It wasn't that she was wary of men on the contrary, even now she occasionally found her eyes drawn to Though her sons sometimes urged her to find someone to spend her remaining years with, Adrienne had Her children were grown, her father had passed away in 1996, and she'd been divorced from Jackįor seventeen years now. Learned more in those five days than she had in all the years before or after. And in an odd way, Adrienne had come to believe that she'd They were hers, and over the years, she'd come to view them as a sort of museumĮxhibit, one in which she was both the curator and the only patron. Norĭid she share these memories with others. Was often romanticized with these memories, there was no reason to make them any more romantic than they already were. Remembering those days always aroused a mixture of emotions in her-something akin to, but not quite, nostalgia. Listening to the gentle tapping against the glass, she was thankful for its steady sense of familiarity. That love was the essence of a full and wonderful life. Despite all that had happened in the years that had passed since then, Adrienne still held tight to the belief She sat at the table, reflecting on that last visit to the Inn, remembering the long weekend she'd once Now, standing in the kitchen of her own home a few months into her sixtieth year, Adrienne hung up the phone after speaking She could do to change it, Adrienne remembered closing her eyes, as if to magically blink it back to what it had once been. The Inn seemed to be winding down, and though she knew there was nothing Of rust along the roof, water stains near the gutters. But looking closer, she gradually began to notice changes that cosmetic work couldn't hide: decay at the corners of the windows, lines The haze, and for a moment Adrienne felt she'd traveled back in time. With the sun hovering among the clouds, the air had a luminescent quality, as though particles of light were suspended in On either side of the building, sea oats waved a greeting, and sand formed a curving dune thatĬhanged imperceptibly with each passing day as individual grains shifted from one spot to the next. Shiny black shutters sandwiched rectangular white-curtained windows on both floors like offset piano keys. It unchanged, as if the small Inn were impervious to sun and sand and salted mist. Three years earlier, on a warm November morning in 1999, Adrienne Willis had returned to the Inn and at first glance had thought

Nights in Rodanthe by Nicholas Sparks