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.“But he can’t leave!” Hanna said, horror-struck.“For someone who can’t,” Sam noted uneasily, watching the truck swerve out to squeeze by where he’d left his car in the driveway, “he is.”The truck barely stopped where the driveway met the highway: a pause, a slither, and lights becoming red pinpricks in the distance until they disappeared altogether.“I have to be back at work,” Hanna said, her voice desperate.“I told Mr.Banks I would be back in twenty-four hours.That would mean I have to leave here by two tomorrow afternoon.”She would arrive back to work when everyone else was leaving for the day? Hanna poring over numbers deep into the night in an empty office was so far from the life Sam had pictured for her that he wanted to shake her.When she turned her gaze to him, that something that Hanna was so dangerously close to minutes before sparked anew in her eyes, and then spilled, like a single liquid diamond, out of the corner of her eye and down her cheek.Sam stared at her.Intellectually, he knew he’d done the right thing by already deciding he was done here, by deciding he would send a representative of Old Apple Crate to talk to her about the farm tomorrow.A better man than him, a good man, would see her distress and know what to do.A good man would take her in his arms, and hold her, and feel her tears wet his shirt, and tell her it would be okay.He wasn’t that man.On the other hand, he was never going to see her again, so just for now, just for this second, he would pretend that he was.A good man who knew what to do with a woman’s tears.What was honorable, after all?He stepped up to her and put his arms around her, and tugged her in close to him.He felt Hanna’s tears slither past his overcoat and down through the opening in his shirt, warm on his chest.He tucked her head into his chest and resisted, barely, the desire to kiss her forehead.But he did hear himself whisper, like the man he had always hoped he could be, “Shhh, everything is going to be okay.”For a moment she relaxed into him.And for a moment, just like long ago, sitting in the shed sipping hot chocolate, everything felt amazingly right and good in his world.But then, as if ashamed she had allowed herself a weak moment and let herself lean on him, Hanna pushed back from him and scrubbed at her eye with a furious knuckle.“I’m fine,” she said, her voice a squeak that indicated she was not.But, thankfully, before he could repeat his efforts at being a good man, she turned and headed for the house.“Tomorrow, noon.”He accepted her dismissal and walked back to where his vehicle was still parked way up the drive.Sam left the farm and drove ten minutes to the town of Smith.It was night-quiet, the way it had always been, a quaint farming community, so sleepy that the phrase “the streets were already rolled up for the night” could have been coined for it.He had booked a room at the only hotel, a beautiful old building proudly displaying a plaque that declared it a historic treasure.He drove to it and stopped in front of it, but at the last minute, he did not go in.Instead he pulled back out onto the deserted main street.Even the Christmas decorations, adorning every light standard, usually lit, had been turned off.Sam felt like a man on a mission as he drove to the part of Smith that was not quaint, the neighborhood of dilapidated trailers and falling-down houses that stood in the shadow of a bleak flour mill that had been closed for fifty years.He stopped in front of the Mill Road trailer he and his father had shared during his high school years.It did not look any worse than it had back then, because it seemed places like these reached a point where they could not get any worse.There was a handwritten For Sale sign planted in the mounded snow that, no doubt, hid trash in the front yard.The sign had hung there so long that the S had faded completely, and the sign now read For ale, which was way too appropriate, a fitting remembrance of his father.Sam stared at it for a long time.He didn’t wonder why he had come.He knew why he had come.Because, for a moment, holding Hanna, playing at being the better man, it had felt so right.But this was where he came from, and it seemed to him, looking at it now, he was able to recognize that he’d been trying to rise above this place all his adult life.He had traveled the world.He had enjoyed every perk that being a very wealthy man could offer.He had tried to achieve that most elusive of states—“normal”—when he had married.Despite giving Sandra what he thought mattered most beyond the trinkets and the trappings of success—honor—their marriage had not survived.He had come here to remind himself that the exquisite longing that had unfurled in him when Hanna’s tears had washed down his shirt and her hair had pillowed his chin was not something he could give in to.This was where he came from.He had risen above it professionally—maybe even been driven by it.But personally? It still influenced him in a million subtle and not so subtle ways, from stocking his pantry as though he were preparing for the Apocalypse, to having a collection of leather jackets so extensive they needed their own temperature-controlled closet, to needing to feel in control.He could not outrun the sense of not having enough, the sense that while he had achieved every success, true happiness eluded him.This was the only legacy he had to give.Sam fished his cell phone out of his pocket, determined to send someone else out to discuss the sale of Christmas Valley Farm with Hanna tomorrow [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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