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from the woods behind the house. The original part of the cottage, the hunting camp, was still obvious at the end of a more recent addition, someone’s less than aesthetic attempt to turn it into a year-round house with the addition of a bathroom, a real kitchen, and a bedroom. The addition, while obviously well built, didn’t match the original and gave the house a disjointed and incomplete appearance.
    Rose Ellen regarded it with sadness and dismay. It’s just like Timmy–us–patched together. Not a real house.
    Timmy leaned on his crutch and studied the house from the weedy gravel driveway. “I think it’s great,” he said. “I always liked it. I used to come here with my father and uncles sometimes when they went hunting. And it’s a place to start over. It wouldn’t take too much to make the parts match, put new shingles on all of it, change a couple of the windows, build a new porch I could screen in.”
    Rose Ellen was less than enchanted when she silently compared it to her long-held dream house. It certainly wasn’t a Thomas Kincaid vision, and she regarded it with a sinking feeling in her stomach. But it’s Timmy’s and he likes it. The house was basically sound and, as the many magazine articles pointed out, it had a lot of possibilities. Her life recently had had no possibilities, and now she might have a future to think about. She could certainly advise him about some landscaping.
    He glanced around him, then looked directly at her, his face sober. “This isn’t the way I planned to say this, to propose to you, but would you consider it? I mean, you and me? Getting married and living here when I’m well again? When I can work again? I can get it fixed up in the meantime . . .”
    She met his eyes for a moment, felt his concern for her, the love she craved, and then looked again at the sad little house. It certainly isn’t my Kincaid cottage . There was no nearby brook, no arched bridge, no picket fence, no roses, but there was promised love and a future. Kincaid is probably a lot of romantic nonsense, like Trudy said. This is here and now, reality, and there really are a lot of possibilities .
    She smiled at Timmy, then said, “I can always plant the roses.”

FROM SUNLIGHT INTO SHADOW
    Andrea Fortune looked at the poem she had been working on for several days, seeking just the right words for how she felt, and was dissatisfied. It wasn’t at all what she wanted to express, and it certainly didn’t help. She sighed, read it again, and was still unhappy with it.
    When you move
    From sunlight into shadow,
    For a moment
    The eye is blinded,
    Unable to see
    The edges of the world.
    All is in darkness
    Until the eye adjusts
    And you can see again.
    She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes trying to ease the headache, the panic that was returning, the vision she couldn’t erase, the awful what-might-have-happened. Like today, almost a week later, last Thursday was a bright, beautiful spring day, and she had chosen to prolong her enjoyment of it by driving along back roads. The roadside trees were densely packed and the shadow they created across the narrow road was deep. When she drove into it, it had taken a moment for her eyes to adjust to the abrupt change of light and she had not seen the older man and the dog standing at the edge of the road. She didn’t know how close she had come to hitting them.
    She had stopped, spoken to him, told him what had happened, but did not ask his name.
    “I have that problem with shadows, too,” he’d said pleasantly, apparently not at all disturbed, “and you weren’t really that close. Old Trix and I stay pretty close to the side. Lots of traffic on this road, you know.”
    She had returned home shaken, grateful that the man and dog were unhurt, but she could not rid herself of the thought of what could have happened. Any dark shadow across the road now induced a momentary panic.
    Andrea knew her reaction was overblown, out of proportion to what