“No,” he said before she could finish. A deep, jagged breath tore from his lungs. “I can’t make you understand right now. I had to get away and—”
“Write?” The word was flung as a challenge.
The lines in Clint’s face seemed etched deep with regret as he looked at the ground, then glanced toward the quiet man still sitting in the Bronco, the man Sherry had almost forgotten. The man leaned forward and nodded, as if giving him some silent signal. Clint’s eyes glossed over with despair as he brought them back to her. “Yeah,” he breathed out in a voice as dull as a twilit sky. “I had to get away and write.”
Somehow the admission pierced her even more deeply than his disappearance had. “I’m sure the youth ministers of the world will appreciate the sacrifices you’ve made to record your amazing well of knowledge. Too bad you’ve lost all your credibility now that you’ve left your youth group high and dry and dumped your fiancée all in one moment of panic.”
“Sherry, don’t do this,” he whispered, as though he didn’t want the other man to hear. He touched her hair so lightly that she sensed more than felt it. “I’ve been through agony, and it’s not over yet.”
Sherry ducked her head away from his hand and slipped into the car. “Just think how much richer your writing will be after all that suffering,” she said, her voice cracking. She cranked her engine, but he leaned inside the car door, still not letting her go.
“It’s not over, Sherry,” he said in a deep, desperate voice. “I’m not giving up on you. You’re gonna have to do one major convincing job to make me believe that you don’t care anymore.”
Sherry stared at her trembling hands clutching the steering wheel as if it alone could anchor her to reality.
“I’m still crazy about you,” he whispered, his hand slipping through her hair to settle on her neck. “An hour hasn’t gone by that I haven’t thought of you.”
“That’s very touching.” Sherry knew that somewhere within her there must be a reserve of strength. But for the life of her, she could not find it. Her eyes fluttered shut. His fingers began to knead her neck, and she opened them again and shoved his hand away from her neck. “Now if you’ll kindly move so I can shut my door …”
“I want to see you tonight.”
“No.”
“Why not?” he asked. “What are you afraid of?”
“My temper,” she said.
“I know that temper. I can deal with it.”
“I can’t,” she bit out, lips quivering. “It might land me in jail.” Her face reddened to back up the words, seething blood and storming emotions threatening to implode, leaving her their only victim, if she didn’t start driving.
“Then when can I see you?” The question was a pleading whisper against her face.
“Never. Now get away from my car.”
Clint blew out a frustrated breath. “I’ll let you go now, but it’s not over by a long shot.”
Sherry slipped her car into reverse. “It’s your time, your energy. Waste it if you want.”
Slowly, Clint stepped back and allowed her to pull her door closed. He stood watching as she backed away from the Bronco’s barricade, then shifted into drive with a screech of rubber and went around it.
Sherry would have given all she owned for a little numbness at that moment, for her heart ached as she glanced back at him before making her turn. He was standing in the road, lean and forlorn, staring after her. Quickly, she turned, leaving him behind, though the sight of him was inexorably drafted on her mind.
The car seemed to drive her home instinctively, for her thoughts were caught in the eye of her raging emotions. The anger and bitterness she had carefully cultivated for her first meeting with Clint dwindled beside the bitter mingling of pain and attraction she still felt. It wasn’t fair for him to come back now, she thought as she forced back her menacing tears. She had just begun to get her life in order, had just come close to happiness again after the nightmares of the last eight months.
Nightmares. She wiped at her eyes and thought how the whole eight months had been a series of nightmares. Memory settled over her like impending night as she remembered her first attempt to strike back at those nightmares …
Something has happened to him!” she’d cried frantically to Gary Rivers, the police sergeant she had been involved with before Clint. It hadn’t mattered that the police department had given up the search for Clint, deciding that they couldn’t waste their time on someone who simply had premarital cold feet. So she had done something she’d sworn never to do. She had used her past relationship with Gary as a means to get help, even though she knew he had never really forgiven her for choosing Clint over him.
They had spent the morning going through Clint’s house in a vain search for clues. “He wouldn’t have just left!” she kept saying.
Gary had rubbed his blond beard and shaken his head dolefully. “I’m sorry, Sherry.” He stepped over several boxes that Clint and Sherry had packed for their move into the house they were buying, the house they had lost because Clint had been gone for the closing. “But the man knew what he was doing. He didn’t leave anything really important. He took everything he’d need.”
“You’re not listening to me!” she screamed. “He’s hurt somewhere! Maybe dying! Maybe he’s already—” The word had died in her throat. “If we give up on him we’ll never find him. We’ve got to get to him!”
Gary had only shaken his head again, turning up the voltage on her fury. “We’ve done everything—”
“Don’t say it!” she shrieked. “Don’t tell me we’ve done everything we can. We haven’t done anything! He’s out there somewhere, and he needs me! Why don’t you believe me?”
Gary had looked at her with sympathy she could simply not bear. “Sherry, it’s never easy to admit that someone ran out on you. But it isn’t all that uncommon for a man to get cold feet. Especially a man like Clint—”
Sherry had cut off his words by grabbing him by the collar and shoving him against the wall in a burst of raging adrenaline. “He was not afraid of marriage! He wouldn’t do that!” she had gritted. “He wouldn’t leave me like that! He loves me!”
