and she absently traced her breast as she buried herself in the smell, fighting sleep until she could do so no longer. When she rose the following morning, she started a pot of coffee and took another walk on the beach.

She passed two other couples in the half hour she spent outside. A front had pushed warmer air over the island, and she knew the day would lure even more people to the water’s edge.

Paul would have arrived at the clinic by now, and she wondered what it was like. She had an image in her mind, something she might have seen on one of the nature channels—a series of hastily assembled buildings surrounded by an encroaching jungle, ruts in a curving dirt road out front, exotic birds chirping in the background—but she doubted that she was right. She wondered if he had talked to Mark yet and how the meeting had gone, and whether Paul, like she, was still reliving the weekend in his mind.

The kitchen was empty when she got back. She could see the sugar bowl open by the coffeemaker with an empty cup beside it. Upstairs, she could hear the faint sound of someone humming.

Adrienne followed the sound, and when she reached the second floor, she could see the door to the blue room cracked open. Adrienne drew nearer, pushing the door open farther, and saw Jean bending over, tucking in the final corner of a fresh sheet. The old linens, the linen that

had once wrapped her and Paul together, had been bundled and tossed on the floor.

Adrienne stared at the sheets, knowing it was ridiculous to be upset but suddenly realizing it would be at least a year until she smelled Paul Flanner again. She inhaled raggedly, trying to stifle a cry.

Jean turned in surprise at the sound, her eyes wide.

“Adrienne?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

But Adrienne couldn’t answer. All she could do was bring her hands to her face, aware that from this point on, she would he marking the days on the calendar until Paul returned.

“Paul,” Adrienne answered her daughter, “is in Ecuador.” Her voice, she noted, was surprisingly steady.

“Ecuador,” Amanda repeated. Her fingers tapped the table as she stared at her mother. “Why didn’t he come back?”

“He couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

Instead of answering, Adrienne lifted the lid of the stationery box, From inside, she pulled out a piece of paper that looked to Amanda as if it had been torn from a student’s notebook. Folded over, it had yellowed with age. Amanda saw her mother’s name written across the front.

“Before I tell you,” Adrienne went on, “I want to answer your other question.”

“What other question?”

Adrienne smiled. “You asked whether I was sure that Paul loved me.” She slid the piece of paper across the table to her daughter. “This is the note he wrote to me on the day that he left.”

Amanda hesitated before taking it, then slowly unfolded the paper. With her mother sitting across from her, she began to read.

Dear Adrienne,

You weren’t beside me when I woke this morning, and though I know why you left, I wish you hadn’t. I know that’s selfish of me, but I suppose that’s one of the traits that’s stayed with me, the one constant in my life.

If you’re reading this, it means I’ve left. When I’m finished writing, I’m going to go downstairs and ask to stay with you longer, but I’m under no illusions as to what you’re going to say to me.

This isn’t a good-bye, and I don’t want you to think for a moment that it’s the reason for this letter. Rather, I’m going to look at the year ahead as a chance to get to know you even better than I do. I’ve heard of people falling in love through letters, and though we’re already there, it doesn’t mean our love can’t grow deeper, does it? I’d like to think it’s possible, and if you want to know the truth, that conviction is the only thing I expect to help me make it through the next year without you.

If I close my eyes, I can see you walking along the beach on our first night together. With lightning flickering on your face, you were absolutely beautiful, and I think that’s part of the reason I was able to open up to you in a

way I never had with anyone else. But it wasn’t just your beauty that moved me. It was everything you are—your courage and your passion, the commonsense wisdom with which you view the world. I think I sensed these things about you the first time we had coffee, and if anything, the more I got to know you, the more I realized how much I’d missed these qualities in my own life. You are a rare find, Adrienne, and I’m a lucky man for having had the chance to come to know you.

I hope that you’re doing okay. As I write this letter, I know that I’m not. Saying good-bye to you today is the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do, and when I get back, I can honestly swear that I’ll never do it again. I love you now for what we’ve already shared, and I love you now in anticipation of all that’s to come. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I miss you already, but I’m sure in my heart that you’ll be with me always. In the few days I spent with you, you became my dream.

