A Walk to Remember - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,61

features. “I don’t know if I can anymore,” she said.

“But if you could, would you?”

I cannot adequately describe the intensity of what I was feeling at that moment. Love, anger, sadness, hope, and fear, whirling together, sharpened by the nervousness I was feeling. Jamie looked at me curiously, and my breaths became shallower. Suddenly I knew that I’d never felt as strongly for another person as I did at that moment. As I returned hergaze, this simple realization made me wish for the millionth time that I could make all this go away. Had it been possible, I would have traded my life for hers. I wanted to tell her my thoughts, but the sound of her voice suddenly silenced the emotions inside me.

“Yes,” she finally said, her voice weak yet somehow still full of promise. “I would.”

Finally getting control of myself, I kissed her again, then brought my hand to her face, gently running my fingers over her cheek. I marveled at the softness of her skin, the gentleness I saw in her eyes. Even now she was perfect.

My throat began to tighten again, but as I said, I knew what I had to do. Since I had to accept that it was not within my power to cure her, what I wanted to do was give her something that she’d always wanted.

It was what my heart had been telling me to do all along.

Jamie, I understood then, had already given me the answer I’d been searching for, the one my heart had needed to find. She’d told me the answer as we’d sat outside Mr. Jenkins’s office, the night we’d asked him about doing the play.

I smiled softly, and she returned my affection with a slight squeeze of my hand, as if trusting me in what I was about to do. Encouraged, I leaned closer and took a deep breath. When I exhaled, these were the words that flowed with my breath.

“Will you marry me?”

Chapter 13

When I was seventeen, my life changed forever.

As I walk the streets of Beaufort forty years later, thinking back on that year of my life, I remember everything as clearly as if it were all still unfolding before my very eyes.

I remember Jamie saying yes to my breathless question and how we both began to cry together. I remember talking to both Hegbert and my parents, explaining to them what I needed to do. They thought I was doing it only for Jamie, and all three of them tried to talk me out of it, especially when they realized that Jamie had said yes. What they didn’t understand, and I had to make clear to them, was that I needed to do it for me.

I was in love with her, so deeply in love that I didn’t care if she was sick. I didn’t care that we wouldn’t have long together. None of those things mattered to me. All I cared about was doing something that my heart had told me was the right thing to do. In my mind it was the first time God had ever spoken directly to me, and I knew with certainty that I wasn’t going to disobey.

I know that some of you may wonder if I was doing it out of pity. Some of the more cynical may even wonder if I did it because she’d be gone soon anyway and I wasn’t committing much. The answer to both questions is no. I would have married Jamie Sullivan no matter what happened in the future. I would have married Jamie Sullivan if the miracle I was praying for had suddenly come true. I knew it at the moment I asked her, and I still know it today.

Jamie was more than just the woman I loved. In that year Jamie helped me become the man I am today. With her steady hand she showed me how important it was to help others; with her patience and kindness she showed me what life is really all about. Her cheerfulness and optimism, even in times of sickness, was the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed.

We were married by Hegbert in the Baptist church, my father standing beside me as the best man. That was another thing she did. In the South it’s a tradition to have your father beside you, but for me it’s a tradition that wouldn’t have had much meaning before Jamie came into my life. Jamie had brought my father and me together again; somehow she’d