Gary hadn’t said another word, and she had let him go, muttering a quiet, hoarse, “Get out. You’re no help.”
She had spent the night among Clint’s things, sleeping in his bed, wearing the clothes too old or too tattered for him to have taken, crying her soul out, praying that he’d walk through that door any minute and hold her.
But she hadn’t seen him again.
Until today. And though she had come to terms with the ultimate rejection, she had never been able to hate him or give up on him completely, as long as the faint possibility existed that he’d left for some unavoidable reason. Not because he feared commitment. Not because he didn’t love her. And certainly not so he could write.
But his reappearance today without a substantial excuse shattered those possibilities. More than ever, she had to face the fact that the commitment had been too much for him, that she had not been enough.
The crunch of rocks on the driveway of her house pulled her out of her reverie, and mechanically, she gathered the stack of papers on her seat and got out of the car. It was important to keep her routine, she told herself as she stooped to pick up the newspaper. If she just kept things normal, she would not lose control. If she kept the pain from her face, maybe she could exorcise it from her heart.
Slipping the rubber band off the paper, she used her free hand to shake it out of its roll. The front page told of the few small developments in the Givanti trial that her father’s office was prosecuting. Givanti, the local businessman who had been indicted for murder and cocaine distribution, had been almost the sole focus of the U.S. attorney’s life for the past few months, when he wasn’t worrying about his daughter’s emotional state. She walked out to her mailbox on the street and reached inside for the stack of mail. Her hand slipped beneath the weight, and the stack of papers anchored
against her hip began to slide in a mini avalanche onto the hot May pavement. Muttering under her breath, Sherry squatted and began to reconstruct the stack, glancing from side to side, hoping no one had seen the clumsy performance. The only human in sight was someone in a black Pontiac parked several houses up the street—apparently waiting for someone—but he seemed more engrossed in the newspaper he read than in her. Pull yourself together, she ordered herself. Madeline will take one look at you and see that you’re falling apart. She’ll have that prayer chain of hers activated within the hour, and everyone in town will know you’re losing it.
Madeline was waiting for her when she went in, her dark curls framing her concerned face. A cartoon animator affiliated with a Christian amusement park, Promised Land, Madeline had been her roommate and mainstay ever since the terrible day that she accepted that Clint was never going to return.
Trying to appear nonchalant, Madeline crossed her arms over the caricature of the mosquito, which her T-shirt declared to be the Louisiana state bird. Her curls fell into her eyes, and she blew them back as she rushed forward to help Sherry with her load. “Here, let me help.” She took the stack of papers, then regarded Sherry carefully. “Feel okay?”
Sherry shrugged and tossed the mail onto the table. “Yeah, fine.”
“Are you gonna call him?”
“Don’t have to,” Sherry said. “I just saw him.”
Madeline gasped. “No way. How’d you know where to find him?”
“He found me,” Sherry said. “He ran me off the road a few minutes ago.”
“Ran you off the road? Are you hurt?”
Not physically, she wanted to say, but instead she shook her head and slumped onto the couch.
Madeline lowered herself onto the coffee table across from her. “Sherry, what happened? What did he say?”
“What difference does it make? I told him that I don’t want to see him again.”
“Did he say why he left? I mean other than that writing thing?”
Sherry felt the life draining from her face, leaving behind a hollow, expressionless shell. “No. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it.”
Silence provided the response that Sherry expected. Madeline propped her elbows on her bare knees and pushed her curls out of her face. After a long while, the young woman’s voice came quiet and uninflected. “I guess I really expected there to be more.”
“Yeah. Guess I did too.” The admission made Sherry’s voice catch, and to avoid seeing the wave of sympathy washing across Madeline’s face, she stood up and went into the kitchen. “What’s to eat? I’ve got a ton of work to do tonight. I have to type four of Wes’s bids.”
“Anything I can do?” Madeline asked. She followed Sherry and leaned against the kitchen doorjamb. “Like listen?”
Sherry’s hands fell limp on the package of sandwich meat she had reached into the refrigerator for. “Thanks, Madeline. I just don’t want to talk about it right now.”
Madeline slid up onto the kitchen table, for she rarely used chairs. “Good. At least you’re not going to pretend it doesn’t bother you.”
Sherry abandoned the meat and closed the refrigerator door, letting her eyes rest on her hands gripped around the handle. “Yes, I am. As soon as I get over the shock, I plan to do just that.”
“But not to me.”
Sherry crossed her arms and leaned back against the refrigerator door. “No, not to you. I’m pretty transparent to you.”
“And to Clint.”
Sherry lifted her brows doubtfully. “Yeah. But if I was transparent today, he saw a whole barrage of conflicting signals, because I don’t even know how I feel about seeing him again.”
Sherry pulled out a chair and sat, combing a hand through her hair and trying not to renew her fury of the afternoon. “I told him I never want to see him again, but he swore it wasn’t over.” Her shoulders sagged, and she cradled her forehead in her hand and whispered a soft moan. “What am I going to do?”
