Been In Love Before: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

a bit.”
    “I am sure he’ll be happy to see you.”
    “I’m sure; he has tons of space. Have a good day, Officer.”
    In the past he would have crashed on his sofa at his office in Delray, but he had hired his old friend Rose Gilardo, an interior decorator, to remodel it and make sense of the old boxes, files, and memorabilia, along with the hundreds of baseball bats, gloves, and balls. The sofa was gone. It should be finished this week, he thought. I hope.
    He packed, finally tossing Alice’s pink robe over his shoulder. He was ready to leave, and turned to look around his homestead one last time. “Good-bye, baby. I’ll miss you, sweetie,” he whispered, closing the door behind him. He loved that house.
    It was only a thirty-minute drive from his home to Ryan’s house on the beach. He drove up State Road A1A from his house in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea and marveled at the huge mansions going up seemingly overnight along the beach thoroughfare. The city straddled the ocean roadway, with the ocean on one side and the Intracoastal Waterway on the other.
    He and Alice preferred living along the restful Intracoastal Waterway. Sitting at the breakfast table, they would occasionally see the gentle manatees slowly gliding along the water, heading south to Fort Lauderdale with only their dark-brown, leathery backs breaking the water’s surface. He headed north toward his brother’s house in Boca Raton. This should be interesting, he thought. They had not lived in the same house . . . in a long, long time.
    As he drove toward his brother’s beach home, he made a detour through his old Delray neighborhood, turning left onto Atlantic Avenue before making another left onto South East First Avenue. He pulled to the curb, stopping before an oversize three-acre plot of vacant land, which still had a gray, weathered F OR S ALE sign posted at the corner.
    He looked over the lot with fond recollections of his and Alice’s plans to build on it. This is where we are going to build our dream home, just for the two of us, they would say to each other. Now it was filled with bittersweet memories. Should I just sell it and get rid of it? Plenty of time for all those decisions later.
    Eian noticed the grass was very high and that someone had dumped some old tires and discarded a refrigerator on his property. He made a mental note to contact the property-management company to come by and take care of it. He said his good-byes, started the car, and pulled away from the curb to drive the short distance to his younger brother’s house. He and Ryan together, this was going to be like old times, he thought to himself.

Chapter Four
    Dr. Ryan Macgregor sat on his large patio overlooking the beach in front of his large white stucco house in Boca Raton. It was an ultramodern three-story house with a four-car garage and so many bedrooms he had lost count.
    Sitting by the pool, he was going through the motions of reading his outdated professional magazines. He bought the house because Grace loved to swim. Then he had lost her when she was biking down A1A and was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Now he sat by the pool and thought of nothing but her.
    She had called him that day from the side of the road, and he remembered she had told him, “Chill the champagne, Ryan my sweet, I beat my best biking time this morning. Today is a good day, I can tell.” Her voice had faded away. Then, talking with an edgy laugh, she said, “You won’t believe this guy, baby . . . he’s driving like a maniac. He’s crazy or drunk,” she shrilled. She talked faster as the fear rose in her voice. And then he heard her say, “Oh no! Oh my God! No! . . .” There was static, and then the line went dead. Dead? From that moment on, she was gone from his life forever.
    Now he sat by the pool he had built for her, catching up on his reading, skimming through past issues of Psychiatric Journal Review . He knew that as a psychiatrist, he had to keep up with the