Paul

The year following Paul’s departure was unlike any year in Adrienne’s life. On the surface, things went on as usual. She was active in her children’s lives, she visited with her father once a day, she worked at the library as she always had. But she carried with her a new zest, fueled by the secret she kept inside, and the change in her attitude wasn’t lost on people around her. She smiled more, they sometimes commented, and even her children occasionally noticed that she took walks after dinner or spent an hour now and then lingering in the tub, ignoring the mayhem around her.

She thought of Paul always in those moments, but his image was most real whenever she saw the mail truck coming up the road, stopping and starting with each delivery on the route.

The mail usually arrived between ten and eleven in the morning, and Adrienne would stand by the window, watching as the truck paused in front of her house. Once it was gone, she would walk to the box and sort through the bundle, looking for the telltale signs of his letters: the beige airmail envelopes he favored, postage stamps that depicted a world she knew nothing about, his name scrawled in the upper-left-hand corner.

When his first letter arrived, she read it on the back porch. As soon as she was finished, she started from the beginning and read it a second time more slowly, pausing and lingering over his words. She did the same with each subsequent letter, and as they began to arrive regularly, she realized that the message in Paul’s note had been true. Though it wasn’t as gratifying as seeing him or feeling his arms around her, the passion in his words somehow made the distance between them seem that much less. She loved to imagine how he looked as he wrote the letters. She pictured him at a battered desk, a single bulb illuminating the weary expression on his face. She wondered if he wrote quickly, the words flowing uninterrupted, or whether he would stop now and then to stare into space, collecting his thoughts. Sometimes her images took one form; with the next letter they might take another, depending on what he’d written, and Adrienne would close her eyes as she held it, trying to divine his spirit.

She wrote to him as well, answering questions that he’d asked and telling him what was going on in her life. On those days, she could almost see him beside her; if the breeze moved her hair, it was as if Paul were gently running a finger over her skin; if she heard the faint ticking of a clock, it was the sound of Paul’s heart as she rested her head on his chest. But when she set the pen down, her thoughts always returned to their final moments together, holding each other on the graveled drive, the soft brush of his lips, the promise of a single year apart, then a lifetime together.

Paul also called every so often, when he had an opportunity to head into the city, and hearing the tenderness in his voice always made her throat constrict. So did the sound of his laughter or the ache in his tone as he told her how much he missed her. He called during the day, when the kids were at school, and whenever she heard the phone ringing, she found herself pausing before she answered it, hoping it was Paul. The conversations didn’t last long, usually less than twenty minutes, but coupled with the letters, it was enough to get her through the next few months.

At the library, she began photocopying pages from a variety of books on Ecuador, everything from geography to history, anything that caught her eye. Once, when one of the travel magazines did a piece on the culture there, she bought the magazine and sat for hours studying the pictures and practically memorizing the article, trying to learn as much as she could about the people he was working with. Sometimes, despite herself, she wondered whether any of

the women there ever looked at him with the same desire she had.

She also scanned the microfiched pages of newspapers and medical journals, looking for information on Paul’s life in Raleigh. She never wrote or mentioned that she was doing this—as he often said in his letters, that was a person he never wanted to be again—but she was curious. She found the piece that had run in The Wall Street Journal, with a drawing of him at the top of the article. The article said he was thirty-eight, and when she stared at the face, she saw for the first time what he’d looked like when he was younger. Though she recognized his picture immediately, there were some differences that caught her eye—the darker hair parted at the side, the unlined face, the too serious, almost hard expression—that felt unfamiliar. She remembered wondering what he would think of the article now or whether he would care about it at all.

She also found some photos of him in old copies of the Raleigh News and Observer, meeting the governor or attending the opening of the new hospital wing at Duke Medical Center. She noted that in every picture she saw, he never seemed to smile. It was, she thought, a Paul she couldn’t imagine.

In March, for no special reason, Paul arranged to have roses sent to her house and then began having them sent every month. She would place the bouquets in her room, assuming that her children would eventually notice and mention something about them; but they were lost in their own worlds and never did.

In June, she went back to Rodanthe for a long weekend

with Jean. Jean seemed edgy when she arrived, as if still trying to figure out what had upset Adrienne the last time she was there, but after an hour of easy conversation, Jean was back to normal. Adrienne walked the beach a few times that weekend, looking for another conch, but she never found one that hadn’t been broken in the waves.

When she arrived back home, there was a letter from Paul with a photograph that Mark had taken. In the background was the clinic, and though Paul was thinner than he’d been six months earlier, he looked healthy. She propped the photograph against the salt and pepper shakers as she wrote him a letter in response. In his letter, he’d asked for a photograph of her, and she sorted through her photo albums until she found one that she was willing to offer him.