Madeline slid off the table and disappeared into the living room, then returned with Sherry’s load of papers and dropped them down with a thud on the kitchen table. “You’re going to go on with life as if he never came back. You’re going to bury yourself in your work until the shock wears off, and then you’ll be fine. And I’m going to get our friends praying for you and for the situation, and then remind you that God is still in control …”
A wisp of a smile softened Sherry’s face, and she pulled the papers in front of her. “You’re very predictable, you know that?” Sherry asked.
Madeline grinned. “Good. You need a little certainty in your life.”
Sherry’s heart lightened at her friend’s step-by-step approach to life’s catastrophes. But as she sorted through her papers, she realized she was kidding herself if she thought the problem of Clint Jessup could be solved with a pat on the back and a stack of work. God was trying to teach her something, and for the life of her, she was tired of learning.
Later that night, Sherry called her brother Wes to break the news. “Clint’s back.”
“Back?” Wes asked. “Just like that?” She knew he had given her fiancé up for dead. Like her, he couldn’t believe that his friend had betrayed them, and had spent eight months filling in the blanks.
“Yeah.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Yeah, today.”
“And what did he say? What explanation did he give? Where has he been?”
She sighed. “Let’s just say that the explanation left a lot to be desired. You know all those noble scenarios we came up with, about it all being out of his control, and his struggling all this time to get back to me?”
“Yeah.”
“Fantasy. He just needed his space.”
“That’s what he said? That he needed his space?”
“No, but that’s basically it.”
Wes was quiet for a moment. “If I see him, I just might tear him apart with my bare hands. What kind of jerk would profess to be some called-of-God youth minister, then do something so selfish and hurt so many people? Abandoning my sister at the altar, lying to me about being a great guy and a wonderful future brother-in-law and uncle for my kids …”
“He betrayed me, Wes, not you. And I wasn’t left at the altar.”
“Same thing. He betrayed a lot of us, Sherry. You, me, all those kids who trusted him and grieved over him. They’re still praying for him.”
“They need to,” she said. “Look, I gotta go. I have to let Dad know.”
“Right,” Wes said. “He ought to relate, since he walked out on you, too.”
Chagrined, she hung up, and stared at the phone for a moment. Wes, who she had once believed had no capacity for hate, truly hated their father.
For years, she and Wes had been estranged from him, after he had divorced their mother when they were both small children. For most of their lives, he had been a nonentity in their lives. In her, his absence had left a deep void, but in Wes, it had left deep bitterness. They had not known where he was or why he had abandoned them, until the day he’d come back to town and told them that he wanted to reestablish his relationship with them, now that their mother was dead. He was a lawyer now, and had money, something she and Wes had never had benefit of. And he told them that his life had changed when God had used a heart attack to bring him face to face with his mortality. He’d been convicted of his past mistakes and the pain he had inflicted on his children. The remorse and shame had brought him to his knees, forced him to ask forgiveness, and empowered him to make amends. Wes had not trusted the story and wanted nothing to do with him, despite his wife’s insistence that their children needed at least one grandparent.
Sherry, on the other hand, had been more forgiving, and had embraced her father with an almost desperate love. When he had run for federal attorney this past year, she had been right there beside him, campaigning with him like a devoted daughter. He had won. Her father had proven that he loved her with his diligent atten
tion and care for her, and even though Wes warned her that he’d lose interest eventually, as he had so many years ago, she had enjoyed her newfound relationship with him. She only wished Wes could understand how much her father had been there for her when Clint had disappeared. He had displayed startling bits of wisdom about forgiveness and patience, and had kept her hoping despite the fact that there seemed to be no hope.
Now, there was even less than no hope.
She dialed her father’s number, got his machine, and said, “Dad, it’s me. Are you there?”
He picked up immediately. “Hi, honey. I was avoiding the press. They’re all over me with the Givanti case going on.”
She didn’t care about that. She only had the energy to deal with one thing at a time. “Dad, I thought you should know that Clint is back. I saw him today.”
Silence. Then, “What did he say?”
“Oh, not much. That he wants to resume things. No real explanation. At least, not one that makes sense.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You’re not alone, are you? I could come over—”
“Madeline’s here. I’m fine, Dad, really. I guess I should just be glad that he’s not dead. The mystery’s over. At least that part of it.”
“Are you going to see him again?”
“Not if I can help it.”
Silence again. “Honey, are you sure I can’t come over?”
“Positive, Dad. I’ll talk to you more tomorrow.”
“All right, honey. Have faith, okay? All things work together for good …”
“Yeah, I know. Bye, Dad.” She hung up, and sat wondering what good could come of this. Not for the first time, she wondered if she could even believe that Scripture anymore.
Chapter Two
If only I could explain, Clint thought dismally as he stepped into the new office building for Grayson Builders, where Sherry worked with her brother, Wes. It was the day after his disastrous encounter with Sherry, and he hoped Wes might help him get through to Sherry somehow.
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