And Then I Found You Read Online Free PDF Page B

someone—even Jack—talk her out of doing this, that she
     would never again follow through on anything important in her life. Never. “It’s one
     year. That’s all.” She wiggled onto his lap and kissed his neck. “Love is enough.
     It always is.”
    “Sadly, sometimes it’s not enough.”
    “You are so pragmatic. My lawyer, Jack Adams.”
    “Please don’t go.”
    “I have to. That’s the thing, Jack. I absolutely have to. But I believe in us. I do.”
    At that four girls burst into the bedroom, calling Jack’s name. They stopped short
     when they saw Katie. “Sorry,” one tall brunette said as she shut the door.
    “Well,” Katie stood and looked down at him. “I guess you aren’t going to be too lonely
     while I’m gone.”
    “Don’t turn this around,” he said. “I’m not doing anything wrong. At all.”
    “I’m not either,” Katie said.
    “If I’m not doing anything wrong and you’re not doing anything wrong, why the hell
     does everything feel so wrong?” Jack asked, squinting at Katie as if a bright light
     shone into his eyes.
    “I don’t know,” she said in a whisper. “I really don’t know. But I can’t fight about
     it, and I can’t leave with us angry.”
    “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
    *   *   *
    The camping and wilderness routine returned to Katie as if her visit to Jack had been
     a quick dream. She opened her eyes in the dead of night, her head lying on a bunched-up
     sweatshirt. As usual, the first thing she looked for in the night sky was the moon,
     but it was a new moon, not invisible exactly, but translucent. The arching bell of
     dark sky reached to touch the edges of the earth, holding its innumerable stars. A
     young girl next to Katie whispered. “There are a million more stars here than where
     I live in New York.”
    Katie smiled into the dark, once again explaining. “There are always the same amount
     of stars, but here you can see them. Just like you’ll soon be able to see all the
     beautiful things in you that were there all along. It takes the wilderness to open
     your eyes.”
    “Whatever,” the girl said in the hoarse and angry whisper they all seemed to arrive
     with.
    That night Katie missed Jack with a deep ache. It was a feeling that snuck up on her
     in the quietest moments. How was it possible to both love where she was and yet miss
     where she wasn’t?
    She’d seen the sun set and rise on the same seemingly endless terrain. She’d eaten
     food she’d never heard of and slept less than she knew a human body could sleep and
     still function. She collected feathers, which she often found exactly when she was
     thinking about something that needed an answer. She knew her days by the phases of
     the moon. The shooting stars—twenty or thirty a night—were her lullaby and passageway
     to sleep. What was once foreign was now familiar.
    Many times Katie felt that her family was frozen in time, but much happened that year.
     After an early graduation from University of South Carolina, Tara had eloped with
     her boyfriend, Kyle; now she wrote witty columns about marriage for the local paper.
     Molly was in her sophomore year in high school and her letters were full of exclamation
     points and drama. Her parents were living a second dating life, their first cut short
     by marriage.
    No one in the family—not one—agreed with Katie’s job choice. They believed she was
     running away from life when she told them over and over that she was actually not
     running anywhere, but maybe, just maybe, was learning a new life while touching the
     lives of others.
    Jack wrote letters and she wrote back, long letters about everything she saw and felt
     in this strange terrain. In every correspondence, she told him, I wish you could see what I see. She missed him, his voice, his touch, and yet the longing for him couldn’t stand
     against the need to stay at her job. With every girl’s life that changed, a new young
     girl was beginning