the room across the hall.
For the hundredth time he checked the glowing blue numbers on the clock radio, realizing it would be dawn in less than half an hour. Pretty soon he’d be able to distinguish the muted plaid pattern of the wallpaper, the spiderweb fracture of the windowpane where he’d connected on one of Davey Kenyon’s curveballs in eighth grade, the dozens of trophies on the desktop and bookshelves that could use a good dusting.
He didn’t even need daylight to see the objects in this room where he’d spent most of his nights for most of his life. Most of all he didn’t need light of any sort to see Jenny’s face smiling out at him from the silver-framed photograph on top of the knotty pine dresser. It was always there, that mischievous, gamine face that he’d loved from the very first day of kindergarten when he’d come home—right here—and announced to his mother over cookies and milk that he was going to marry Jenny Sayles, then asked in all seriousness just how long he’d have to wait to do that.
Although his mother had laughed and suggested a seemly eighteen or twenty years might be good, her answer should have been forever.
Sam felt that too-familiar constriction in his throat now and the hot sheen of moisture in his eyes that always came when he allowed himself to think about Jenny for more than a passing moment. Swearing softly, he reached up to double the pillow under his head, then he closed his eyes, for all the good that would do in blocking out nearly three decades of images that seemed almost permanently etched on his brain. Jenny here. Jenny there. Jenny everywhere.
Since he couldn’t marry her in kindergarten, he’d waited until their graduation from high school to ask her. She’d put him off, and then put him off again when they graduated from college. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to marry him. She did. She swore she did. But Jenny had her own itinerary. She wanted to go as far as she could as a concert pianist before settling in as Sam’s wife. And she thought she had all the time in the world. They both did.
His gaze lit on the Divisional boxing trophy he’d won in the Corps. When Jenny moved to Los Angeles to study with the renowned pianist, Hermoine Stahl, it made perfect sense for Sam to enlist in the Marine Corps because Camp Pendleton was just a few hours away from L.A. Later, when Jenny moved to Paris, he pulled a string or two in order to be assigned embassy duty there. Wherever Jenny went, he followed. It had been whither thou goest in reverse.
When Jenny acquired a rampant case of stage fright that prevented her from performing, he’d resigned from the Corps and followed her back here where he’d run for county sheriff, winning in a surprising landslide. But even then, Jenny wouldn’t marry him. She needed to prove she could play on stage, if only one more time.
And then, on an icy stretch of Highway A-14, Jenny’s time had run out.
It was light enough now for Sam’s eyes to trace all the hairline cracks in the ceiling. He wondered how many men his age had only loved one woman in their lives, and of those how many had only made love to one woman. Damned few, he decided.
While Jenny was alive, he’d been oblivious to other women. In the two years since her death, he’d been both oblivious and numb. Then suddenly Laura McNeal had waltzed out of the Yellow Pages and into his office in her little blue velvet scrap of a dress, and had lit a fire in him that Sam didn’t like one bit.
He sat up now, rubbing nonexistent sleep out of his eyes. He should’ve known better than to offer to help the woman. But, since he had, he was going to help her with a vengeance. Help her right out of his life.
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