Chapter 17
“General Sterling.” Evelyn cut him off calmly, stepping back to put distance between them. “The past is over. I have a quiet life now. Please–leave it alone. Don’t come here and disturb it anymore.”
Her composure hit Graham harder than any tears or accusations ever could.
He would have preferred her to lash out, to shout at him–anything but this absolute, freezing indifference that excluded him from her life.
When she started to walk away, panic surged through him. Instinct made him reach for her arm.
Evelyn jerked away as if he had burned her, the motion startlingly fast. She lifted her head; the eyes that had once been full of adoration and starlight now showed only clear, unmasked resistance and a trace of something else, a fear she tried to suppress but couldn’t quite hide.
That flash of fear stabbed Graham like the sharpest icicle. It cut so deep his breath hitched.
She was afraid of him.
The girl he had once held in the palm of his hand–the girl he had never allowed himself to speak roughly to had become someone who feared him.
–
His outstretched hand froze in midair; his fingertips went cold and trembled. Words lodged in his throat and would not come.
Evelyn did not look back.
She clutched her books to her chest, kept her head down, and hurried past him without a single backward glance.
Her slender figure drew a long shadow in the setting sun–decisive, without a trace of lingering attachment.
Graham stood there like an abandoned statue on Harborbend’s unfamiliar streets, watching her silhouette disappear around the corner.
A chilly evening breeze stirred the fallen leaves into lonely spirals that whispered against the pavement.
The chatter of passersby, the ring of bicycles, the laughter and talk around him–all of it receded into a distant blur.
The world lost color and sound, leaving only a vast, gray emptiness and the cold, hollow sting of being utterly rejected.
Chapter 17
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He had lost.
Completely.
He hadn’t come to win her back. He had come to humiliate himself. The naïve idea that a little
coaxing could fix everything now seemed like a cruel joke.
He did not leave Harborbend.
He took a long–term suite at the Crestwood Suites, two streets from the community high school.
The hotel was dated, the furnishings sparse and worn, the walls half–painted with a stripe of faded green. The air carried that damp, musty hush of old buildings.
He scaled back most of his duties, handling only the most essential military matters by phone and paperwork.
He exiled himself to the small Southern town and began a long, silent vigil.
He no longer dared appear in front of Evelyn. That brief street encounter–the clear fear in her eyes–had poured cold water over every hard idea he’d had of “taking” her back.
He chose a clumsier, quieter route instead.
Through his old war buddy, Julian Blake, who still worked at Harborbend City Hall, he quietly reached the principal of Harborbend Community High School.
Without revealing his identity, he called in a favor under the guise of a concerned supporter of military families and asked that Evelyn be watched over.
The principal, though puzzled, obliged out of deference to City Hall. He took a little more care when assigning Evelyn’s duties and tried to accommodate her health.
There were a few local drifters who lingered near the school at dismissal, sometimes whistling at girls or at female teachers walking home.
Graham had seen them once. He said nothing then, but late one night, dressed in plain clothes, he “happened” upon them.
Quietly and unmistakably, he made it plain that they would be wise to keep their distance.
After that, the routes home for the school’s girls and its female teachers grew noticeably quieter.
Chapter 17
