Nights in Rodanthe - Nicholas Sparks [54]
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.