Second Chance Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

never heard from you.“
    “I know, I know,” he said. “Please. Sit down.“ They took seats opposite each other. Steve said, “That first year was so crazy. Dad didn’t know he was going to die that day. He carried everything around in his head. I got no briefing. I had to discover everything on my own, and every decision might be a disaster. I felt like I was swimming upstream through warm Jell-O for those first few years. By the time I was able to come up for air, it had been so long that I felt guilty. Every day that passed, the guiltier I felt. That seems like it was just yesterday, but here we are now, twenty years later.”
    She nodded. It was what she had expected to hear.
    “You know, Lizzie, I’ve looked for you off and on all these years. I searched for your phone number, tried to find you on social media, but it was like you had just disappeared.”
    She shook her head. “I’ve never had a phone. If I need to make a call, I use the phone at the shop. There used to be a payphone in the lobby of the building where I live, but they took it out a few years ago. I guess everyone but me has a cell phone now. I’ve never been on Facebook, or whatever else there is. I didn’t see the point. So then, the real question is, ‘how did you know where I lived?’”
    Steve looked a little guilty, then reached in his coat pocket and produced her ID card. He handed it to her.
    The light of realization dawned in her eyes. “I must have dropped this at the tree lot.”
    Steve nodded. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be a stalker. I didn’t know any other way to get a message to you.“
    She looked thoughtfully at the ID, then at him. Deliberating. Finally, she said, “It’s okay. It’s not like my address is a state secret or anything. Thank you for the tree, by the way. That was very thoughtful.”
    Steve shook his head. “It was nothing. Really. So,” he said, changing the subject, “tell me what else is going on in your life, other than strange men from the past following you home from Christmas tree lots?”
    The question she had been dreading. The answer was so… sad.
    “My life is simple, especially compared to yours. I go to work at a little used bookstore. I do some volunteer work with a literacy group at an inner city school. I read a lot. Honestly, that’s about it. What about you?” She felt much better shifting the focus away from her life onto his.
    “Kind of the same, really. I go to my office, then home. I don’t even have the volunteer work to keep me busy. Sometimes I feel like I’m married to my phone.”
    “So, are you?”
    “Am I what?”
    “Married. To your phone or anyone else.”
    He smiled again, and shook his head. “No, never been married. How about you?”
    “No.” She didn’t elaborate.
    “Lizzie, look. There’s something I want to tell you. That night, that Christmas Eve when I left school, I was on my way to see you when Mom called me, remember?”
    Elizabeth nodded.
    “Well, this is kind of embarrassing after all these years, but I was going to tell you something that night. I was going to tell you…” He paused, searching for either the words or the courage to speak them, even after twenty years. “I was going to tell you that I had feelings for you. Oh, hell, I was going to tell you that I loved you.”
    Elizabeth shut her eyes and kept them shut for five, six, seven seconds. When she opened them, there were no tears, but he saw the pain.
    Steve reached into his pocket and pulled out a small package. “Here,” he said. “This is for you.”
    He pushed it across the table to her. It was rectangular and wrapped in faded Christmas paper that had faint pictures of elves and boughs of holly.
    “I was going to give it to you that night, but when I saw you, it just didn’t seem right. I’ve been carrying it with me through every move and relocation since. If that little box had a passport, it would have a lot of stamps.”
    She reached out and touched it