The Best of Me - Nicholas Sparks [95]
She began to speed up, trying again to convince herself that her decision was the correct one, the only one she could realistically make. Behind her, the cemetery receded into the distance.
“Dawson, forgive me,” she whispered, wishing he could somehow hear her, wishing she’d never had to say those words at all.
A rustling behind him interrupted Dawson’s reverie, and he scrambled to his feet. Startled, he recognized her instantly but found himself speechless.
“You’re here,” Marilyn Bonner stated. “At my husband’s grave.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, dropping his gaze. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“But you did,” Marilyn said. “And you came here recently, too.” When Dawson didn’t respond, she nodded at the flowers. “I make it a point to come by after church. They weren’t here last weekend, and they’re too fresh to have been placed here earlier in the week. I’m guessing… Friday?”
Dawson swallowed before answering. “In the morning.”
Her gaze was unflinching. “You used to do that a long time ago, too. After you got out of prison? That was you, right?”
Dawson said nothing.
“I thought so,” she said. She sighed as she took a step closer to the marker. Dawson moved aside, making room as Marilyn focused on the inscription. “A lot of people put flowers out for David after he died. And that went on for a year or two, but after that, people stopped coming by, I guess. Except for me. For a while, I was the only one bringing them, and then, about four years after he died, I started seeing other flowers again. Not all the time, but enough to make me curious. I had no idea who was responsible. I asked my parents, I asked my friends, but none of them would admit to it. For a short time, I even wondered if David had been seeing someone else. Can you believe that?” She shook her head and drew a long breath. “It wasn’t until the flowers stopped arriving that I realized it was you. I knew you’d gotten out of jail and that you were on probation here. I also learned that you left town about a year later. It made me so… angry to think you’d been doing that all along.” She crossed her arms, as if trying to close herself off from the memory. “And then, this morning, I saw the flowers again. I knew it meant that you’d come back. I wasn’t sure you’d come here today… but sure enough, you did.”
Dawson shoved his hands in his pockets, suddenly wanting to be anywhere but here. “I won’t visit or bring flowers again,” he muttered. “You have my word.”
She looked at him. “And you think that makes it okay that you’ve come here at all? Considering what you did in the first place? Considering that my husband is here, instead of with me? That he missed the chance to watch his children grow up?”
“No,” he said.
“Of course you don’t,” she said. “Because you still feel guilty about what you did. That’s why you’ve been sending us money all these years, am I right?”
He wanted to lie to her but couldn’t.
“How long have you known?” he asked.
“Since the first check,” she said. “You’d stopped by my house just a couple of weeks earlier, remember? It wasn’t too hard to put two and two together.” She hesitated. “You wanted to apologize, didn’t you? In person. When you came to the porch that day?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t let you. I said… a lot of things that day. Things that maybe I shouldn’t have said.”
“You had every right to say what you did.”
A flicker of a smile formed on her lips. “You were twenty-two years old. I saw a grown man on the porch, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to believe that people don’t really grow up until they’re at least thirty. My son is older than you were then, and I still think of him as a child.”
“You did what anyone would do.”
“Maybe,” she said, offering the slightest of shrugs. She stepped closer to him. “The money you sent helped,” she said. “It helped a lot over the years, but I don’t need your money anymore. So please stop sending it.”
“I just wanted—”
“I know what you wanted,” she interrupted. “But all the money in