The Best of Me - Nicholas Sparks [33]
He hadn’t slept well. Instead, his mind had cycled endlessly between Amanda and the Bonners. In prison, aside from Amanda, Marilyn Bonner was all he could think about. She had testified at the sentencing hearing, and her testimony underscored the fact that he’d not only robbed her of the man she loved and the father of her children, but also destroyed her entire way of life. In a breaking voice, she’d admitted that she had no idea how she was going to provide for her family, or what would become of them. Dr. Bonner, it turned out, had neglected to buy life insurance.
Eventually, Marilyn Bonner lost the house. She moved back in with her parents at the orchard, but her life continued to be a struggle. Her father had already retired and had early-stage emphysema. Her mom suffered from diabetes, and the loan payments on the property ate up almost every dollar the orchard brought in. Because her parents needed almost full-time care between them, Marilyn was able to work only part-time. Even when she combined her small salary with her parents’ social security, there was barely enough to cover the basics, and sometimes not even that. The old farmhouse they lived in was beginning to fall apart, and the loan payments on the orchard eventually fell into arrears.
By the time Dawson got out of prison, things had become desperate for the Bonner family. Dawson didn’t learn of that until he went to the farmhouse to apologize almost six months later. When Marilyn answered the door, Dawson barely recognized her; her hair had turned gray and her skin looked sallow. She, on the other hand, knew exactly who he was, and before he could say a word, she began screaming at him to leave, shrieking that he’d ruined her life, that he’d killed her husband, that she didn’t even have enough money to fix the leaking roof or hire the workers she needed. She screamed that the bankers were threatening to foreclose on the orchard, and then that she was going to call the police. She warned him never to come back. Dawson left, but later that night he returned to the farmhouse and studied the decaying structure; he walked the rows of peach and apple trees. The following week, after receiving his paycheck from Tuck, he went to the bank and had a cashier’s check sent to Marilyn Bonner for almost the entire amount, along with everything he’d saved since he’d gotten out of prison, with no note attached.
In the years since then, Marilyn’s life had gotten better. Her parents eventually died and the farmhouse and orchard passed to her; though it had been a struggle at times, she’d slowly been able to make up the outstanding loan payments and carry out the necessary repairs. She now owned the land free and clear. She’d started a mail-order business a few years after he’d left town, selling homemade canned preserves. With the help of the Internet, her business had grown to the point where she no longer worried about paying the bills. Though she’d never remarried, she’d been dating an accountant named Leo for almost sixteen years.
As for the kids, Emily graduated from East Carolina University and eventually moved to Raleigh, where she worked as a manager in a department store, preparing most likely to take over her mom’s business one day. Alan lived in the orchard in a double-wide that his mom had purchased for him and hadn’t gone to college, but he had a steady job and in the photographs that were sent to Dawson, he always seemed happy.
Once a year, the photographs arrived in Louisiana along with a brief update on Marilyn, Emily, and Alan; the private detectives he’d hired had always been thorough but had never pried too deeply.
He sometimes felt guilty about having the Bonners followed, but he had to know whether he’d been able to make even the smallest positive difference in their lives. That’s all he’d wanted since the night of the accident, and it was the reason he’d been sending checks monthly for the past two decades, almost always through anonymous offshore bank accounts.