Nights in Rodanthe - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,51
Linda divorced, Adrienne had been there to help him through his grief, and she’d even allowed him to stay in the guest bedroom when he came to see the kids. Ironically, Linda had left him for another man, and Adrienne could remember sitting with Jack in the living room as he swirled a glass of Scotch. It was past midnight, and he’d been rambling for a few hours about what he was going through, when he finally seemed to realize who it was that was listening to him.
“Did it hurt this bad for you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Adrienne said.
“How long did it take to get over it?”
“Three years,” she said, “but I was lucky.”
Jack nodded. Pressing his lips together, he stared into his drink.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The dumbest thing I ever did was to walk out that door.”
Adrienne smiled and patted his knee. “I know. But thank you anyway.”
It was about a year after that when Jack called to ask her to dinner. And as she had with all the others, Adrienne politely said no.
Adrienne rose and went to the counter to retrieve the box she’d carried from her bedroom earlier, then came back to the table. By then, Amanda was watching her with almost wary fascination. Adrienne smiled as she reached for her daughter’s hand.
As she did, Adrienne could see that sometime during the past couple of hours, Amanda had realized that she didn’t know as much about her mother as she thought she did. It was, Adrienne thought, a role reversal of sorts. Amanda had the same look in her eyes that Adrienne sometimes had in the past, when the kids would get together over the holidays and joke about some of the things they’d done when they were younger. It was only a couple of years ago that she’d learned that Matt used to sneak out of his room to go out with friends late at night, or that Amanda had both started and quit smoking as a junior, or that Dan had been the one who’d started the small fire in the garage that had been blamed on a faulty electrical outlet. She’d laughed along with them, feeling naive at the same time, and she wondered if that was the way Amanda was feeling now.
On the wall, the clock was ticking, the sound regular and even. The heat pump clicked on with a thump. In time, Amanda sighed.
“That was quite a story,” she said.
As she spoke, Amanda fingered her wineglass with her free hand, rotating the glass in circles. The wine caught the light, making it shimmer.
“Do Matt and Dan know? I mean, have you told them about it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure they need to know.” Adrienne smiled. “And besides, I don’t know if they would understand, no matter what I told them. They’re men, for one thing, and a little on the protective side—I don’t want them to think that Paul was simply preying on a lonely woman. Men are like that sometimes—if they meet someone and fall in love, it’s real, no matter how fast it happened. But if someone falls for a woman they happen to care about, all they do is question the man’s intentions. To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll ever tell them.”
Amanda nodded before asking, “Why me, then?”
“Because I thought you needed to hear it.”
Absently, Amanda began to twirl a strand of hair. Adrienne wondered if that habit was genetic or learned by watching her mother.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you tell us about him? I mean, you never mentioned anything about it.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
Adrienne leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. “In the beginning, I guess I was afraid it wasn’t real. I know we loved each other, but distance can do strange things to people, and before I was willing to tell you about it, I wanted to be certain that it would last. Then later, when I started getting letters from him and knew it would… I don’t know… it just seemed such a long time until you could meet him that I didn’t see the point in it….”
She trailed off before choosing her next words carefully.
“You also have to realize that you’re not the same person now that you were then. You were seventeen, Dan was only fifteen, and I didn’t know if any of you were ready to hear something like this. I mean, how would you have felt if you’d come back from your father’s and I told you that I was