Summer was hot and sticky; most of July was spent indoors with the air-conditioning running; in August, Matt headed off to college, while Amanda and Dan went back to high school. As the leaves on the trees turned to amber in the softer autumn sunlight, she began thinking of things that Paul and she might do together when he returned. She imagined going to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville to see the holiday decorations; she wondered what the children would think of him when he came over for Christmas dinner or what Jean would do when she booked a room at the Inn in both their names right after the New Year. No doubt, Adrienne thought with a smile, Jean would raise an eyebrow at that. Knowing her, she would say nothing at first, preferring to walk around with a smug expression that

said she’d known all along and had been expecting their visit.

Now, sitting with her daughter, Adrienne recalled those plans, musing that in the past, there had been moments when she’d almost believed they’d really happened. She used to imagine the scenarios in vibrant detail, but lately she’d forced herself to stop. The regret that always followed the pleasure of those fantasies left her feeling empty, and she knew her time was better spent on those around her, who were still part of her life. She didn’t want to feel the sorrow brought on by such dreams ever again. But sometimes, despite her best intentions, she simply couldn’t help it.

“Wow,” Amanda murmured as she lowered the note and handed it back to her mother.

Adrienne folded it along its original crease, put it aside, then pulled out the photograph of Paul that Mark had taken.

“This is Paul,” she said.

Amanda took the photo. Despite his age, he was more handsome than she had imagined. She stared at the eyes that had seemed to so captivate her mother. After a moment, she smiled.

“I can see why you fell for him. Do you have any more?”

“No,” she said, “that’s it.”

Amanda nodded, studying the photo again.

“You described him well.” She hesitated. “Did he ever send a picture of Mark?”

“No, hut they look alike,” Adrienne said.

“You met him?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Where?”

“Here.”

Amanda’s eyebrows rose. “At the house?”

“He sat where you’re sitting now.”

“Where were we?”

“In school.”

Amanda shook her head, trying to process this new information. “Your story’s getting confusing,” she said.

Adrienne looked away, then slowly rose from the table. As she left the kitchen, she whispered, “It was to me, too.”

 

By October, Adrienne’s father had recovered somewhat from his earlier strokes, though not enough to allow him to leave the nursing home. Adrienne had been spending time with him as always throughout the year, keeping him company and doing her best to make him more comfortable.

By budgeting carefully, she’d managed to save enough to keep him in the home until April, hut after that, she would be at a loss as to what to do. Like the swallows to Capistrano, she always came back to this worry, though she did her best to hide her fears from him.

On most days when she arrived, the television would he blaring, as if the morning nurses believed that noise would

somehow clear the fogginess in his mind. The first thing Adrienne did was turn it off. She was her father’s only regular visitor besides the nurses. While she understood her children’s reluctance to come, she wished they would do so anyway. Not only for her father, who wanted to see them, but for their own good as well. She had always believed it important to spend time with family in good times and in difficult ones, for the lessons it could teach.

Her father had lost the ability to speak, but she knew he could understand those who talked to him. With the right side of his face paralyzed, his smile had a crooked shape that she found endearing, It took maturity and patience to look past the exterior and see the man they had once known; though her kids had sometimes surprised her by demonstrating those qualities, they were usually uncomfortable when she’d made them visit. It was as if they looked at their grandfather and saw a future they couldn’t imagine facing and were frightened by the thought that they, too, might end up that way.

She would plump his pillows before sitting beside the bed, then take his hand and talk. Most of the time she filled him in on recent events, or family, or how the children were doing, and he would stare at her, his eyes never leaving her face, silently communicating in the only way he could. Sitting beside him, she would inevitably remember her childhood—the smell of Aqua Velva on his face, pitching hay in the horse stall, the brush of stubble as he’d kissed her good night, the tender words he’d always spoken since she was a little girl.

On the day before Halloween, she went to visit him,

knowing what she had to do, thinking it was time he finally knew.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” she began. Then, as simply as possible, she told him about Paul and how much he meant to her.

When she finished, she remembered wondering what he thought about what she’d just said. His hair was white and thinning: His eyebrows reminded her of puffs of cotton.

He smiled then, his crooked smile, and though he made no sound, when he moved his lips, she knew what he was trying to say.

