Nights in Rodanthe - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,14
who handled the bills. It turned out that he wasn’t, and she’d had to take a part-time job at the local library. Though she wasn’t so worried about her or the children, she was scared for her father.
A year after the divorce, her father had had a stroke, then three more in rapid succession. Now he needed around-the-clock care. The nursing home she’d found for him was excellent, but as an only child, she bore the responsibility of paying for it. She had enough left over from the settlement to cover another year, but after that, she didn’t know what she would do. She was already spending everything she earned at the part-time job she’d taken at the library. When Jean had first asked if Adrienne would mind watching the Inn while she was out of town, she had suspected that Adrienne was struggling financially and had left far more money than was necessary for the groceries. The note she’d left had told Adrienne to keep the remainder as payment for her help. Adrienne appreciated that, but charity from friends hurt her pride.
Money, though, was only part of her worries about her father. She sometimes felt he was the only person who was always on her side, and she needed her father, especially now. Spending time with him was an escape of sorts for her, and she dreaded the thought that their hours together might end because of something she did or didn’t do.
What would become of him? What would become of her?
Adrienne shook her head, forcing those questions away. She didn’t want to think about any of this, especially now. Jean had said it would be slow—only one reservation was in the books—and she’d hoped that coming here would clear her mind. She wanted to walk the beach or read a couple of novels that had been sitting on her bedstand for months; she wanted to put her feet up and watch the porpoises playing in the waves. She had hoped to find relief, but as she stood on the porch at the sea-worn Inn at Rodanthe awaiting the oncoming storm, she felt the world bearing down hard. She was middle-aged and alone, overworked and soft around the middle. Her kids were struggling, her father was sick, and she wasn’t sure how she’d be able to keep going.
That was when she started to cry, and minutes later, when she heard footsteps on the porch, she turned her head and saw Paul Flanner for the first time.
Paul had seen people cry before, thousands of times, he would guess, but it had usually been within the sterile confines of a hospital waiting room, when he was fresh from an operation and still wearing scrubs. For him, the scrubs had served as a type of shield against the personal and emotional nature of his work. Never once had he cried with those he’d spoken with, nor could he remember any of the faces of those who had once looked to him for answers. It wasn’t something that he was proud to admit, but it was the person he had once been.
But at this moment, as he looked into the red-rimmed eyes of the woman on the porch, he felt like an intruder on unfamiliar ground. His first instinct was to throw up the old defenses. Yet there was something about the way she looked that made doing so impossible. It might have been the setting or the fact that she was alone; either way, the surge of empathy was a foreign sensation, one that caught him completely off guard.
Not having expected him to arrive until later, Adrienne tried to overcome her embarrassment at being caught in such a state. Forcing a smile, she dabbed at her tears, trying to pretend the wind had caused them to moisten.
As she turned to face him, however, she couldn’t help but stare.
It was his eyes, she thought, that did it. They were light blue, so light they seemed almost translucent, but there was an intensity in them that she’d never seen before in anyone else.
He knows me, she suddenly thought. Or could know me if I gave him a chance.
As quickly as those thoughts came, she dismissed them, thinking them ridiculous. No, she decided, there was nothing unusual about the man standing before her. He was simply the guest Jean had told her about, and since she hadn’t been at the desk, he’d come looking for her; that was all. As a result, she found herself