True believer - Nicholas Sparks [88]
Now we’re getting somewhere, Jeremy thought. “And how would I arrange that?”
“I don’t know. No one’s ever asked.”
Jeremy hopped back into his car, finally admitting that he was beginning to panic.
Maybe it was because he’d already come this far, or maybe it was because he realized his final words to Lexie the night before had signaled a deeper truth, but something else had taken hold of him and he wasn’t going back. He refused to go back, not after getting this close.
Nate would be expecting his call, but suddenly, that didn’t seem as important to him as it once was. Nor did the fact that Alvin would be arriving; if all went well, they could still film both this evening and tomorrow evening. He had ten hours until the lights would appear; in a fast boat, he figured that he could reach Hatteras in two. It gave him plenty of time to get there, talk to Lexie, and come back, assuming he could find someone to take him there.
Anything could go wrong, of course. He might not be able to hire a boat, but if that happened, he’d drive to Buxton if he had to. Once there, however, he couldn’t even be sure that he’d find her.
Nothing about this entire scenario made sense. But who cared? Once in a while, everyone was entitled to be a bit flaky, and now it was his turn. He had cash in his wallet, and he’d find a way to get there. He’d take the risk and see how things turned out with her, if only to prove to himself that he could leave her and never think about her again.
That’s what this was all about, he knew. When Doris intimated that he might never see her again, his thoughts about her had gone into overdrive. Sure, he was leaving in a couple of days, but that didn’t mean this had to be over. Not yet, anyway. He could visit down here, she could come up to New York and if it was meant to be, they’d somehow work it out. People did that all the time, right? But even if that wasn’t possible, even if she was resolute in her determination to end things completely, he wanted to hear her say it. Only then could he return to New York knowing he’d had no other choice.
And yet, as he came to a sliding stop at the first marina he saw, he realized he didn’t want her to speak those words. He wasn’t going to Buxton to say good-bye or to hear her say that she never wanted to see him again. In fact, he thought with amazement, he knew that he was going there to find out if Alvin had been right all along.
Late afternoon was Lexie’s favorite time of day. The soft winter sunlight, combined with the austere natural beauty of the landscape, made the world appear dreamlike.
Even the lighthouse, with its black and white candy-cane pattern, seemed like a mirage from here, and as she walked the length of the beach, she tried to imagine how difficult it had been for the sailors and fishermen to navigate the point before it had been built. The waters just offshore, with their shallow seabed and shifting shoals, were nicknamed the Graveyard of the Atlantic, and a thousand wrecks dotted the seafloor. The Monitor, which engaged in the first battle between ironclads during the Civil War, had been lost here. So had the Central America, laden with California gold, whose sinking helped cause the financial panic of 1857. Blackbeard’s ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, had supposedly been found in the Beaufort Inlet, and half a dozen German U-boats sunk during World War II were now visited almost daily by scuba divers.
Her grandfather had been a history buff, and every time they walked the beach holding hands, he told her stories about the ships that had been lost over the centuries. She learned about hurricanes and dangerous surf and faulty navigation that stranded boats until they were torn apart by the raging surf. Though she wasn’t particularly interested and was sometimes even frightened by the images conjured up, his slow, melodic drawl was strangely soothing, and she never tried to change the subject. Even though she was young at the time, she sensed that talking to her about