The back of her throat tightened, and she leaned across the bed, resting her head on his chest. His good hand went to her hack, moving weakly, soft and light. Beneath her, she could feel his ribs, brittle and frail now, and the gentle beating of his heart.

“Oh, Daddy,” she whispered, “I’m proud of you, too.”

In the living room, Adrienne went to the window and pushed aside the curtains. The street was empty, and the streetlights were circled with glowing halos. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked a warning to a real or imagined intruder.

Amanda was still in the kitchen, though Adrienne knew she would eventually come to find her. It had been a long night for both of them, and Adrienne brought her finger to the glass.

What had they been to each other, she and Paul? Even

now, she still wasn’t sure. There wasn’t an easy definition. He hadn’t been her husband or fiancé; calling him a boyfriend made it sound as if he were a teenage infatuation; lover captured only a small part of what they had shared. He was the only person in her life, she thought, who seemed to defy description, and she wondered how many others could say the same thing about someone in their life.

Above her, a ringed moon was surrounded by indigo clouds, rolling east in the breeze. By tomorrow morning, it would be raining at the coast, and Adrienne knew she’d been right to hold back the other letters from Amanda.

What could Amanda have learned by reading them? The details of Paul’s life at the clinic and how he spent his days, perhaps? Or his relationship with Mark and how it had progressed? All of that was clearly spelled out in the letters, as were his thoughts and hopes and fears, but none of that was necessary for what she hoped to impart to Amanda. The items she had set aside would be enough.

Yet once Amanda was gone, she knew she would read all of the letters again, if only because of what she’d done tonight. In the yellow light of her bedside lamp, she would run her finger over the words, savoring each one, knowing they meant more to her than anything else she owned.

Tonight, despite the presence of her daughter, Adrienne was alone. She would always be alone. She knew this as she’d told her story in the kitchen earlier, she knew this as she stood at the window now. Sometimes she wondered who she would have been had Paul never come into

her life. Perhaps she would have married again, and though she suspected she would have been a good wife, she often wondered whether she would have picked a good husband.

It wouldn’t have been easy. Some of her widowed or divorced friends had remarried. Most of these gentlemen they married seemed nice enough, but they were nothing like Paul, Jack, maybe, but not Paul. She believed that romance and passion were possible at any age, hut she’d listened to enough of her friends to know that many relationships ended up being more trouble than they were worth. Adrienne didn’t want to settle for a husband like the ones her friends had, not when she had letters reminding her of what she was missing. Would a new husband, for instance, ever whisper the words that Paul had written in his third letter, words she’d memorized the first day she’d read them?

When I sleep, I dream of you, and when I wake, I long to hold you in my arms. If anything, our time apart has only made me more certain that I want to spend my nights by your side, and my days with your heart.

Or these, from the next letter?

When I write to you, I feel your breath; when you read them, I imagine you feel mine. Is it that way with you too? These letters are part of us now, part of our history, a reminder forever that we made it through this time.

Thank you for helping me survive this year, but more than

that, thank you in advance for all the years to come.

Or even these, after he and Mark had an argument later in the summer, something that inevitably left him depressed.

There’s so much I wish for these days, but most of all, I wish you were here. It’s strange, but before I met you, I couldn’t remember the last time that I cried. Now, it seems that tears come easily to me . . . but you have a way of making my sorrows seem worthwhile, of explaining things in a way that lessens my ache. You are a treasure, a gift, and when we’re together again, I intend to hold you until my arms are weak and I can do it no longer. My thoughts of you are sometimes the only things that keep me going.

Staring at the distant face of the moon, Adrienne knew the answer. No, she thought, she wouldn’t find a man like Paul again, and as she leaned her head against the cool pane, she sensed Amanda’s presence behind her. Adrienne sighed, knowing it was time to finish this.

“He was going to be here for Christmas,” Adrienne said, her voice so soft that Amanda had to strain hear it. “I had it all worked out. I’d arranged for a hotel room,” she said, “so we could be together his first night back. I even bought a bottle of pinot grigio.” She paused. “There’s a letter from Mark in the box on the table that explains everything.”

“What happened?”

In the darkness, Adrienne finally turned. Her face was

half in shadow, and at the expression on her mother’s face, Amanda felt a sudden chill.

It took a moment for Adrienne to answer, the words floating through the darkness.

“Don’t you know?” she whispered.