Nights in Rodanthe - Nicholas Sparks [11]
Two weeks after Mark had gone, Martha filed for divorce.
If Mark’s words had once made him angry, Martha’s words left him stunned. He started to try to talk her out of it, but Martha gently cut him off.
“Will you really miss me?” she said. “We hardly know each other anymore.”
“I can change,” he said.
Martha smiled. “I know you can. And you should. But you should do it because you want to, not because you think I want you to.”
Paul spent the next couple of weeks in a daze, and a month after that, after he had completed a routine operation, sixty-two-year-old Jill Torrelson of Rodanthe, North Carolina, died in the recovery room.
It was that terrible event, following on the heels of the others, he knew, that had led him to this road now.
After finishing his coffee, Paul got back in the car and made his way to the highway again. In forty-five minutes, he’d reached Morehead City. He crossed over the bridge to Beaufort, followed the turns, then headed down east, toward Cedar Point.
There was a peaceful beauty to the coastal lowlands, and he slowed the car, taking it all in. Life, he knew, was different here. As he drove, he marveled at the people driving in the opposite direction who waved at him, and the group of older men, sitting on a bench outside a gas station, who seemed to have nothing better to do than watch the cars pass by.
In midafternoon, he caught the ferry to Ocracoke, a village at the southern end of the Outer Banks. There were only four other cars on the ferry, and on the two-hour ride, he visited with a few of the other passengers. He spent the night at a motel in Ocracoke, woke when the white ball of light rose over the water, had an early breakfast, and then spent the next few hours walking through the rustic village, watching people ready their homes for the storm brewing off the coast.
When he was finally ready, he tossed the duffel bag into his car and began the trip northward, to the place he had to go.
The Outer Banks, he thought, were both strange and mystical. With saw grass speckling the rolling dunes and maritime oaks bent sideways with the never-ending sea breeze, it was a place like no other. The islands had once been connected to the mainland, but after the last ice age, the sea had flooded the area to the immediate west, forming the Pamlico Sound. Until the 1950s, there wasn’t a highway on this series of islands, and people had to drive along the beach to reach the homes beyond the dunes. Even now it was part of the culture, and as he drove, he could see tire tracks near the water’s edge.
The sky had cleared in places, and though the clouds raced angrily toward the horizon, the sun sometimes squinted through, making the world glow fiercely white. Over the roar of the engine, he could hear the violence of the ocean.
At this time of year, the Outer Banks were largely empty, and he had this stretch of roadway to himself. In the solitude, his thoughts returned to Martha.
The divorce had become final only a few months earlier, but it had been amicable. He knew she was seeing someone, and he suspected she’d been seeing him even before they’d separated, but it wasn’t important. These days, nothing seemed important.
When she left, Paul remembered cutting back on his schedule, thinking he needed time to sort things out. But months later, instead of going back to his regular routine, he cut back even more. He still ran regularly but found he no longer had any interest in reading the financial pages in the morning. For as long as he could remember, he’d needed only six hours of sleep a night; but strangely, the more he cut back on the pace of his previous life, the more hours he seemed to need to feel rested.