Nights in Rodanthe - Nicholas Sparks [36]
Nonetheless, something had changed in the short time he’d been here. He wasn’t sure when it had happened. It might have been yesterday when they were walking on the beach, or when she’d first told him about her father, or even this morning when they had eaten together in the soft light of the kitchen. Or maybe it happened when he found himself holding her hand and standing close, wanting nothing more than to gently press his lips against hers.
It didn’t matter. All he knew for sure was that he was beginning to fall for a woman named Adrienne, who was watching the Inn for a friend in a tiny coastal town in North Carolina.
Eleven
Robert Torrelson sat at the aging rolltop desk in his living room, listening as his son boarded up the windows at the back of the house. In his hand was the note from Paul Flanner, and he was absently folding and unfolding it, still wondering at the fact that he had come.
He hadn’t expected it. Though he’d written the request, he’d been sure that Paul Flanner would ignore it. Flanner was a high-powered doctor in the city, represented by attorneys who wore flashy ties and fancy belts, and none of them had seemed to give a damn about him or his family for over a year now. Rich city folk were like that; as for him, he was glad that he’d never had to live near people who pushed paper for a living and weren’t comfortable if the temperature at work wasn’t exactly seventy-two degrees. Nor did he like dealing with people who thought they were better than others because they had better schooling or more money or a bigger house. Paul Flanner, when he’d met him after the surgery, had struck him as that type of person. He was stiff and distant, and though he’d explained himself, the clipped way he’d spoken the words had left Robert with the feeling that he wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep because of what had happened.
And that wasn’t right.
Robert had lived a life with different values, values that had been honored by his father and grandfather and their grandfather before that. He could trace his family’s roots in the Outer Banks back nearly two hundred years. Generation after generation, they’d fished the waters of Pamlico Sound since the times when the fish were so plentiful that a person could cast a single net and pull in enough fish to fill the bow. But all that had changed. Now there were quotas and regulations and licenses and big companies, all chasing fewer fish than there’d ever been. These days, when Robert went down to the boat, half the time he considered himself lucky if he caught enough to pay for the gas he’d needed.
Robert Torrelson was sixty-seven but looked ten years older. His face was weathered and stained, and his body was slowly losing the battle with time. There was a long scar that ran from his left eye to his ear. His hands ached with arthritis, and the ring finger on his right hand was missing from the time he’d got it caught in a winch while dragging in the nets.
But Jill hadn’t cared about any of those things. And now Jill was gone.
On the desk was a picture of her, and Robert still found himself staring at it whenever he was alone in the room. He missed everything about her; he missed the way she rubbed his shoulders after he came in on cold winter evenings, he missed the way they used to sit together and listen to music on the radio while they sat on the porch out back, he missed the way she smelled after dabbing her chest with powder, an odor that was simple and clean, fresh like a newborn.
Paul Flanner had taken all that away from him. Jill, he knew, would still have been with him had she never gone to the hospital that day.
His son had had his turn. And now the time had come for his.
Adrienne made the short drive to town and pulled into the small gravel parking lot of the general store, breathing a sigh of relief to find that it was still open.
There were three cars out front parked haphazardly, each coated with a thin layer of salt. A couple of older men wearing baseball hats