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Bangor for a few weeks. She couldn’t use him as an excuse to head to the West Coast,though that was where she most wished she could be—at Jeff’s place, tucked in safe with the last member of her family.
    Her dream of being married by the time she was 30 looked further away than ever before. Her options were fading. As painful as it was to absorb the breakup with Kevin, she couldn’t afford to pull back from dating again if she was going to keep her dream alive. She’d have to shake it off, patch together her self-confidence, and move on. Kevin hadn’t meant to cause her so much turmoil. He’d broken things off as gently as he could, done it with kindness by saying it wasn’t her; it was simply that it wasn’t going to work out for the long term and it would be better to conclude that now and keep their relationship a friendship.
    It was her. This was the third serious relationship to end in essentially the same way. And she was at a loss for the reasons and what to do about it. She didn’t understand what had gone wrong, so she didn’t know what to fix. She was adaptable, willing to change, willing to make adjustments. She just needed a guy to like her enough to stick with her while they figured out how to make a relationship work for the long term.
    She wanted to get married. She was 29, reasonably pretty, she had a good smile, her weight was under control, she could converse on most subjects with some knowledge, she went to church, she was nice to people, and the fact she wasn’t married when she wanted to be just didn’t make sense. It was the kind of failure that fit into the bucket of things she simply couldn’t understand.
    â€œJust one guy, God. Surely somewhere there is one guy for me,” she mentioned quietly as she gathered up the orange peels and dropped them into the trash. She even kept a fairlyneat house. She wasn’t the best cook in the world, but she was decent enough with a cookbook.
    Her speech could lock up on rare occasions, but it had happened only twice in the last two years with Kevin, and it was more an embarrassment for her than a concern. The doctors compared the phenomena she experienced to a stutterer who had difficulty getting the words out. She couldn’t believe that was the problem. The speech freeze would clear itself on its own in a minute or two. She mentally pushed away the concern. If she wanted to find reasons for Kevin’s decision, she could talk herself in circles. He hadn’t given her one.
    Jeff would help her out. It’s what big brothers did. She could ask him to introduce her to Navy guys he liked. Surely on a base where more than ten thousand people worked, there would be a few eligible, nice, single guys whom Jeff thought might like her. She wouldn’t mind being a military wife.
    She had worked on sonar projects in the past—her idea for cross-sonar now kept Jeff materially safer than he had been before. If she married a military man, there would always be ocean work she could do for the Navy, regardless of where they were based. If she got lucky enough to marry a submariner, she already knew she liked the Bangor area, in the northwest part of Washington State. The other home port for submarines stateside was at Kings Bay, Georgia. While she hadn’t visited it, Jeff had thought it a nice enough place for the year he had been stationed there.
    Gina finished the orange.
    She had a couple of new sonar ideas worth exploring. A phone call would put in motion the security clearances necessary to let her pursue them. She could be on the West Coast tomorrow, tucked into a lab at Bangor, have some time toherself to work. She could stay at Jeff’s place. It would give her physical distance from Kevin. It would keep her occupied until Jeff got back from his sea patrol.
    If she retreated to Chicago, her other option, she ran the risk of giving up on her dream of marriage. She had held on to the