Nights in Rodanthe Read Free

their personalities. Both had become unusually withdrawn and
     quiet. Neither had played soccer in the fall, and though Max was doing well in kindergarten, he cried every morning before
     he had to go. Greg had started to wet the bed again and would fly into tantrums at the slightest provocation. Some of these
     changes stemmed from the loss of their father, Adrienne knew, but they also reflected the person that Amanda had become since
     last spring.
    Because of the insurance, Amanda didn’t have to work. Nonetheless, for the first couple of months after Brent had died, Adrienne
     spent nearly every day at their house, keeping the bills in order and preparing meals for the children, while Amanda slept
     and wept in her room. She held her daughter whenever Amanda needed it, listened when Amanda wanted to talk, and forced her
     daughter to spend at least an hour or two outside each day, in the belief that fresh air would remind her daughter that she
     could begin anew.
    Adrienne had thought her daughter was getting better. By early summer, Amanda had begun to smile again, infrequently at first,
     then a little more often. She ventured out into the town a few times, took the kids roller-skating, and Adrienne gradually
     began pulling back from the duties she was shouldering. It was important, she knew, for Amanda to resume responsibility for
     her own life again. Comfort could be found in the steady routines of life, Adrienne had learned; she hoped that by decreasing
     her presence in her daughter’s life, Amanda would be forced to realize that, too.
    But in August, on the day that would have been her seventh wedding anniversary, Amanda opened the closet door in the master
     bedroom, saw dust collecting on the shoulders of Brent’s suits, and suddenly stopped improving. She didn’t exactly regress—there
     were still moments when she seemed her old self—but for the most part, she seemed to be frozen somewhere in between. She was
     neither depressed nor happy, neither excited nor languid, neither interested nor bored by anything around her. To Adrienne,
     it seemed as if Amanda had become convinced that moving forward would somehow tarnish her memories of Brent, and she’d made
     the decision not to allow that to happen.
    But it wasn’t fair to the children. They needed her guidance and her love, they needed her attention. They needed her to tell
     them that everything was going to be all right. They’d already lost one parent, and that was hard enough. But lately, it seemed
     to Adrienne that they’d lost their mother as well.

    In the gentle hue of the soft-lit kitchen, Adrienne glanced at her watch. At her request, Dan had taken Max and Greg to the
     movies, so she could spend the evening with Amanda. Like Adrienne, both of her sons were worried about Amanda’s kids. Not
     only had they made extra efforts to stay active in the boys’ lives, but nearly all of their recent conversations with Adrienne
     had begun or ended with the same question:
What do we do?
    Today, when Dan had asked the same question again, Adrienne had reassured him that she’d talk to Amanda. Though Dan had been
     skeptical—hadn’t they tried that all along?—tonight, she knew, would be different.
    Adrienne had few illusions about what her children thought of her. Yes, they loved her and respected her as a mother, but
     she knew they would never really
know
her. In the eyes of her children, she was kind but predictable, sweet and stable, a friendly soul from another era who’d
     made her way through life with her naive view of the world intact. She looked the part, of course—veins beginning to show
     on the tops of her hands, a figure more like a square than an hourglass, and glasses grown thicker over the years—but when
     she saw them staring at her with expressions meant to humor her, she sometimes had to stifle a laugh.
    Part of their error, she knew, stemmed from their desire to see her in a certain way, a preformed image they